Do Cubists Dream of Jazz Quartets?
The haze of smoke swirls; a miasma in the cool, dark air of the club. The band launches into a new tune; the bass takes an introduction, plinking out dark tones that spell the body of a song. ‘Autumn in New York,’ and so it is. The cool outside air has no dominion here; the warmth of bodies grows to nearly unbearable levels. One almost imagines cigarettes lighting themselves. The tenor blows softly through the head while the clinking piano builds into a soft pad of notes which swirl with the cigarette smoke. I dance the ice cube around my drink; its orange hue reflecting the smoke and shifting it to amber.
Behind me, the clinking of glasses and gentle, quiet conversations; the movement makes this place feel external to time. The club holds us together, a physical manifestation of our collective—the sanctuary we seek from the music. The musicians begin to improvise, the pianist taking the lead, rushing the tempo out of the gentle ballad they had begun with. He plays with the geometrics of music, up and down the ivories, tapping out gentle rectangles in the upper register of his instrument. For a fleeting moment, he himself seems to be rectangular.
The band is afforded a moment to cool off as the tenor takes a brief, lyric solo; I again waltz with the ice cube in my drink as it slowly dilutes the liquor at the bottom of the glass. The ice cube, it seems, has not felt Time’s expansion. The notes of the band fade and fall to nothing.
The tenor takes the lead, deftly dancing around the melody and announcing the musicians as they launch into a swifter tune: ‘Four.’ They play everything more loosely now, time expanding and contracting with the music’s pulse. The sprint of the bass, the insistent tink of the ride, the crashing of the keys create a hole in time and space. The smoke rises again, choking the room and dancing to the roiling beat of the music.
Before my eyes, the musicians shift and change. The pianist crushes down to a rectangular face with branching, triangular hands that break off at sharp, odd points. The music crushes, the sound of the piano becomes harsher, faster; the world turns on its axis when he smashes out a new chord. The bassist becomes swiftly ovoid, melding into the great beast of his instrument; the hollow wood of the bass smiles wide, its splintered grin suggesting a perverse, voyeuristic joy. The tenor player is now a cube, his saxophone a simple tube which makes noises seemingly impossible for an instrument of its shape and bore: it howls, screams, roars, trumpets as if summoning the magnificent elephant. It speaks of the desert, of a Savior, of a mirage, of truth, of lies, of darkness.
The music boils; the tempo, frenetic. The volume is all consuming as the shape of the drummer becomes incomprehensible; he is a mess of geometry, thousands of square limbs screaming towards the heads of his battered drum. The musicians howl as a mess of color and shapes blooms over their heads; a current of squares blows by the stage and dissolves into a choking whirlwind.
The saxophone shrieks a narrative gospel of a man born into a timeless world where he alone ages, and all others are static. As the tenor climaxes multiphonically, I see this Grand Tube’s beak point directly to me.
I begin to scream, shriek, howl alongside the music, a great devilish sound, though those in the club may misinterpret it as piety. The roiling shapes within me strain and struggle to burst forth from my pale chest. I have been discovered! The figures in the club all turn to me as one; the whispers begin, yet I cannot discern anything that has been said. In the back of my mind I think I hear them say, “He isn’t dancing…”
And they are right. I have never danced. I have only watched the geometry of other men’s movements and called it understanding.
The whispers grow and shift into the haze of cigarette smoke, the letters joining the great current of swirling, choking geometry in a choir of omniscient judgement.
I see the doorman of the club speaking to the owner, pulling at the inside of his thick jacket. A man near him falls into a coughing fit, sips his water, and falls silent. The stares continue unabated, a thousand fractured prisms which scythe the fabric of time in two.
The club spins around me, its pace matching the tempo and dances with them. In and out, the music dictates the orientation of the room; glasses clink and fall about like bullets from an assembly of executioners. The people remain still, as if glued to their chairs. They, too, have become geometric.
I feel my foot begin to collapse into a dead cube of flesh, molding my shoe to a new shape. I am breathless, panic rising in me unlike anything I’ve known. Viscera falls into marching order, obeying a new master, some other God of shape and substance. On cue, the drummer and his octopian limbs morph into a perversion of a snare, the beat reverberating as if played by a million cloned musicians, all milliseconds apart from one another. The sound is both harrowing and all consuming. Beside this train of snares, the tenor commands Time to halt his efforts until the story has been told.
The music stops abruptly. The crowd breaks into a gentle applause and the shapes return to their anthropomorphic forms, seemingly unfazed. Yet, in the corner of my eye, I see the cubic form of an ice cube clinking in an empty glass at the edge of the bar.
I order another drink, my dry mouth reminding me of my thirst. The bartender obliges silently, looking at me with a modicum of concern before passing me the drink. The man beside me lights a new cigarette, his previous smoked to a nub during the performance. He inhales sharply and looks around, impatient.
My breathing slows. I had been panting through the performance, and the sheen of sweat on my brow draws strange looks from the couples around me.
The tenor thanks the crowd for their time and announces one final number. The drummer begins, abrasively up-tempo, unceasing: ‘Countdown.’ Suddenly the room again contracts, more surgical and mechanistic than before; the shapes coalesce into being. The Grand Tube screams “Countdown” and the precise, brutal mathematics of the sound forces geometry back into being. Again, the room wakes to life, spinning, spinning, spinning. I dance with the room itself now, and feel my rectangular soles leave the floor as the tenor continues to proselytize. The Tube’s gospel swarms, infesting my mind and body with holy geometry. The shapes are brutal, machines made to torment, to kill, to change. Tessellation overcomes the room.
Time snaps. The world shatters into anisometric form, millions upon millions of shards. My body contorts of its own will; there is nothing but deference to this gospel. My flesh disintegrates into thousands of shapes, their pointed edges sharp.
Incomprehensibly, a shape emerges from the din. A man, standstill yet free-floating in Time’s vacuous world. The Tube chants of the man observing life from the outside, of seeing the great dance of humanity, collisions and all. He stands at the edge of the dance floor, unable to step into the rhythm. His limbs answer to a different metronome. My body contracts and I suddenly become that man, or some perverted form of him. My bones snap, angling themselves into predestined, geometric form. The pain is unbearable, and again I scream in harmony with The Grand Tube.
The band grinds to an aching halt, basking in the afterglow of performance. A grinding noise overcomes the room as the music’s machinery collapses to dust. Severing geometry from flesh, the sound seems for a moment boundless, until its work is done. Everyone again turns to their original form. I move to stand and leave, but as I try, my eye is drawn to the empty glass on the table. The drink, empty, is now missing its ice cube. The final shape is gone, and I suddenly understand. The music has no room for witnesses.
Liam Eichberg is a writer from Tampa, Florida. He loves coffee, weird & paranoid fiction, and jazz loud enough to confuse the neighbors. He has been published in GossamerWight and the talking chair, among others. He can be found on instagram as @liameichberg.