"I got fascinated over this music, and I just wanted to make a contribution. It ain't nothing but folk music, like Hungarian folk music. It is all the same thing. That's why I think Bartok is so good. He was playing and writing Hungarian folk music."
-Fred Anderson
The only light in the room is from the stage, and it takes some minutes for my eyes to adjust. The décor isn’t much, some wobbly tables, old red patterend wallpaper, a big water stain in the corner ceiling. The room is mostly full, the crowd quiet and attentive. The college students, whose "Evening in the City" we are documenting, have settled into the center table, bringing in their half-drunk bubble teas. We are in the Velvet Lounge in Chicago’s South Side.
The post-Coltrane riffs on the stage are hot. Virtuosic and passionate. The boy pounding on the Yamaha (he looks like me at 19) looks far too young to have the licks he has. He appears to be in a trance. Another white boy plays bass. Then a big black guy in a white shirt takes the stage with his tenor sax. He rivets the room with that sax. The music shatters any other thought I might have had, or have ever had, and captures all of me. I am stunned into open mouthed amazement.
The Velvet is a place for musicians to play. Ryan, whose evening we are sharing, has joined the house band. You can see his nervousness. Waiting for his turn, he fiddles with his reed, looks down, listening, pondering, hoping, I imagine, like anyone who steps up here, that he’s good enough. He starts slow, matching the rhythm, dancing around with it, then launches into his solo, a fast, intense attack. Deeper he digs, he’s looking for his soul down there, you can hear the approach to it, one way, then another. The veins on his forehead look like they could explode, his lips might pinch themselves shut forever. As he ends the crowd applauds appreciatively.
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