18. Fate v. Chance
The Mountain returns and he's in a ontologically foul mood.
This is an ongoing story, meant to be read in order. If you’re just arriving here for the first time, please start at the beginning by following the index.
The Mountain is packing up his rig after finishing what was an even more killer second set. It started off inauspiciously. Second sets can be like that. At best, you rely on a second wind that, if it lasts long enough, brings out some of your weirder, creative tendencies. You’re too tired to really care anymore, so you let down your professional defenses and just fly.
His band members bask in the afterglow of the experience, joking among themselves as they pack up their equipment. The drummer unfastens his cymbals as he makes lewd jokes about some woman in the crowd. Standard musician talk. The Mountain generally stays out of the banter. They’re young, he’s old. They joke about different things.
I’m here to drive him home. That was the deal. Free tickets and access to the master in exchange for him not having to take a cab home.
“Damn. That solo on Endless Melody/Infinite Regress was ridiculous, crazy—but inevitable, like it had to be that way,” I say, walking up to him and shaking my head.
“Nothing is fated. Everything happens by chance.” He looks away wearily, indifferently.
“Yeah, I don’t believe in fate either,” I offer, hoping to get him going.
He brightens a bit, never being able to resist an ontological dialogue. “However, a bunch of chance events can coalesce over time into something that looks a lot like fate, looks like it had to be that way. Thus, you have my mind-bogglingly perfect solo that could easily have gone another way.”
“So fate wins in the end. Whichever way the solo goes, it was meant to be that way.”
“No, no, no. It just looks that way. That’s the big mistake everyone makes. And believe me, mistakes are the key to avoiding fate—which doesn’t exist.”
“Beethoven believed in fate. Tchaikovsky, a big time fatalist. I wish I did. Then you’d have nothing to worry about really. It’d all be preordained.”
“You’d worry anyway. That’s what you and your kind do.”
“Me and my kind? And what are you doing with your music? You’re not trying to tame the beast, control the sound?”
“No, I don’t. Like you, I’ve practiced for a hundred years so I can let the sound go where it must . . . ”
“Which sounds a lot like fate. Where it must go . . . ”
“Ah, but where it must go is a matter of chance, where the moment wants it to go. You don’t really control it. You practice thousands of hours so you can learn how to stay out of the way. Though part of chance is that there might be a chance for you to intervene. And change the direction of the chance.”
I give him a look. “So you’re controlling it.”
“Just drive me home. Sheeit.”
I help him carry his small rig—two custom Fender guitars and a smallish beat-up Fender tube amp—to my clunky, old Saturn, parked out back. I dump the amp in the trunk, but he likes to keep a close watch on his guitars, so he places them in the back seat, then carefully buckles them in.
He sighs heavily as he drops his lanky frame into the passenger seat. “You need a bigger damn car, man.”
“At least I have a car. At least I drive.”
“Haven’t driven since France in the mid-70s. Fuck driving.”
“But it’s okay for me to drive . . . ”
“Mmhmm . . . ”
* * *
L’BoDean lives in Evanston, a college town—Northwestern University—along the lake, just north of the city. I spent a lot of time up there during my high school years, taking my first jazz lessons, later playing at clubs with out-of-tune pianos or no pianos at all. In those cases, I’d bring my Fender Rhodes.
I first met Mountain in one of those clubs in 1977. He happened upon one of my gigs, when he went to pick up a check from the owner, who also managed a much bigger place in Chicago where he was playing. Mountain listened as I played a bluesy original with a flute player, then yelled at me from the back, “Hey, piano player! Where’d you learn to play like that?”
His yelling was fine. There were only three other people in the club, which was so small that the back was almost the front. The vibe of the space was casual, laid out like a hippie’s living room.
“Like what?” I yelled back, not knowing who the tall, elegant man with a guitar was.
“Like that, with that older-than-time blues shit. Pre-blues shit.”
“I don’t know, Duke Ellington maybe.”
“Nope. Goes further back than that.”
I shrug my shoulders. “I have no idea . . . ”
My flute player rolls his eyes, with a look that says, “Who’s this wacko?”
Mountain walks up to the stage—if you can call an area a stage that’s only distinguished from the rest of the room by a beat-up upright, an Art Deco lamp, and a skinny Persian rug.
“You need to come hear my gig,” he intones flatly.
“Who are you? Where?”
“Jehoshaphat L’BoDean. At Mister Kelly’s. Rush Street in Chicago? I’m there almost every Thursday when I ain’t touring. Which is most of the time. How do you not know this.”
