The Eden Express_ A Memoir of Insanity - Mark Vonnegut [27]
What gave me more pleasure at the farm than anything else was playing my saxophone. After putting in a good day’s work clearing brush or chopping wood, I’d get out my old tenor horn, climb up on the roof, and play my heart out. Sometimes I’d be all tense and jittery and my hands or mouth would fuck up, but more often things fit together like magic and I’d sit up on our funky roof on our funky house, looking out on the mountains, feeling completely at peace and in harmony with the world and like I could play forever.
One of the things that made it all so wonderful was the acoustical properties of the valley. It held the sound just enough to give each note a lingering resonance without giving it any echo. That valley was made for music, especially the tenor sax, especially my tenor sax. Wherever I had played music before, I always had to contend with other sounds—cars going by, the hum of an electrical appliance. The only other sounds at the farm were an occasional wind and the melodic babbling of the stream running over the rocks. Although I may have gotten higher and more excited jamming with first-rate musicians, I’ve never felt so completely and deeply satisfied as when I was playing duets with the stream.
The way I played music there was the way I wanted to farm, chop wood, cook, make love, raise children. Everything. A lot of it had to do with things I felt while I played. If only I could feel that sense of total absorption in what I was doing when I was doing other things. It was more than absorption, it was spontaneity, competence, a sense of grace and playfulness, of being in touch with an inexhaustible source of energy and beauty. It was a lot like playing with Zeke.
I was finally just plain playing music, playing music just for the moment. I wasn’t practicing so that I could knock ’em dead at some later time. The music was finally an end in itself. Making the perfect music for the perfect moment for the perfect place.
Music there was all music could be. It did all music could do. There was nothing second-rate about that music. And maybe most important, it was ours. We weren’t crammed into some stadium or concert hall. We weren’t dependent on any electronic gadgetry. Our music fit in perfectly with everything else there. We had brought up a battery tape deck, a really good one, but there was something jarring or alienating about it. We only played it once or twice. It didn’t seem to fit in.
Serendipity. One time only. Fantastic beauty now, and then gone forever. There was something delightfully subversive about playing music that good that far, far away from New York City’s recording studios and the like. Who would have thought that here, twelve miles by boat from the end of Highway 101, twelve miles by boat from our nearest neighbor and then a mile and a half by foot on that old abandoned logging trail, was where it was happening?
Simon had his trombone shipped from back East, Jack bought a flute, and Kathy unpacked her violin, which she played very well. Now and then we got some nice music going all together, but the sax and the trombone tended to drown the others out. The solo numbers seemed to work best.
We had been weaned on horror stories of frictions between communes and local people. We figured things would be different in Canada and weren’t expecting real, heavy trouble, but neither did we expect the degree of warmth and help we got. There were some funny looks from folks who weren’t exactly in love with longhaired people, but it was so mild compared to what we had learned to live with in America that it was almost pleasant when it happened.