Careful what you wish for, girl.

By Sandy Asirvatham

This is just how I dreamed it would be. Isn’t it?

January 2004. In the brand-new lounge area of the newly expanded Café Eduardo, a Yamaha mini-grand piano sits in front of a large glass windowpane overlooking a busy Bethesda sidewalk. And here I am, sitting at the piano as I always imagined I might be, with drinkers behind me in cushy leather club chairs, diners ahead of me at tables in the adjoining room, and the steady gray noise of aggregated voices and ice cubes and clattering plates all around.

The guitarist—our bandleader for this gig—and the drummer and bassist are positioned directly behind my back, a terrible set-up but the only one we could configure in the small floor space we were allotted. It’s musical murder trying to play jazz without being able to make eye contact with my band-mates. Well, I suppose the true masters of this art need only their ears to interact with each other and form a collective sound. We are no such aural geniuses. Besides, even our ears are hampered by our limited amp and monitor set-up. The guitarist has taken to tapping me on the shoulder to let me know when it’s my turn to solo, a pass-off we can usually accomplish with a glance or even just by listening for the obvious climax and denouement of the soloist before us (provided that he or she is a solid sender who can telegraph structure and intentions simply with phrase-lengths, dynamics, and note choices).

Behind me, the bassist and drummer—guys I’ve played with frequently over the past few months—are having an unusual amount of trouble supporting me when I solo. I hear them slamming over my softer, more lyrical passages. I hear the bassist go into a misplaced two-feel when I’m doing long runs of eighth notes, the kind of passages that really ought to be held up with a walking line, four steady beats to a measure. It’s like I’m playing along with a recording instead of live musicians, that’s how separate and irrelevant I feel, how unresponsive they seem. All because of unfortunate wall angles and bad placement.

“Guys! Hey, guys! Hold it down a little, will you?”

Then again, poor feng shui is just one factor that’s making it an off night for me. Driving down here from Baltimore on this cold and windy evening, my fingertips and toes went a bit numb. Actually, a good bit more than a bit. I’ve always had poor circulation and my extremities tend to jam up as soon as it drops below 40 degrees. But this is the worst I’ve ever felt it. Earlier, in the warmth of the restaurant lounge as we were setting up our equipment, I told Sid, the guitarist, and Chick, the drummer, about my strange symptoms, and worried aloud that I was experiencing some kind of serious health problem.

“That’s a pretty serious parka you’re wearing,” Sid ventured (and suddenly I felt very self-conscious and girly on account of my inability to handle cold weather). “Maybe it’s too heavy or the armholes are too tight and cutting off your circulation.”

“That’s plausible,” I said, but I was just being polite. I’m not a hypochondriac, but these days I have really been feeling myself get older. My back aches from lugging around lots of heavy things—my chubby baby boy in the daytimes, a dozen loads of laundry during the week, and my keyboard and PA equipment on certain nights and weekends. I wake up in the mornings and hobble to the bathroom on creaky feet that seem to have been stripped of their natural padding. I pick up my 9-month-old son, feel a flaming arrow across my upper back, and try to hide my wince from his loving gaze. I frequently experience random mid-cycle uterine cramping, long-lasting low-grade headaches, and insomnia. So why not, on top of all that, some kind of bizarre, sudden inability to radiate blood and heat from my center to my periphery?

Several cups of coffee held between my numb fingers did little to warm them before we started our three sets. The first few tunes, as any musician will tell you, often feel a bit uncomfortable and herky-jerky to the players, although the audience doesn’t necessarily notice. In any typical four-hour playing engagement, it can easily take an hour or so before each musician is warmed up individually and the band as a whole is relaxed and focused. When there are complicating factors, like there are tonight, it may take even longer to feel both physically connected to your instrument and emotionally connected to the music itself and the other players. With my back to the band and my hands half-crippled, I am more nervous and distracted than I’ve been since I began playing in public a few years ago.

