It's summer: get drenched in the music

By Maureen Weber

He walked onto the stage wearing jeans, a loose patterned shirt and canvas shoes. Anyone not familiar with him might have assumed he was a crew member making some last-minute adjustments to the grand piano that took up centre stage. He sat at the piano and fingered the keys with his right hand, like someone stroking an unfamiliar cat in order to make friends. The notes were as casual as the clothes he wore, and they sprinkled throughout the expectant crowd as a holy blessing.

I remember years ago my dad talking about Chick Corea but, as is typical with kids, I didn’t pay much attention. If only I had listened to Dad’s record collection a little more. Now I wished I could ask him to play me his favourites. We’d sip glasses of cold beer on a summer’s evening and I’d ask him which he loved the most, and why. At least now I could attend a concert and listen to the legend for myself.

What I did know is that Corea is a virtuoso pianist, prolific composer and multiple award winner. His gentle sprinklings from the keyboard quickly became organized into a song called On Green Dolphin Street. The notes swelled and became ripples and then waves of melody. For an hour and a half I listened. In the darkness, awash in sound, I could drift to places only this music could take me. Here was that summer evening I longed for, and I asked Dad if he was listening.

If this night was gentle waves, a couple of nights later a saxophonist named Joshua Redman and three other musicians in a band they call James Farm blew me out of the water. It rarely happens that I go to a concert not knowing what to expect, but it’s more fun when you don’t. The risk is disappointment; the reward is a discovery you might never have made otherwise. Their manic music spilled from the stage and lifted me from my seat as though I was sitting atop a geyser. Energy medicine for a weary soul. An hour later as we drove in midnight darkness through a section of flooded highway, I leaned my head out the window to feel the spray coming up alongside the car, imagining the music that hadn’t yet silenced within.

“And whenever the evil spirit from God came upon Saul, David took the lyre and played it with his hand, and Saul would be relieved and feel better, and the evil spirit would depart from him” (1Sm 16:23). Music has the power to soothe, to energize, to release memory, to connect, even with those we thought we’d lost, ourselves included. Just look at the recent Craven Country Jamboree in southern Saskatchewan to witness the power of music. Not even mud and angry skies could prevent thousands from attending the annual pilgrimage. All right, there was drunkenness and mayhem too, but the festival is rooted in the music.

We celebrate our 31st anniversary on a patio in anticipation of a band that will play right in front of us. New songs forming old memories. Fifteen minutes later a downpour drenches any chance of hearing live music this night.

But still, it’s summer. There will be other patios, and other shows. Look for them. Find a song. Make a memory. Plug your ears into a private iPod concert. Buy a CD. Remember tapes? Close your eyes oh, the way it feels to click it shut and press play.