Martini glasses: that’s what it sounded like—the music I mean. But the glasses were cold somehow, very cold, frosted over with a white, icy film. To be sure it was not a single glass, for there were many of them—thousands, even. They were not scattered aimlessly about on the floor or a counter, with some lying on their side, others erect, half-empty, carrying a lonely olive crucified with a toothpick; rather, they were stacked. The frosty glasses, stacked in a pyramid on a table covered with white linen. Better yet, if one were to make, in an instant, a long tunnel completely out of cold martini glasses in the middle of a hot nocturnal street somewhere in Chicago, then walk through that tunnel with the steam rising off the glasses, and the orange glow of the streetlights penetrating through the fortress, that is how the music sounded.
And the musicians: each was building one of these tunnels, stacking each note with reckless precision—the tunnels intersecting and merging, opening into wide rooms in the major scales, then contracting back to narrow stairs and alleys with diminished sevenths—building a frozen glass city; and the lights of the cymbal crashes and high hat taps, glowing long then flickering, wondrous to behold.
Here we are, my wife and I, swept up in the panting and pattering rhythms of the glass city. For two years we’ve come every Thursday to Jazz Night at the small Italian restaurant downtown. We arrive at eight o’clock; the pretty blond waitress gives us our table in the downstairs basement, near the band so my wife can hear the music through her hearing aid. We finish our meal at nine-thirty just as the music starts.
We frequented this restaurant for years prior to their initiation of Jazz Night. When Jazz Night started there were few people who attended: mostly older folks, like ourselves, in their fifties or sixties, sipping wine and nodding their heads quietly, and tapping their hands or feet. Now, the young people have discovered it.
They come promptly at eleven in their jeans and sandals, shirts untucked, hair awry, the girls wearing almost nothing—and they talk so loud. With all the laughter and the cursing, one can barely enjoy the music over the racket. They don’t hear the clinking glass of the saxophone or the moaning bass in the bright city; they are not part of it, not carried away into the frosty martini glass world. My wife—I catch her eye as a young man propositions a girl behind us—she smiles that smile I’ve enjoyed forty-two years, and I take her hand as if we are walking down some crystal sidewalk between silver translucent buildings. It’s time to go.
We get up and push our way through the hot crowd in the dark room, and I nod to the waitress. The frosty glass city shatters into shards when we open the door to the night outside just as the youth below in the musty room will collapse someday, the way I will collapse someday. That cold, clear city will live on, being stacked up everywhere and then destroyed. But I’ll be there again next Thursday.
