The Book of Music and Nature: An Anthology of Sounds, Words, Thoughts

From The Bear Comes Home

From The Bear Comes Home Rafi Zabor’s PEN Faulkner Award–winning novel The Bear Comes Home is a most serious book about a bear who plays the saxophone. Fantastical but real, the animal , of course a resident of Bearsville, New York, home to many a famous jazz player, here steps up to the stage with the Art Ensemble of Chicago, one of the greatest and most wide-ranging groups in jazz today. In the event, the music had been interesting. After standing with the band in silence facing east—a nice moment actually , an eVective tune-up—things had begun in a rumor of gongs and birdcalls, and the Bear had stayed out of it, a few stray notes excepted. Standing at his bass, Malachi Favors began muttering into a bullhorn, Lester was breathing hoarsely in and out of his horn, and something in these gathering strands of music caught on his fur and before he knew it he was involved in a converse of whispers with Roscoe Mitchell on the other alto while Joseph Jarman roamed the gong-world behind him, occasionally punctuating the groundswell with a bicycle horn. Now, the Bear had never considered himself a flat-out free atonal player—he hoped he sounded like himself, though it was pretty obvious he came out of Bird, Ornette and Jackie McLean—but as he and Roscoe tangled further and drums and bass came up under them like some thickening storm and Jarman raised a rattle of bells and chimes before the rising wind, in a matter of minutes the Bear was involved in successive tumults of freeblow with Roscoe’s pretty much atonal alto, and the band’s whole sound rose up in a wave. When the crescendo subsided, the rest of the night was blown clear of obstruction, and the Bear went into it happily and without much worry. The audience, which applauded pretty much on schedule after each of the music’s episodes, didn’t bother him either. There was a long sort-of blues, the rhythm section solid, Malachi Favors’ bass huge and warm without, the Bear noticed in some surprise, the benefit of amplification. The Bear had some fun with Bowie, trading choruses, then drifting into some less marked-out call and response. There was a long percussion jam in which he crossed the stage, grabbed a mallet and whomped away at [ 77 ] rafi zabor ⢇ a big bass drum, and then someone called Jarman’s impossibly uptempo Coltrane tribute, “Ohnedaruth,” and all the horn players blew their brains out in succession. Bowie played last, pulled out his pistol at the end of his outing and emptied his clip of blanks into the lights. So far so good, thought the Bear as he squeezed tight on the reed and blew out a skirl of multiphonics, but then Bowie, looking as if he’d gone mad for all the scientific sobriety of his labcoat, reached into his pocket, loaded another clip into the automatic and fired another brace of blanks into the avid, crowded tables of the nightclub yelling, “Bang bang bang motherfuckers,” and a busload of tourists at a row of tables near the front—some tour director must have sent them to see the Art Ensemble by mistake or for laughs—who had been only mildly alarmed at the first shots and the presence of what seemed to be an actual bear onstage now went into blind panic, flinging chairs aside and bolting through the tightly packed crowd for the exit. Their panic spread through the club, no one sure what had happened or what had not, and it pretty much cleared the house. The band retired backstage laughing, Jarman threatening to kill Lester Bowie twice, and the Bear stood there onstage looking through pistol smoke. He heard Jones calling from the club’s front door, but he also saw a lone figure seated at a table, and the Bear’s jaw dropped in deference: it was Ornette Coleman: the master: he made me. The Bear stepped down from the stage through the remaining gunsmoke and walked to Ornette’s table. Ornette was wearing a black silk suit and he seemed untroubled by the gunshots and the emptying of the club. He smiled up at the Bear. “That was interesting,” Ornette said in a faraway, gentle voice, “but what I wonder, even though you play a thousand times better than I ever could, was how come you play so much...