(Man, how I sweated, that very first time I tried playing in a band and improvising on the D dorian minor scale over the first part of John Coltrane’s “Impressions,” during a weekend intro jazz seminar where all the horn players and other rhythm section folks had clearly been doing this sort of thing for a while. But that’s another story, for later on.)

My singing is off, too, at least to my own ear. A somewhat morose-looking, slope-shouldered, balding middle-aged white guy in wire-rimmed glasses calls out to us from his barstool, where he is sitting alone nursing a glass of red wine, and asks if we do any Sinatra. We oblige with “Fly Me To The Moon,” one of the many too-popular songs I keep in my vocal book but only do when asked. (The others in this category include “At Last” and “Unforgettable”…cliché wedding “favorites” I’d be happy never to sing, listen to, or hear mentioned again.) I call off the Sinatra tune at too slow a tempo and the band chugs through the intro tepidly. When I start to sing it, I can hear myself going sharp and have to concentrate hard to correct my pitch. The morose-looking gentleman listens politely but shows no enthusiasm, and after a couple other tunes, leaves the place without even a glance of thanks. Graceless bureaucrat, I think, but I can’t really blame him for being unimpressed and unmoved.

As far as compulsive dreamers go, I suppose I’m pretty high-functioning. At some point, after the long months and years of spinning out grand schemes and meditating on outrageous visions of glory days ahead—and sometimes even longer periods of stopping myself with acute ill-confidence and an abundance of second-guessing—I actually plunge in and get a few things done. Just a few years ago, I started inching my way toward this nutty idea of becoming a professional jazz pianist and singer, despite the fact that my previous performance experiences had been strictly amateur, and my previous musical education had been highly inconsistent and mostly unrelated to jazz.

And now here I am—after slowly but insistently pursuing the proper training and preparation—a 38-year-old novice jazz pianist and singer, a part-time newcomer among mature, full-time musicians who’ve been playing professionally since they were teenagers, and a rare woman in a field still predominantly male. (I mean the specific arena of instrumental improvisation here; of course there is no shortage of what some still call “chick singers.”) It’s not the kind of dream that remotely interests most people today—for in our fantasies as in the marketplace, jazz can’t begin to compete with rock-n-roll heroics or hip-hop shamanism—but hey, it’s a dream that’s all mine, and I’m living it.

There are two immediate problems with being a person who actually fulfills her goals. First, obviously, is that even a great reality pales in comparison to the spotless vision that preceded it. When I was still just spinning out this unlikely wish-fabric from the comfort of my own piano bench at home, I never considered the unsightly seams or the holes between the weave. I didn’t anticipate the drudgery of hauling heavy equipment from gig to gig, the disappointment when you realize ninety percent of your audience isn’t listening, the frustration of “negotiations” with flaky restaurant owners who can’t tell you a straight story or won’t commit to a date and a fee until the very last minute, the awkwardness of having to ward off drunk fathers-of-the-bride or lecherous swing-dance enthusiasts without offending the people who write the checks. No: Dreams are much too smooth and pretty to contain such marring details.

Then there’s a second problem with being a person who wants too much from life but is lucky enough to actually get one or two of those things: Once a particular ambition has been knocked off the list, there are dozens of others right behind it, all clamoring for the same level of attention. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done already—only what you haven’t done yet. The complex bebop tunes and important standards you haven’t yet memorized—hundreds upon hundreds. The technique you haven’t yet acquired—oh, there’s an infinite amount of that, indeed. The recordings you haven’t yet made, and the rave reviews about them that haven’t yet appeared, and the fame and money that aren’t yet flowing in your direction. The one truly impossible dream, then, is the one about satisfaction.

