---Bix Beiderbecke
This is where we should make our base for the next several months,
Albert croaked ton the third morning over his eighth Winston of the
day, a man who wouldn't get out of bed for a cup of coffee
before he'd had three cigarettes, ordering a beer from the table
service as soon as he'd drained his koffie verkeert. I've got a
feeling about this place, that it's the sort of place with enough
going on we can find a place to play – big university life will
swallow our eccentric jazz with a confusion they will attach both to our
creativity and the collective mistranslation of intent.
And so began our first foray into seeking a place to live, finding
locales wherein we might begin to play, establish our sound as it
were, and settling in to a new culture.
Among other things about Utrecht you might notice if you were in our
position, looking for housing is that very little suitable housing
exists. Well, the estate agents had plenty of ridiculously priced
luxury-style flats which we would have lived like furniture-less
kings in, but because of the influx of homeless students coming in a
few months before the new semester was to begin, in order to find
realistic housing, we would have to sign up for something before we
were even off for our fortnight of meandering through Belgium for the
European Championships.
When the B&B became prohibitively expensive, we switched to a youth
hostel near the water tower off of Amsterdamsestraatweg and
continued half-hearted efforts of finding a more permanent place. It
seemed ridiculous to pay a month's rent for a place we wouldn't be
living in but the idea of not having our own place when we got back
seemed even more ridiculous. After all, once the fun and madness of
the Euros were over, it would finally be time to get down to
business and we weren't going to get much done without a rehearsal
space, packed into bunk beds in a youth hostel. On the other hand,
the odds were stacked against us.
Cees had a grand time with our search. Do you know that every year
hundreds of first year students stream through the streets looking
for tiny flats, three by five meters for five hundred a month,
anything – they search advertisements in newspapers and little
advertisements on the street and all the while, long, long waiting
lists - and imagine yourselves looking, not as students, for cheap
housing but foreigners, adult foreigners, surely no students, and
you'll begin to realise your chances are quite slim indeed. The
locals were quite happy to bemoan the lack of housing but there were
tragically few leads.
Every afternoon we'd stroll into Marktzicht and every afternoon
greeted by how's the search coming along, and every afternoon,
empty-handed, we'd sidle up to the bar or take a seat at a window
table if it were free and drink away our frustration.
Locals had just as much trouble. Gert had been looking for three
months. Pieter another one who had been living on a sofa for half a
year. They got a kick out of our futile searching.
Perhaps more annoying however was that we had no place to rehearse.
For one, the outskirt location of the B&B meant, due to the size,
weight and encumbrance of Albert's bass we couldn't venture very
far. There wasn't a single venue suitable for practice or play. The
B&B owner, although sympathetic, was no masochist, and warned us
that any rehearsals we wanted to undertake within the premises would
have to be sporadic and short. It's not that I don't like jazz, she
explained with a shrug of her shoulders. I admire it in some ways.
It's just that the other patrons…and her voice wandered off to the
rest of the buildings leaving us to infer the disturbances of
tourists and weekend honeymooners up from Belgium and France or
Germany.
And certainly we weren't going to leave. The breakfasts alone, full
table spreads of cereals, fresh fruits and juices, platters laden
with cheese and meats, were enough to keep us. We rationalised that
there wasn't very long before we'd be leaving for Belgium and the
European Championship anyway so a few more weeks out of tune
wouldn't hurt us.
For that matter we might as well have left our instruments behind in
New York for all the good they'd done us to this point, for all we'd
struggled carrying them first from New York and all the hassles
involved with customs, dragging them around Amsterdam and then
leaving them to gather dust at the B&B. Albert hadn't taken his bass
out of the casing nor I my saxophone and not wanting to carry either
we went out each day leaving the instruments behind wandering around
futility seeking housing and when not seeking housing, more often than
not, hanging around like vagrants at Café Marktzicht where we were
fast becoming causes célèbres for our prolific, daily consumption of
beer and toasties, outrageous banter and the looming voyage to
Belgium, two yanks in search of football.
We tried vainly to sort out some semblance of a scheme but given the
temporal nature of our existence prior to leaving again, there
seemed little point. We wandered from estate agent to estate agent,
looking at flats which were situated in the most expensive
neighbourhoods simply because that was all they had to offer. We
wanted to find a dump, anything that wouldn't drain our coffers
quickly and a place where the noise of our rehearsals wouldn't
bother anyone. But it wasn't easy. We dropped hints everywhere we
went, every pub and café and falafel house we stopped in. We pried
and poked, questioned and demanded, all with equal futility. And by
lunch or mid afternoon, having exhausted ourselves and whatever
cryptic leads we had followed that day, we headed invariably back to
Café Marktzicht.
