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| Tubular Chimes in Pierce Park, at Harbor Place in Baltimore |
© Andrea Canter
Why is it that, having found a perfect quote, I can never
find it again when I want to quote it myself? Sitting on a plane recently,
reading (laboriously) through The Rise of
a Jazz Art World by Paul Lopes, I found what feels like the perfect –if
really inaccurate—phrase to describe jazz, particularly for those hearing it
for the first time: “an enthusiastically disorganized music.” The source was
referring to his impressions of jazz of the 1920s and 30s, and differences
between white and black bands of the era. But something about the concept of
“enthusiastically disorganized” appealed to me, at this moment, as a perfect
summation of my own experience as an uneducated improviser a few hours earlier.
Briefly, my own experience performing music came between the
ages of 9 and 14 when I took classical piano lessons. I was good enough to last
five years, not good enough to please myself or be convinced that more skill
would come if I stuck with it. Probably I was wrong about that. And maybe if my
lessons had included some jazz and improvisation, I would have at least pleased
myself. In my mid 20s, I even bought a piano with the idea that I would finally
get serious about personal enjoyment. I sold it a few years later after merely
watching it gather dust.
Fast forward nearly 4 decades. I happened to be in Baltimore
for a one-day conference, held adjacent to the Inner Harbor area and the
tourist-centric Harbor Place where I enjoyed the well-designed spaces,
walkways, and juxtaposition of old and new.
Along the path connecting street and harbor is a modern building that
houses some research entities affiliated with the University
of Maryland, and a public space named Pierce Park.
It’s not so much a park as a large rustic garden space with a walk lined with
vertical metal pipes that resemble chimes rather than a traditional fence. The
chain of chimes ends with the real thing: Several sets of vertical and angled
tubular chimes, some as tall as 8 feet and maybe 5-6 inches in diameter, the
smallest set aligned horizontally like a slightly raised vibraphone. At the
base of each set of chimes was a bucket containing mallets. It was an open
invitation to create a do-it-yourself musical moment. Young children with parents, couples out for
a stroll, who ever passed by could not resist the temptation to be a musician
in the moment.
And I was not about to pass up the opportunity. I came back
to Pierce Park several times over my two-day
visit. Of course, when I hear Gary Burton or Stefon Harris or Dave Hagedorn, I
know I am hearing musicians who have studied the art and science of percussion
and who not only understand how to create the variety of sounds of their
instrument but understand the art of improvisation. Fifteen minutes in Pierce Park
did not make me a musician. But briefly, I felt like an improviser. After all,
if you really don’t know what you’re doing, you have to make it up. I picked up
a pair of mallets and started attacking those tubes, gently, aggressively,
slowly, recklessly. I could drag a mallet and create a zigzag cascade of long-sustaining
notes. I made up little melodies, hitting the high and low extremes, doubling
notes, inventing chords. Everything I needed to know (at the moment), I did
learn in kindergarten.
Enthusiastic disorganized music. Just call me Mallet Girl.
(Anyone know where I can buy one of these things?)
By some odd twist of fate, whatever I learned in kindergarten, I learned in Baltimore, where I started those piano lessons a few years later, before we moved to the Midwest. Of course that was years before there was such a thing as Harbor Place.
