I came down to Blues Alley tonight, where they serve things like steak and potatoes, and bread and butter. The menu is intentionally hearty, as if to tell us that this is the kind of relief a night here is supposed to provide. I’m not sure what it is I’m searching for relief from, but I did wake up this morning drenched in sweat, and with a sore chest to boot, as if a little gremlin had been out there overnight dancing from muscle fiber to muscle fiber while trying to rid me of a troubling dream. Outside, street lights reflect off of puddles that built up over the day, puddles that my bike tire picked up and flung into a cold patch on the back of my sweater, although as Rafi hands me a glass and the lights dim, all I feel is warmth. The thirty or so of us here on this Sunday night settle in to listen to Nubya Garcia and her band.
Insulated here in the corner of this room, my thoughts drift back to my childhood, to my grandmother calling me to come in and eat dinner. The sounds of the Cairo traffic would be down to a comfortable buzz, and the humid summer air would call out for a pitcher of fruit juice. If I was lucky, we’d have fresh mango and a full tray of ice cubes, and the squeezer would let through a few globs of fruit. After dinner, I’d take the pitcher out to the balcony and spray for mosquitos before stretching out with a fan and a book. The sounds that filtered up were the soundtrack of the city; in them, I could hear the dinner parties that my parents would be off to, and the car horns and jokes and laughs that my older brothers and their friends would be surrounded by. Sometimes, it was our home that would fill with family and friends, with the clinking of glasses and the soft croons of Halim and Fairuz, who at that time had captured minds all across the Middle East, from Beirut to Baghdad to Damascus and even beyond, to the Olympia Theater in Paris and the Royal Albert Hall in London.
Nubya starts the set off with her eyes closed in a smile, smiling as if daring us to believe that the whole set could be this easy to listen to, that life could be this easy to feel alive to. Her music brings these memories gliding to me, skipping years at a time, as if they know that they only have a short while to make themselves heard. So I apologize – what you’re reading right now was jotted onto my notepad hastily undiluted.
Being the youngest in the family, I was accustomed to living at a distance from the world. From my room, I would hear my parents’ fervent political debates with their colleagues, or later in the night, watch my brothers and their friends disappear through the gate, strands of smoke later curling away from their Cleopatra cigarettes and appearing above the garden. Sometimes, they’d take a radio out with them, and soft traces of music would filter up to me, the music of the Stones, The Police, Michael Jackson.
I had no idea that I would someday make my own home in the U.S., that my parents’ work could one day lead to us crossing the ocean to the rural American South. There, my most vivid memories are of moonlit backroads and late nights spent in fields brimming with bonfires, cheap liquor, and first loves. If you looked at us from above, you’d have seen a crisscrossing network of headlights, and in the center, highlighted, a little jagged piece of the land where we chased away the hours through backyard sports, creeks, and barbecues.
Years later, I landed at LAX, a suitcase in each hand, imagining myself in the shoes of Natsume Soseki’s Sanshiro as he got off his first train to Tokyo, the world and the university at his timid fingertips, his fingertips finally at the world. The days became full of hard work, the nights psychedelic, muddled with substances while exploring films and soccer tactics and books. We’d drink and smoke and argue the merits of strategies that had evolved in Amsterdam versus Barcelona just as excitedly as we would discuss the films of Agnès Varda and Wong-Kar Wai, or the books of Toni Morrison and Saul Bellow. We were feigning sophistication, each of us as confused as the other, but as we took lovers and partners in our hands, the world began to seem understandable, and sophistication a fool’s errand.
As Nubya plays on, I get the sense that she’s desperate to feel for herself the same degree of freedom as there is in the tune that she’s creating. As friends drifted and different years populated my world with different people, it was this melody of freedom that I found in jazz clubs, hideaways where anonymity provided me with my first taste of a freedom that not only accepts the madness of solitude but exalts it. Oh, I don’t believe there’s anything special about it being jazz; what mattered was that it was solitary, and as real of a home as I’d ever had. Sitting on the little cubes of the Blue Whale, I hardly knew the people my shoulders and legs would be touching, and yet, we would eagerly converse between songs and during intermissions, having been warmed by the hospitality of Joon Lee and intoxicated by the feeling that on that night, we were all backstage, the secret of a magic trick being revealed to us, only to find out that it was actually magic after all. On those nights, it was hard to tell where things might go: sometimes off to drift alone through dark streets, or to dance to Cesária Évora or acid house music. The city was a psychotic combination of sensations and colors, the artificiality of night emerging fantastically from the smoggy, golden-pink glow of daylight, with the palm fronds standing in relief, almost on guard of the city’s obscene ways.
As the sounds of Nubya’s saxophone dance through the air, it feels as if life could turn infernally dark and all of us in this room would be ready for it, anchored by being witnesses of something that is undeniably mad but also undeniably real, emerging from another human being right there in front of us, separate from us. In this separation, there is, on one hand, a sobering reminder of how alone we all are. And yet at the same time, in this separation – almost only in this kind of separation – does it seem that we can finally traverse the tightropes connecting us. Anyway, Nubya is really getting going now, and the bread and butter is here. I should eat something.
Mostafa El-Kalliny is a graduate student at the University of Colorado Boulder. He was born in Cairo, Egypt, and lives in Denver, Colorado.
Featured Artwork:
Imaginary Map
Fabio Sassi is a photographer and acrylic artist. He enjoys imperfections, and reframing the ordinary in his artwork. Fabio lives in Bologna, Italy and his work can be viewed on his website.