“Oh yeah! That’s why I know you’re name. I live like three blocks from there. See you’re name on the marquee. Don’t think I’ve heard your music, though. It’s blues, right? I don’t really follow blues much.”
“If you’d heard my music, you’d remember it. Trust me. It ain’t like any blues you heard before. Come by this week. I’ll put your name on the list. You still have to pay though.” He laughs.
“Okay. Maybe I’ll check it out.”
“You will check it out.” He points at the piano. “You got something going on there, young man.” He starts to walk out, then turns around. “Needs a lot of work, though. But something . . . ” And he’s gone.
* * *
We’re driving north on Sheridan Road. There’s no good way to get to Evanston, but this is the quickest way. The roads are slick from light November rain earlier in the evening that had started to freeze over.
“The thing is,” I continue, “even if your perfect solo was predetermined to be the way it was from the beginning of time, you would never know it. It would still feel like a chance moment to you because you can never have full access to the infinite power and intelligence that bring about the moment.”
“Ain’t no infinite power telling me what to play.”
“Yeah, but ultimately what’s the difference?”
“Difference in what?”
“Between fate and chance. If your life unfolds as a series of chance events, each one of which could potentially lead you down an ultimately different path, how is that fundamentally different from an unknown fate, a fate you can never see coming? To me, that feels the same as chance. Chance, in a way, feels like fate—and fate feels like chance. What’s the difference?”
“It’s a matter of approach, attitude. Chance is ultimately liberating because things can always go another way, evolve into something we never could have imagined possible until it happens. Fate is stasis. Chance is hope. It’s only after the fact, after it’s already happened, that a thing appears to have been predetermined. Fate is not the future. Fate is the past—what’s already happened. And the past ain’t there anymore. So—”
“The past ain’t what it used to be.” I begin humming a tune.
“What?”
“You know, the Mercer Ellington tune—Things Ain’t What They Used To Be. Made me think of that song.”
“Oh, yeah. Hmm. You ever hear the, uh, Cecil Taylor version of . . . . It has nothing to do with that song! Now shut up and let me finish here.”
He looks out the window, annoyed by my innocuous intrusion, then continues where he left off. “So, as I was saying, the past is no longer there. Hence, no fate. Fate is an illusion we use to comfort ourselves about what has already happened to us.”
“It’s a pretty convincing illusion, though.”
“And we use it to explain both the good and bad things—it was meant to be or God works in mysterious ways or it had to happen this or that way. Blah, blah, blah. The point is that it could be this or that. It just so hap—”
“Or the other.”
“What?”
“This, that, or the other. My dad always says that.”
He gives a sardonic, quizzical look. “Well, even though you’re really getting on my nerves now, your dad has a point—if inadvertently. This, that, or the other is precisely how the world and music unfold. All. The. Time.”
“Actually, he says this, that, and the other. So maybe that changes it.”
He ignores me.
It’s starting to rain again, so I focus on driving. We drive past Temple Emanuel, a synagogue where my siblings and I briefly attended Sunday school—and where we’d go to not pray twice a year. The traffic backs up and stops at a light. There’s some sort of sporting event letting out at Loyola University to our right, students walking with pennants. Must be basketball.
“Okay, I suppose, with my music, I approach it that way too. Like I might be improvising or composing something, and I reach a certain juncture, a place where a decision has to be made on which direction to go next. Like a musical fork in the road—I could go this way, that way . . . or the other way. And whatever way I choose will have consequences for the rest of the journey. Maybe to the listener, the way I choose sounds like the way, the inevitable path. But the reality is, I could have gone another way, and it would still sound right. The way I chose to go only sounds right because it was the way I chose to go. Tautologies be damned.”
“And there you have it, the true power and purpose of improvisation—to keep you from falling into stasis, to keep you alive to the possibility that whatever you happen to be doing at any moment can evolve into something else, something that you hadn’t planned for. Our job is to keep fate at bay, keep it away, keep it dead in the past where it belongs. Capiche?”
“Yes.”
The light changes.
“Good. Now, again, stop talking and get me home. I have a headache. And don’t go the usual way. What is it with you and Sheridan Road?”
End of Part 1
In two weeks, Part 2 begins. I wrote and published all of Part 1 in 2016 and am republishing it here with the implied verbal permission to myself. Haha. Parts 2-4 are all new. Stay tuned…
Peter, I finally finished Part 1 and though the "conversation" in Fate V. Chance was beyond me, I thoroughly enjoyed you music.