night music at metro mont royal …
below adolescent oak trees, beside the entrance to one of the busiest metro stations in town, on a still and humid saturday night full of movement and people, but remaining also charmingly calm, fresh and quiet almost — below, within and amongst all of this a small band of the most talented of people sat down and played music, and in the process made a world full of magic and joy come to life, for everyone involved.
we were working late, at an all night café, and through the seven foot sliding windows wafted towards us their music, full too of all the pollen, nectar and spring sweat that saturated the fecund june air. we walked over and sat on artfully crafted stone slabs meant for sitting, and listened to these 4 very young, very inconspicuous, musicians. they all played immaculate, rich acoustic instruments, dressed in faded blue-jeans and t-shirts: two on those lovely django reinhardt jazz guitars, one on violon, and one on a big ol’ stand-up bass. people would come and go, but there seemed to be an easy 80 people there throughout, gathered in along the benches or sitting on the young grass, juxtaposed in the way that your thumb and forefinger do when at rest near the bottom third of your morning cup of coffee. they played a sort of early jazz, mixed with dolups of ragtime, world rhythms and free jazz. it was lovely. it was gypsy.
sitting there, i couldn’t help but realizing that one of the reasons i love montreal as much as i do is the fact that it has the room for just such events to spontaneously erupt. all the ingredients are present: there is no shortage of talented musicians in montreal, or any other sort of artist for that matter; there is an impressive abundance of people eager to revel in any good art being made (and thereby support it); and there are well-designed, or at least wonderfully random, public spaces — physical spaces not owned by any corporate interest, increasingly rare in most north american cities – where people can sit, loiter even … string together notes on some sort of instrument, gather crowds.
and it needs to be reiterated: these musicians were fantastic, despite the fact one looked hardly 18 and another couldn’t stop his francophone riverdancing between (and sometimes during) his impeccably colourful violin solos. with a growing nightime breeze, after a hot, humid day of intense, scorching heat, we sat and let the music spread smiles of contentment and joy across our faces. like that time when i was 17 and on my first roadtrip without the parents. when everything in life was possible, and ahead, and sure to be better than anything i had ever managed to dream up …
that’s what it was like that night, beside the metro mont royal. those young, innocent musical geniuses plucked not only the souls of their lovely acoustic sirens to life, but also my little oaky soul, over-worked, mature and solid but still leaning towards a lithe, supple cherry pith of perpetual, indolent, dreamy adolescence …
c.
