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

My One Conversation with Collin Walcott

My One Conversation with Collin Walcott For Glen Moore, Ralph Towner, and Paul McCandless In the mid-1980s, during a severe August drought, I stopped by to gab with my neighbor, Jon (who pronounces it “Yawn”), and happened to arrive at his house just as his Baldwin upright piano (Yawn called it his “Ax”) was heading out the door into the local piano-tuner’s van. As I grabbed a corner and helped lift, I learned that a jazz quartet called Oregon was going to be playing an outdoor concert the following night, and that Yawn’s Ax was headed oV to serve as one of the two “concert grands” the band had requested. When I learned that a free tuning went with the loan, I said, “Hey!”—and a short time later the piano-tuner’s van was jouncing up my mud-rut driveway, destined to make my moth-eaten, hymn-beaten, five-owner Jansen upright Oregon’s second “concert grand.” In defense of these pianos I should explain that we lived, geographically, on a decidedly rural portion of the Oregon coast, which implies that, culturally, we lived in what the national jargon would term a vacuum. On Forest Service maps we were a green thumbprint with a few blue veins (the creeks) running through us. On highway maps we were nothing at all—solid color without symbols or words. But there, nevertheless, we were, smack in the middle of Downtown Vacuum, our various oddball houses sprouting like Cubist mushrooms from the abandoned dairy pastures, clearcuts and river valleys. And somehow or other these internationally renowned musicians had found us and decided, despite our pianos, to play some music. The place Oregon played was called Cascade Head—a twelve-hundred-foot “mountain” whose eastern end is actually a ridge buried in the Coast Range, and whose western end is actually a cape amputated by the Pacific into a serrated series of basalt cliVs and inaccessible coves. The concert took place at a little arts center named Sitka (after the local spruce trees), in a grassy outdoor alder-and-spruce-ringed bowl. Because it was necessary to park at the bottom of the Head and hike a steep half-mile to reach this bowl, the arriving faces had that benign quality faces get [ 108 ] david james duncan ⢇ when the psychic umbilicus connecting humans to cars is severed. And they grew more benign when, in a building behind the concert bowl, they discovered a local restauranteur catering wine and imported beer, and the baker from the co-op serving up delectable carbos. Meanwhile the local ocean was serving up a low summer fog that crept eastward through the trees like a spectator with no ticket. The fog cooled things fast, but with most of the rest of North America smoggy or humid and pushing 100 degrees that day, I heard no complainers. We sat on green grass in gray light, those who’d brought blankets sharing with those who hadn’t. The band was on time, and already warming up. For a while I bustled around the crowd like a demented father, pointing out my enstaged and honored piano to everybody I knew. My friends mostly gawked at it, then winced, so my pride soon grew containable. I sat, and began to check out the band. Though I’d heard many, maybe all, of their recordings, I’d never seen Oregon in person. I eyed Glen Moore first, since he was the guy standing closest to my Jansen. He was wearing bright red pointy-toed genie slippers and even brighter maroon pants, but to judge by his smile he’d done it on purpose. Instead of plucking, tuning or even touching his stand-up bass, he just goofed around with a friend’s baby daughter, zooming her low over the stage, nnnrowwing her round and round the spotlights. His bass, at least, looked ready for action: it sported a snarling gargoyle head and appeared to be at least a thousand years old. Ralph Towner stood with his back to us, adjusting the valves or something on a Prophet 5 synthesizer, tuning six- and twelve-string guitars, blowing warm air through a flügelhorn, playing deft warm-up scales on Yawn’s Ax. (I noticed Yawn not ten feet away, chest puVed, eyes glistening, pointing out his shining Ax to other concert-goers. But Yawn had an excuse: the Ax really is a nice piano.) When Towner finished the Prophet 5’s...