And every afternoon we'd stroll in, now familiar, greeted by the
stragglers who weren't at work or were off work early, order our
customary pints and settle in, sometimes by the window in front at
the tables reserved for the regulars and other times seated at the
edge of the bar, all the while doing the same, sipping our beers,
chain smoking our cigarettes and grousing about failed opportunities
until someone or another would strike up a conversation and steer us
in other directions.
And one afternoon, like all the others, the spell was momentarily
broken when we met Jan as we sat outdoors at a café with
our instruments which we'd brought with us that morning on the
half-witted notion of finding a place in a park to at least rehearse
awhile in, languidly sipping Belgian Trappist beer in preparation
for our outward journey.
Jan spotted Albert's double bass carrier in particular, hard as it was to miss, which Albert had brought along simply because he's already worked out a deal to leave it on premises for the duration of our Belgian tour and invited himself to our table, ordering another round in the process. Harmless enough.
So, he concluded after we'd chatted amiably for a half hour and
established, as we did with nearly everyone we came across, the
dignity of our goal, to establish ourselves here as jazz musicians
with our own delicate and unique sound, just after the Euros were
over and we'd sated ourselves with hedonism, of course, I'm in a
band myself and while we aren't looking for musicians, we
are playing in a small little festival not far from Utrecht in a few
nights and I'm sure the festival proprietors would be happy to add
some kind of jazz act to the bill. At the moment it's mostly rock
and pop but yes, the more I think about it, the more I believe this
would work out perfectly for you, your first gig, your first chance
at getting heard someplace other than in your minds, he added with
typical Dutch subtle yet direct derisiveness.
But we haven't really developed any real play list or really any
songs of our own, Albert explained. We play in the tradition of
spontaneous jazz musicians, making it up as we go along more or
less.
Jan assured us it wouldn't be a problem. It isn't going to be very
professional. A neighbourhood hell raising fundraiser is all – you
wouldn't be critically judged, I can assure you. Not to mention the
fact you are not Dutch but hoping to live here and establish
yourself as jazz musicians, well, we don't get much of that even
though we have such a vibrant blues and music scene here with all of
our festivals coming this summer it would be a chance for you to
enhance your résumé so to speak.
And so it was agreed, rather suddenly, with little time to rehearse.
We would invite those among the clans in the cafés we habituated, we
would invite people by word of mouth and in a few weeks time, just
before leaving for Belgium, we would have our first gig, even if
we had yet to find a place to live.
*****
It’s noted that we’re not hideous to listen to. I often think the amount of ocular cringing people do when listening somehow prevents them from understanding that we’re not just bad, we’re beautiful…
from the Diaries of Witold Kazmerski, cahier 1, page 81
Around 11, we began subtle gesticulations at preparing ourselves to
go on stage. Albert, exhausted by a combination of beer and the
heavy ride trying to balance his stand up bass on the bicycle on the
way here, was leaning up against one of the pillars in front of the
stage, a Winston unmoving between his lips save for an occasional
labial twitch and puff of smoke. His eyes opened when I got nearer.
All I know is that I'm not pedalling that fucking bass all the way
back into town when this nightmare has finally concluded he hissed
with the cigarette bobbing up and down in his mouth. No problems I
reassured. I've already spoken with Jan about the bass riding back
in their van with them. We'll be meeting with them at Fabriekzicht
afterwards. Albert snorted and removed the cigarette to replace it
with his mug of beer. A little late now, eh? I'm so exhausted
already I'll need another half dozen beers before I can stand
straight.
The band ahead of us, electric violin, screeching guitars and a
belchy, subterranean growl from the lead singer, were winding up
their last song, building a crescendo, sweating beneath the lights
while an overly enthusiastic group of junior high aged girls swung
their arms and shook their legs, wild, tangled hair in every
direction. The crowd was diverse enough but following music like
this was a bizarre mix, an embarrassing fart of jazz to let leak out
on their uninitiated ears.