Toward the end of our evening at the Café Eduardo, things get a little better. My voice is warm and tuned up, my fingers are responding to about eighty-five percent of my wishes, the band is swinging along smoothly. Now, instead of the half-hearted fulfillment of cliché audience requests, we are playing only the songs we love as a group…“East of the Sun,” as a vocal bossa nova… “Tenderly,” an instrumental with lots of rich piano fills behind the simple, spacious guitar melody…“Freight Train,” a fun bebop melody from Tommy Flanagan…some Pat Metheny, some Joe Henderson, and just because Sid is a big fan of her first album, Norah Jones’ song “Come Away With Me.” Only an instrumental version of that one, though.

NEXT>>>

I’m not the most prima donna-ish singer around, not by a wide margin, but I’m still prickly about singing cover versions of overplayed radio favorites at the very moment of their hyper-popularity. It’s just begging your audience to compare you unfavorably with the original…

(…an especially annoying comparison if you don’t love the original all that much to begin with, if you’re in fact secretly a little baffled at the vast population of listeners who can latch so completely onto such a seemingly minor little bit of pop craftsmanship. Sid claims it’s the compositional simplicity itself that makes “Come Away With Me” a great song —he says there’s a kind of righteous truth in the plain old basic C major-ness of it. I don’t know. Maybe it’s effete of me but I still have a preference for interesting layers, for infectious polyrhythmic grooves, for subtle complications and unexpected turns of phrase in the lyrics, for fresh-sounding tensions in the harmonies…or hell, at the very least, for a nice, driving, classic rock-n-roll backbeat.)

I’d sent out an email announcement to about 100 people I know, and exactly two of those acquaintances have shown up and are sitting in plush chairs and listening quite attentively to our music. I consider that a pretty good ratio for a Thursday night. Sid has a half-dozen friends and relatives in attendance, and although they’re milling around conversing with each other and not always paying full attention to the music, they are always good about clapping after each tune. Well-trained jazz listeners, sometimes they’ll even clap and nod appreciatively after a solo from Sid or from me, or after we trade fours or eights with Chick on the drums.

(They never clap after one of Allan’s solos, though. It is merely a fact of life for the jazz bassist. There go those crazy fast runs and figures. Allan is shredding. But most people out there don’t even realize what they’re supposed to be listening to and wonder why the music has suddenly become so soft. I could tell you about a dozen jokes involving bass players, but the punch line is always based on the same sad fact: everybody talks over a bass solo. Sometimes even the other musicians on the bandstand can’t refrain from using the time to yammer. Our excuse is that it’s usually very important stuff under discussion: did the bandleader remember to bring his checkbook, is the restaurant manager letting us drink for free, was it legal to park in that spot right next to the freight delivery door, is the father of the bride too inebriated to remember to tip us, etc.)

We stop playing around 11 pm and start packing up our equipment. After all our friends and acquaintances have left and the place is nearly empty, I see a casually dressed, middle-aged white couple watching us with beautiful wide grins on their faces, and I’m glad to have made them happy. The man calls out to me from his chair.

“Hey, so, what part of Memphis are you from?”

It’s an odd non sequitur, but I do understand that he’s trying to give me a compliment of some sort.

“Is there a neighborhood in Memphis called New Jersey?”He laughs. “It’s just that you sound so authentic, like one of the great big-band singers I used to hear when I was young.”

And just as I’m about to be profoundly touched and flattered by his words, he decides to add—

“But you look like you should be working in a falafel stand!”

Thud.

Did he really just say that?

Chick and Allan, packing up their equipment near the clueless middle-aged Memphian and his wife, both laugh the same kind of appalled, incredulous laugh and send me semi-confused looks of sympathy. Chick and Allan are white but Sid is half-Japanese, and thus no stranger to weird random racist stuff like this, so I see him off there in my peripheral vision, shaking his head but hardly shocked.

I’m still smiling—laughing, actually—although I can feel my face scrunch up in a childish expression of distaste. Something comes out of my mouth, I don’t even know what. It’s along the lines of “That’s not a very nice thing to say,” even though what I really mean is, You are a fucking moron.

Mister Memphis and his wife are also still smiling, smiling, glowing. Oh, they just loved the music, they really, really did. Well, that’s just wonderful for you. Buh-bye! You have yourself a wonderful evening!

