Musicians vs. writers

I’ve mentioned the family curse before — in four living generations, many of us show alarmingly little interest in any career outside the arts. So, as a freelance journalist, there is a lot about my cousins’ house in South Philly that I can relate to. The place has a singer-songwriter and a photographer, plus El Caribefunk, a four-man Colombian band my cousins met touring in South America and brought to Philly for the summer. Sure, there are tables and couches and a TV, but they’re dwarfed by square mountains of amps, guitars and basses, bongos and congas, a piano, and the odd mandolin or clarinet.

We call it the Clubhouse, and it’s less a home than a sort of waystation for every other musician on two continents. Despite beginning and ending my own musical career with a plastic recorder in third grade, I crash there sometimes too, filing stories from the couch. And I’m finally starting to feel, at long last, that somebody has it worse than I do.

Guitars in bed

When I say worse than I do, I don’t mean it in terms of the daily scramble to meet the bills without a salary; the relentless grind of promoting yourself, doing the work, and collecting on the pay; the people who ask if you’ve considered a “full-time” job. I usually have three notebooks within reach at all times, and a typical day can involve emails from my writers or editors til midnight. I thought nobody knows better than a writer what it’s like when your work is your life.

In my experience, when the players are home, the only quiet hours at the Clubhouse are between about 3am and 1pm, when the musicians hibernate on beds, couches, or various portable co-ed mattresses with a moniker I won’t repeat here. If musicians are awake, there’s music in the house. Last weekend, I borrowed someone’s bed for a midnight rest while a Latin concert raged two floors down in the living room. There was a guitar beside me in bed and another one resting on a nearby chair, as if the players might not have the energy to bring their gear upstairs, but would all need to seize the strings first thing in the afternoon, quicker than the rest of us reach for our smartphones.

People have rolled their eyes at the notebook I always carry, but now I’m just glad it’s not a guitar.

After the daylight hours of the morning Clubhouse hibernation, come down the stairs to the living room and someone is likely to be standing there, testing a tune or rhythm on one of the resident instruments as if nothing else in the world exists.

Record, play, play, repeat

Recently, El Caribefunk’s headman brought his friend, a New York City trumpet player, home. The guys disappeared all day for a recording session, then returned, ate late in the evening without leaving the kitchen, and then carried the trumpet, guitar, and an amp to the back patio. I was resting on the couch, but decided to get up and listen.

The guitar-player, each wrist and ankle twined with faded, straggling bracelets, repeated a patient, pliant tune, rocking his body slightly on his seat, brown feet perched in flip-flops on the stool’s lower bar. The trumpet player’s cigarette glowed in the dark and he nodded to the beat for a moment, until the two caught some silent physical sync that was waiting under the music. He closed his eyes, raised the horn, and added a sophisticated flutter of improvised notes, flaring perfectly over the guitar’s quiet cycle of chords.

They played until almost midnight before leaving for an open mic in Center City — where they were already booked to play the following night.

Even when he’s not playing, the trumpet-player often puffs his cheeks and makes a muffled noise with his mouth as if he never laid the instrument down and is still testing new tunes. I watch them all at home and onstage and try to see the answer to why they rarely stop.

The secret’s in the solos

Caribefunk’s shows all seem to end the same way. They announce their last song and finish it among a growing chorus of “MORE FUNK! MORE FUNK!” Shirts soaked with sweat, the boys sip from beers crowding every corner of the stage, wipe their faces with dripping forearms, exchange glances, resettle their shoulders above strings, mics, and drums, and resurrect their energy.

Tomorrow night they’ll do it again — after jamming together during the afternoon and evening the way other people hold conversations. Want your iPad for a little insomniac Netflix at 1am? Sorry, they’re recording a new song on it in someone’s bedroom.

Is it the constant practice that makes them so good that the crowd yells for more? Or does the nightly adulation stoke the music at home?

No packed bar is ever going to chant my byline over and over, but if it did, would my solitary attention to any sentence equal the musicians’ daily absorption in every hook and riff?

Ultimately, it’s watching the onstage solos (from percussion to trumpet to the mandolin) that convinces me the endless music at home isn’t simply preparation for the screaming crowd.

Don’t look at the soloist. Look at the other musicians while their hands are still, so transported by their partners’ melodies that their eyes close, their heads bob, and their bodies vibrate with the joy and awareness of when to mutually give that moment and when to gather it back. As a writer, I won’t experience anything like that communal, aesthetic, physical surge. But it does help me understand why they’re still playing long after I’m in bed. I shouldn’t say the musicians have it worse than I do. As artists, they’re just in a different league.