As usual, we had tried to prepare those musically in the know for the fact that we were talent-less, inept, embarrassing. But the more we said that, the more convinced they became that we were really something special. Something unique out of America, an unspeakable hipness that would blind them all with
its profound exuberance.
Holding the sax, I looked through the crowd at familiar, expectant faces. Our friends of the last week, complete strangers in other lives a month ago and now we were going to humiliate ourselves with an unmatched zeal.
Once on stage, we'd planned on an elaborate verbal waste of time to
get us through the early expectations. A note hit here and there for
emphasis, but basically, a ridiculously elaborate history of the
song piece, a virtual encyclopaedia of liner notes on a song we'd
just rehearsed only two days before for the first time. By lulling
them to sleep with the vocabularies and translations, the sheer
enormity of the words and sentences to the point of
incomprehensibility, the strange and unequally timed jazz number,
completely original and completely without skill, would be an almost
welcomed respite, no matter how bad it was.
Billing ourselves as avant garde lent itself an automatic elasticity where this sort of performance art jazz was concerned. Simple chords, in a chaotic
enough fashion, sufficed.
I could tell, a few minutes into the second number, that we had them
right where we wanted them:
Uncertain as to whether we sucked or we were great.
Logically, had we actually been great, the chances that we would be
playing in this little neighbourhood festival were pretty slim so
for me, it left the door wide open to the idea that we sucked.
Fortunately, Albert and I had worked with this incompetence long
enough to have learned how to dress it up a little, enough to create
that uncertainty. They sound like they suck, but they look like they
know what they're doing. We'd perfected it through watching years of
talent less musicians performing on MTV. While we lacked the
pyrotechnics of talent, we were able to create enough sparks to get
people to believe the burning was only a matter of time.
The last number involved getting the audience to participate, making
noises that ran, more or less, in tune with Albert's thumping bass
notes over and over again. There's no doubt if we'd had a talented
drummer, we could have really sounded like we knew what we were
doing, but lacking the drummer, we used the audience. And of course,
being one of the last bands to play, everyone was pretty drunk by
the time we'd gone on. My vacant preambles on music history only
made them drink faster. So by the end of the last number, we were
all in on the conspiracy, the conspiracy that we'd created together.
That's how Albert and I had come up with the name to begin with: The
Deadbeat Conspiracy.
When it was over completely, we were such a hit, Jan was somehow
able to fit both Albert, his bass, which he now carried around with
him like his date, and I into the van along with the other guys in
his own band. It was the space of being accepted, for whatever
delusion they harboured. People were everywhere, crawling on top of
one another, laughing, singing loudly over the stereo as we rattled
along the canal in the van back into town.
*****
We wake up to a Fiat giving birth to painful horn honking, a
determined bastard on the road outside presses down on the horn with
the kind of persistent hand motion he could only have mastered in
his pimply teenage years staring and drooling over back issues of
garage sale Playboys. I raise my head and peer over the sprawl of
bodies and limbs, the snores of hedonism so entrenched in the
subconscious that even the dreams are haunted by strobe light
scattered images of the previous night's piecemeal memory. No one
else's sleep was even faintly disturbed. With a strychnine-jointed
grimace, I gather myself off of the floor, reassembled in a standing
position, and take a sniper's peak out the front window to the
annoyances below.
A very disturbed sophomore twitches and fiddles with varying degrees
of urgency at his coat lapel, his nose, the side of his face, right
pant leg, greasy hair. He looks like a fidgety third base coach
giving bunt signals to a batter who has just stepped out of the box
to adjust his cup. He looks hung-over, or like a cat who just
escaped from a washing machine. I can feel the fraying of his nerves
from the window and the honking has only grown more urgent.
I open the front door and edge my head out, feeling the cold air
tweezer its way through my nostrils giving me a mild headache like
the kind you get from eating ice cream too fast. Hey! I yell
inventively, gesturing an empty stab of malice. What the fuck is
going on?
The honking stops immediately and the Fiat guy fixes his desperate,
bugging eyeballs in my direction. He rushes across the lawn as
though he was tossed from a moving vehicle and quickly arrives in
front of me, reeking with the urgency of a man with overactive
bowels. He flails out a sentence, which I can't understand because
it isn't in English and looks at me expectantly. I shrug my
shoulders. Agneta he clarifies suddenly as though speaking to an
embassy bureaucrat. Where is Agneta?