Clueless people like these have never figured into either my buried childhood dream of glorious musical achievement or its recent reincarnation. But here’s the thing. People are out there in the world, going about their business. They have asked absolutely nothing from me. I’m the one who has presented myself, has entered the spotlight expressly for the purpose of making those otherwise disinterested people stop and listen. I can’t simultaneously desire the widest possible audience and expect that they all live up to my standards, can I?

I am the child of Indian immigrants but a born and raised American. I have a strange mental block, you see. No matter how many times other people try to remind me, in their own rude and bumbling and usually completely pointless way, I just can’t seem to remember. I just can’t seem to remember that I look like anything out of the ordinary. This has always been true no matter what the context, but it is especially true in the performance arena.

Oh, how I hated my parents as a teenager for belittling my dreams of a career on Broadway, acting and singing and dancing. I was pretty good at all that stuff, good enough to at least contemplate a profession at it, and they could grudgingly acknowledge as much, but they doubted anyone would ever hire an Indian girl for roles. In retrospect, they were probably not wrong. And yet...and yet...and yet...I wish they’d had the bravery to encourage me to be strong and to make a place for myself wherever my abilities led me. Bravery was generally not their guiding attitude in these or any other parental matters.

(Although I suppose I can’t even begin to understand the bravery it must have taken to move to a country far from home and start their lives here from scratch.)

Truly, when I’m up there performing, I am just another American girl singing some great songs out of the Great American Songbook, playing a style of improvisational music that was invented here in America. I’ll go even further than that. When I’ve been playing and singing a while, when I’m warmed up and things are going well and the band is clicking along like a gorgeously designed machine, I forget that I look like anything at all.

All I am, at that moment, is the music itself. The pitched breath. The effortless connection between the keyboard and the pads of my fingers, the feedback sensation of hammers struck. The vibrations ringing off the strings. This was and is a large part of the dream, not just for me but also, I suspect, for all of us who perform music. We want to disappear, bodily and completely, into the sound itself.

I don’t mean to sound hokey and vague. I’m talking about something quite sensual, though paradoxically so: the complete absence of self-consciousness and the simultaneous ultimate heightening of awareness. Transcendence, I suppose. Another nearly impossible wish, although the chance to sense its possibility just beyond the edge, the chance to touch it even fleetingly, brings us back again and again.

By 11:40 or so, my band-mates and I have all packed up our cars and said our goodbyes. Yves has paid us and is busy talking about giving us a regular spot on Thursday nights, but who knows if he’ll actually come through—he’s nice, but unreliable, and like every restaurant owner these days, he’s always too nervous about business to make any firm commitment to music. I would love to have a standing weekly gig—the holy grail of the local musician. Playing regularly with the same good musicians is one of the only sure ways to get better.

But chances are, I will have to continue to do what I do on an ad hoc basis, waiting for a gig here and there, trying to keep my chops in shape even with several weeks or months between performances, trying to live up to the stringent demands of this all-consuming endeavor, this profoundly obsessive dream, jazz music, on a part-time, semi-professional, late-bloomer, stay-at-home-mom-with-a-kooky-hobby sort of schedule. There is the spotless, seamless dream, and then there is the complex reality of living a life.

When I turn on the car ignition, a stream of icy air blasts through the vents. I make my way through the quiet Bethesda streets and onto the D.C. beltway heading back up to Baltimore. Ten minutes in, I expect the car environment to be warm, but it’s still a punishing cold. I look at my dashboard controls and realize I have them set to defrost, not heat. Turns out, I had driven all the way here from home with air-conditioning blasting out onto the windshield, and because I was wearing gloves and preoccupied with thoughts about the imminent gig and more than a little worn-out by the requirements of motherhood-plus-musicianship, I hadn’t even realized it.

No circulation problems. No terrible health issues in the offing. I had simply flash-frozen my own fingers.