FOOTPRINTS

I was sitting behind the stage at the Monterey Jazz Festival where Ron Carter and Herbie Hancock were performing a set as a duo. And this was the first time they were doing so.  Maestro Carter is 89 and Herbie is 86. The stage was big,  the audience large, and the expectations were very high.  

They are both masters, rather,  architects of this music and in some ways they can do no wrong.  If you are a trailblazer, the trails you decide to make would be the ways. We all have been following after the musical trails they laid out. Their musical lives are the history of modern jazz. They both explored the field and opened many trails for us. Now they are on stage at the Monterey Jazz Festival and it feels like they are back to where they started. Two remaining members of the Miles Davis Quintet paying homage to their late boss. I can’t even begin to imagine what that must feel like. 

Our accomplishments and the trails you leave behind can sometimes be a ball and chain. It gets harder to do things that can potentially make you fall on your face as you age. It’s also hard to do things that you used to do really well but can’t do like when you were in your 20s. Imagine falling off of your bike. It’s nothing when you are 10 but doing that at 55 could be much more painful and embarrassing and yet you don’t want people to know that you are hurting.  When you are nobody,  you fall but since nobody was watching,  according to quantum physics, you didn't really fall.  It hurts less and you brush it off and you move on. But not when you are Maestro Ron Carter and the one and only Herbie Hancock; every key stroke and every pull are observed intently. Their performance will be recorded, analyzed, and repeatedly consumed.

I looked out into the audience at one point and I felt such a feeling of sonder: how their music has been the soundtrack to the lives of each audience member and how each of us has different memories and emotions attached to the music and we came to Monterey with so much history and remembrances and joy and pain and anticipation.  In that open air stadium filled with so much adoration and expectations, Ron and Herbie were just steady and present.

It is a wondrous and beautiful thing to witness. Two masters who have been at it for several decades still know how to be in the moment and be vulnerable in front of thousands of people. They played with tenderness, care, and humor. It felt intimate and spacious. What a courageous thing to do and what a lesson that is for all of us. I wished to be so at peace and yet be searching and be vulnerable like them when I grow up. 

At one point, Herbie played Maiden Voyage solo. He wrote the tune in 1965 when he was 25. 61 years later, he played the song which has been played by literally everyone who ever wanted to learn how to play this music since then and yet still his solo rendition filled the stadium with reverent silence.  What an incredible thing to have created something that has been loved for decades in the genre that seems to morph so rapidly, so much so that I spend my days thinking about the question of  “what is jazz?” This sounds so corny but I thought to myself, “wow. I’m witnessing something important and historical.” 

Excellence, I think, is really important. It’s a baseline. But beyond that, it’s not the perfection that resonates nor the point. It’s how you show up with love. I don’t really know how to describe what I felt that night otherwise.