Agneta is half clad under a pile of parkas somewhere left of the
kitchen, perhaps under the dining room table but I'm not going to
tell this guy that unless I know a little more about him. The fact
that he uses a car horn as a means of communication is not a good
starting point. I squint at him suddenly, my memory comes back to me
at high speed from around a sharp curve on two wheels and his face
becomes vaguely evocative of some idiot's conversation I stumbled
over somewhere in the post-twister trailer park of last night's
festivities. Agneta's face had parked itself somewhere in that
memory, seated at a table where a half dozen of us had congealed,
braying over each other with intoxicated opinions on over valued art
and the rise of the Euro. This guy had played a large role in the
braying, his foreign service accented English constructing sentences
of non-sequiturs and mangled inferences with such a lack of charm
and dexterity that I couldn't now see how it were possible I'd have
forgotten him, even for a few moments.
But I had, and whilst I waited patiently as he went about explaining
a rehashing of his life story from the last month and a half forward
in excruciating detail, it began to dawn on me that he was leaving
and he wanted to wish Agneta goodbye. Leaving? I bellow, why you've
only just arrived!
And on it went further, more explications and disentanglements,
deeper detail until I, now reaching in the dark for the light
switch, begin to realise that he was leaving Utrecht, had been
living in Utrecht and wanted to say goodbye to Agneta.
What have you done with your flat, I huff without preamble and
without divulging the whereabouts of Agneta. I haven't done anything
with it, he admitted, sheepishly. I haven't paid rent in several
weeks and I've got a job offer in Rome, so I'm leaving, the hell
with it, I don't care what they do with it.
Where is this place, we'll take it, I say simultaneously, as he
tried to look around me, over my shoulder, somewhere through the
house where Agneta was alleged to have been crashing. What do you
mean, he stammered suddenly flustered simultaneously by my refusal
to divulge the secret location of Agneta and my insistence on
knowing and having his former flat.
Look, here are the keys, he throbbed aloud, pulling them out of his
pocket and dropping them into my palm. They'll be pissed about my
not having paid the rent but if maybe you offer to compensate them,
they'll just let you take over the broken lease. It's on
Amsterdamsestraatweg, see, just down the road a pace – just stop in,
it's above a Somalian and take away place – ask for Belay and it's probably yours.
Agneta, I stood back and swung my arm laboriously sweeping behind
me, is underneath a pile of parkas beneath the dining room table.
*****
As we assemble in various stages of vulgarity and stumble out into a
fortunately clouded sky which eased escaping the bright sunlight in
little shells underneath covers over mattresses, I inform Albert
we've found a flat. Well, we haven't seen it yet of course, I amend,
but we are going to this afternoon.
Naturally, once setting upon the Somalian take away we had plenty of
explaining to do. It took two stabs and a few glasses of tepid tea
to meet the proprietor who arrived with the self-important airs of a
business man on the make, double parking his Mercedes in front, a
handful of keys jangling in his hand as he barked out orders to a
languid aide busy shuffling through calling cards in one breath and
turned to greet our shaggy countenances in another.
I understand you are friends with the man who was renting this place
from me and left two months arrears in rent he opened the bargaining
perhaps hoping to weasel extra money from us in the process.
On the contrary, I corrected, sniffing again the tempting aromas
that wafted down from the kitchen above before straightening to
embark on a course of enthusiasm and explanation that the person in
question had only been someone we'd met at a party to whom we'd
explained our situation and from whom we'd received this rather
miraculous solution.
There was no telling what background Belay was reconvening us from.
His eyes were full of delighted expression considering on the one
hand the rent in arrears to be paid and on the other, two more
borders of questionable character. The brief orders he barked to
aides were in fact given with the voice of authority yet not
authoritative, more like a loud suggestion than a command. The aide
hopped to it nonetheless and as languid as the other workers
appeared, they weren't relying on third world custom, loitering and
shiftless but were all agreeable and efficient. Men at work yet men
simultaneously relaxing.
Belay's expression waned replaced by calculations no doubt – one
could see an adding machine in his head, reminding himself that the
estate agent down the street who'd set up the last tenant had cost
him already two months rent not to mention the commission and here
were two more in the last's place having arrived without invitation,
no less unsavoury but musicians to boot. Still, we had quickly
offered two months rent in advance as a deposit and there was the
factor after all, of not having to pay the estate agent's
commission.
