San Francisco Perfection

Last Saturday, fried from computer screen adoration (you know, when it’s you and your screen and you’re glued to each others eyes…) I finally broke free. 

It started ominously – a drive to the office to pick up papers at 7am on a Saturday morning.  But Spring was upon us and the views of the bay and city in the morning sun finally had their way with me.  I called Marco to check if he was at the Alemany Farmer’s market.  There’s no better way to start a San Francisco Saturday than at the peoples market (then; today).  But for once, Marco wasn’t going.  As I arrived at our block, I couldn’t turn towards home.  Instead, I found myself continuing to drive and ended up on Geary, racing into the Pacific Ocean.  The day only got better:

• The first peek of the Pacific from Geary, rolling downhill to Loui’s Diner and the Sutro Bath ruins. If I wasn’t in a motoring mood, eggs, steak and hash browns with a view to ochre mud stumps and a raging ocean would have been the call.
• Turn off into the park with the top open to take in the colors and smells of springtime, our brooding gnarled california trees and turning a corner, the sudden view of stoic bison, unreal in their mass and stillness.
• Over the bridge to Old Oakland.  Lemon riccotta pancakes at Cockadoodle Cafe, talk about politics surrounded by refreshing color after (it’s true) mostly white San Francisco.
• Dropping Anirvan back to Berkeley and had to extend the conversation as we often must.  But this time, a Berkeley tradition – sitting on the Shattuck median (an 8 ft mound of dirt and grass) with cars puttering by on either side, under a ‘don’t sit on median’ sign. Berkeley gets plus points for this urban rendition of hanging out in a meadow.
• Driving back into the city with a favorite view of San Francisco (from the Bay Bridge) on display for longer than usual as I crawled through Saturday afternoon traffic.
• Quick dinner at Out the Door under the SF Shopping Center with the girls and Marco to provide the sole, slammingly dressed, male counterpoint. Marco can do orange & pink, together - no more need be said.  For food, the brightest, most unexpected salad I’ve ever eaten, Grapefruit & Jicama salad.
• Mosey on over to 111 Minna for what started a little slow (it was a fundraiser for lawyers after all…) but with a favorite DJ from old times spinning dub and then the live action of Sukhawat Ali Khan and friends, it was raucous.  On this night, the art included Amal’s photographs relaying stories of taxi cab drivers. 
  Maneesh (afore-mentioned DJ) said – ‘reminds you of Azaad days, doesn’t it?’  Minna, now more standard fare as a hipster art and music joint, used to be smaller in the day, and Saturday nights often included a collective of DJs (‘Azaad’) spinning South Asian-influenced dub, beats, hip-hop, trance and drum n bass.  Took me back.  Time for a party.

Sutro Bath Ruins. Photo by: the tahoe guy

Bulla & Everyone Else

Everyone sings in India. Birj mentioned this in passing. I had forgotten it. This is the song, he said, that all the kids on the streets were singing when I was last there.

Friday morning, I put on Rabbi in the car. Bulla streams out as the sun glances off downtown San Francisco. I’m approaching the city, on the bay bridge. Rabbi’s sound, Bulleh Shah’s words, kids with nothing who keep singing the words of a Sufi poet from the mid-18th century.

Nor did I create the difference of faith
Nor did I create adam-eve
Nor did I name myself
Beginning or end I know just the self
Do not acknowledge duality
There’s none wiser than I
Who is this Bulla Shah
Bulla! I know not who I am

Dizzy with Muezzins in Calcutta

The chairs were wooden. The stage was rudimentary. We sat under blurred Calcutta skies. But the sounds were heavenly.

Dizzy Gillespie was throwing his trumpet’s innovations to the self-professed cultural capital of India, Calcutta. Jazz. It may have been music, but for me it was everything – everything that was different from my teenage perception of straitjacket India and our old masters, stodgy rule-ridden backward and aristocratic England. Instead, it was America.

And all this before the real hallelujah moment.

A pause. The next number’s coming soon. The trumpet is at Gillespie’s lips. When suddenly another sound fills the air. It’s the muezzins from Calcutta minarets hailing prayer-time for the city’s Muslims. Clashing sensibilities – how dare our native sounds interrupt this 1st world gift!

But Gillespie, my American hero, is not thrown. Gillespie, he pauses, trumpet to lips, allowing his craven audience a moment to distance it self from coarser instant reactions. We begin to hear the muezzins anew. As mostly non-muslims, the sounds finally take on a haloed tone, framed as they are this evening by a foreign meter and a foreign man. As always in India, if the Western master honors, so do the colonial servants.

The muezzins’ melodies tail off. (Had I never noticed before that muezzins’ called out together, their voices interlacing in what seemed, through my overblown teenage imagination, to be in fact – Jazz?) And as the audience slowly readjusts, my American hero’s innovations take off. Gillespie takes the muezzins’ lead, picking up their melody, then taking it away to somewhere else.

And what an amazing place that was. The ascendance of America for me, was confirmed. Where else, I asked, who else, could produce this strange and wonderful music in this unpredictable manner. Who else could produce this ability to be so fluid with boundaries, driven only by the sense of possibility, and creating something unconscionably new.

[Post script: Of course, today I know that my foreign inability to parse out the different Americas allowed me to lump this uniquely African American musical tradition with it's built-in openness and innovation, with a monolithic perception of America. ]