Conclusion: Epilogue

CONCLUSION: A final story to consider how this all can come together to bring us home. In 2015, my colleagues James, Sofia and I brought a large group of The San Francisco School Middle School students to the Orff National Conference in San Diego to perform in front of a thousand-plus music teachers. With a theme of music and dance of the Latin diaspora, they performed both independently and with vibrant adult Orff teachers and musicians—Jackie Rago from Venezuela, Estevao Marquez from Brazil, Sandra Salcedo from Colombia, SK Kakraba Lobi from Ghana, my Pentatonics Jazz Band members Joshi Marshall, Sam Heminger and Micah McClain. 

 

Miki Walsh, a former student of mine from The SF School who I taught back in the 1980’s, happened to come to the concert. I hadn’t seen her in some 30 years. A few weeks after the concert, I received this eloquent letter where she touches on virtually all the bases covered in this book— the healing power of jazz, the “complete control” lying-down meditations I often ended class with, the humor, freedom and purpose those classes offered her as a child that echoed into her adulthood, her testimony to the discipline that allowed the current SF School performers to play so expertly and at the end of it all, that sense of coming home after a long-suffering exile. Her words affirm that what I could only dream of when I began walking these three pathless paths was now simple fact. They work.

 

Doug, I write to you from Mexico under a sky the color of faded bedsheets.  At some point the stars will come out shivering, and the waning moon in all of her steadiness, will rise. I will be sitting here, watching the fire I built in my chimenea, listening to music: Herbie Mann, At the Village Gate, playing "Comin' Home Baby.' It's a piece I can listen to over and over again, and never quite in the same way, which I guess - just like with a good poem - is one of the most beautiful things about music. 

 

You know, for some time - maybe years - I have been wanting to write you. In part, to share moments where I've been so deeply moved by a piece of music...those moments like when I heard Beethoven's violin concertos for the first time in an old bookstore, and had to sit down because it was too much for me...or when I first heard Ben Webster and the visceral, almost choking moan of the sax...or how driving home one night and hearing a stream of Stefan Grappelli on the radio I realized he must have died - and so I stayed up into the early morning, drinking tea, listening to that violin across the airwaves playing tribute, and to Django with his distorted hand moving sound. 

 

Doug, I want to thank you. I want to thank you for body music, for having to be barefoot, for the wooden floors of the music room, for samba, for the surprise I felt first listening to the bellow of the conga, for song...for songs that Jasmine and I, when I see her, still sing together. I want to thank you for that moment at the end of music class of "complete control," where we lay on our backs, eyes closed, chests pulsing from the heat of dance, catching our breaths. I want to thank you for that anticipated moment of release to recess, figured in the touch of a toe. As this year ends, the most devastating year of my life, I play "Comin' Home Baby" for a few reasons. I play it for the slow build...not so dissimilar from another of my favorites, but my Charles Mingus - Better Git it in Your Soul. I play it for the throb of bass, for the playfulness of the flute.

 

 But I also play it to remember my father, who died a few years ago, and who deepened my appreciation of music to the extent that when he adopted me I didn't take his last name, but added one to my own - Django. I play this piece for my mom, who came to visit me in California this May to celebrate my birthday. She had moved to Mexico, which is where her family is from. I remember her asking me where I considered home...Mexico? San Francisco? Iowa? I've lived so many places, in different countries in between. I remember telling her that I didn't know....that I guess it was where she is. Home, not being fixed to place. During her visit, my mom died. And for a moment there, I had no notion anymore of home... 

 

I write to you tonight, Doug, to share this. When I heard students from the SF school in San Diego playing songs that I once played, I felt a wonderful curiosity, joy, rhythm, and a deep connection transmitted through sound, and energy, and love. It was for me, an utterly poignant moment of reconnection to a past self, to a present and future self. It was  a re/connection that transcended space, and place, and time in this exquisitely beautiful moment, where I felt like I was coming home. Where I felt - if only for a moment - that I was home. 

 

May it be so for all of us, each and every one.