So what do you play? Please, sit down, he suddenly said, emerging
from whatever torpor had precluded his manners to begin with and
realising even if these were prospective tenants they were still
guests. He barked out a few more commands and several more cups of
tea were in front of us all, seated at the desk he'd brushed another
assistant away from, two chairs pulled up to join him, a chance to
discuss.
We play jazz, Albert without the usual preamble or elaborations. It
had been a late night with plenty of excitement and at the moment,
he just wanted to get the flat sorted out once and for all, collapse
onto a mattress or floor and sleep a few hours uninterrupted.
Ah, he noted, preparing to launch upon a long discursive about the
history of Somali music. We have some jazz-infused versions of our
own native music, well Somali and Islamic influences. Perhaps you
have heard of Maryam Mursal? He barked out a few more commands and
out of nowhere, as both Albert and I were confessing our ignorance,
as though we weren't even proper musicians if we hadn't come across
such music before, a boom box appeared and we were suddenly being
coached through the first opening bars of Somali's once famous
female vocalist, who, Belay patiently explained, because of some
criticism of Somalia's then-president Mohammed Siad Barre for his
murdering ways, was forced to give up her career to drive taxis for
a living before eventually being rediscovered by none other than
Peter Gabriel.
Albert scoffed, sipping his tea, the irritation of his sleeplessness
showing in the lines of his face like electricity coursing through
live wires, mumbling aloud - who hadn't? Peter Gabriel and Paul
Simon exploited amongst unknown third world musicians between them.
This is wonderful music; I interjected quickly and diplomatically
before Belay could fully digest Albert's words. You must be quite
proud, I suggested. Belay's eyes glistened, likely more from the
sudden memories of civil war in Somalia than the music, but
glistening nonetheless and appreciative that I appeared at least to
grasp the impact of her singing with sufficient levity. He wasn't
measuring us any more, I could tell. It doesn't take much sometimes
and more fortunate still he spared us both the humble rectitude of
lecturing us or congratulating us on our own government's foreign
policy amid his recollections and merely stood up suddenly. So,
would you like to see it?
As we made it up the first flight of stairs he explained the
intricacies of the flat itself. The second floor was a kitchen area
which we were welcome to use as we needed although during the
afternoons, as was evident, the sole chef, a large elderly dark
women with a tooth-missing grin, was busy at work preparing the
evening's take away food. The entire kitchen smelled of spices and
heaven. At the back of the kitchen was an entryway door which opened
into the courtyard used by all the neighbouring houses and flats and
which we would have a key both for the gate and the door and of
course, the toilet with a small shower. The shower was filled with
the remnants of vegetable stalks and shavings, clearly used for
other purposes in the absence of tenants and the toilet, although
functional, didn't appear to have been cleaned in months. Nor did
the light bulbs in either the shower or the toilet work although we
were assured of hot water.
And then he invited us through another door which again had its own
lock and the tall, narrow stairway leading to the landing which was
the floor of the flat itself. Evidentially the last tenant had left
a few articles of clothing, a mattress and a broken stereo in his
haste, all of which, Belay assured us, we were welcome to use or
throw out as we saw fit. He admitted there was a table from the
downstairs that we could bring up ourselves and use for own purposes
but beyond that, we were on our own. There was a small kitchenette
and sink area within a smaller area that doubled as both dining area
and storage space. To the left, a small ladder leading to an alcove
which he helpfully suggested could be used for either storage or
sleeping, large enough as it was for either and then of course, the
main uncarpeted studio area with sufficient space for another bed or
sofa or whatever we might see fit to use it for. All in all it was
neither a hole nor a middle class dwelling. Simply a flat. Just what
we needed.
What about our rehearsing? Albert brought himself to ponder aloud
still anticipating having to lug the bass up and down the narrow
staircase. Would there be a problem with our rehearsing?
Oh nothing, no problems, Belay assured us. Of course, best not to do
so during our socialising hours, depending on your skills, ha-ha, he
added, but we are closed up by 11 and after that, you are free to do
as you wish.
There was really no question as to which path we were headed. This
was everything or would be in time, we were looking for albeit
cramped. It was a decent price with a perfect location; 10 minutes
to either the train station or to Marktzicht, the only two places we
would imagine having to leave for.
We paid our rent in cash after very subtle negotiation on price for
our being two rather than one tenant and by the early evening, we
had moved what few belongings we had inside.
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