Back when the grass was still green and lush, and trees were still producing their fruit, I went to Tanglewood to hear Dave Brubeck and his jazz quartet perform. The sun was setting when we arrived and the blue glow in the sky was nothing less than transcendental. It was a sumptuous beginning.
We had arrived close to the start of the concert. There was a sea of people on the lawn. I asked someone who looked official if there was any method to the seating madness. I was told, “People with chairs sit back here,” with an arm wave to the right and beyond. “People on blankets sit here,” arm waving to the left and down to the yawning porthole of one end of the Ozawa concert hall. Lacking chairs, or even blanket, we found a small spot to sit on the grass close to the opening, and we squished our knees up to our chests and settled in. People near us were romantically sprawled out with burning candles, bottles of wine, clinking wineglasses, sandals carelessly tossed about, plucking grapes, Brie and crackers out of voluminous Martha Stewart-style wicker picnic baskets. Wow! So this was Tanglewood.
As the sky darkened, the glow from inside the hall became intense. The buzz from the crowd lent a feeling of anticipation to the very air we breathed.
When Brubeck took the stage, intially with his quartet, you could see his stooped 84-year-old frame (still pretty spry) glowing in white on a blue and black background. But when you heard the music, it was timeless, he was ageless. Later a 23-piece “symphonette” took the stage with the quartet. A review of the event sums it up and details the pieces nicely.
Listening to the music was like entering a spiritual space. Sitting on the lawn, with an outsider’s view of the interior - watching the watchers - I had a sense of not just a direct consumption of the music, but also of the interplay between audience and performer. The looks of joy on people’s faces. The appreciation for the way these guys were all decked out in white, their years of experience and highly-developed skill, even the beauty of the stage lights, sparkling in the eyes of the people in the theater. The performers were sponges for this invisible energy, soaking it up, and squeezing it back out again.
I loved the stout body of Bobby Militello, the flute and sax player whose notes and riffs were so pitch-perfect and gentle as to make you think they were the voice of God itself.
My squished-up frame couldn’t contain the sounds. The music seemed to fill the entire earth. I could look up into the stars and imagine the sounds filling all of space. I could see the acoustic waves traveling, slowly, reaching out to those millions-year-old twinkling lights above. The billowing white of the perfomers, and the blackness of the stage around them, was one and the same with the blackness of space above, and the gentle sway of green leaves in the late summer air around us.
