Given that it started with me shov­el­ing my dri­ve­way out from under four inches of snow, yes­ter­day – Jan­u­ary 2nd, 2010 (that’s “twenty-ten”) – turned out much bet­ter than I had any right to expect.

The plan was to drive or ride the train into the city for a ses­sion at the loft of  all-purpose jazz mas­ter Con­nie Crothers. Also there would be my reg­u­lar rhythm sec­tion, drum­mer Jay Rosen and bassist Fran­cois Gril­lot, and trom­bon­ist Steve Swell, with whom I’ve played a fair amount.

I decided to take the train, which meant I’d have to limit myself to one horn. Know­ing I’d be on foot in the city all day, with a long trek from the near­est sub­way sta­tion to Connie’s Williams­burg address, I thought it smart to take the soprano, which is of course the eas­i­est to carry. With the like­li­hood of ultra-high energy free jazzery on the agenda, how­ever, I set­tled on tenor … which is, of course, prob­a­bly three times heav­ier than the soprano. The bet­ter to huff and puff and blow the house down.

The snow storm was not unfore­seen, but it would frankly have taken a bliz­zard of ice age pro­por­tions to keep me home.

Eight years of shov­el­ing my dri­ve­way have helped me to develop a tech­nique for get­ting max­i­mum snow clear­ance with the least pos­si­ble (though still sig­nif­i­cant) effort, so it only took about fif­teen min­utes to clear a space big enough to get my car out. The nar­row road lead­ing into the vil­lage was not in great shape, but I gave myself plenty of time to get to the train sta­tion, know­ing my top speed for the two-mile drive would barely exceed 20 mph.

I reached the sta­tion with about fif­teen min­utes to spare. As I got out of the car, I thought to check the pocket of my tenor case to make sure I’d remem­bered to bring some­thing to read on the hour-and-three-quarters train ride.

D’oh!

For­tu­nately, my lit­tle town has a a nice book store close to the train sta­tion. I ran over, grabbed the first Von­negut I saw that I hadn’t already read (God Bless You, Mr. Rose­wa­ter) and made it to the train in plenty of time.

(If given the choice between rid­ing the train or dri­ving into the city, I’ll ride every time. Hav­ing so much guilt-free read­ing time is a rare and won­der­ful thing.)

It wasn’t snow­ing in the city, but it was cold as a mutha. From Grand Cen­tral, I walked over to Sam Ash for some reeds, then took the N train down­town to Union Square. From there, I walked an addi­tional two blocks south on Broad­way to visit my favorite retail estab­lish­ment of any kind, The Strand bookstore.

For those of you who don’t live in NYC, The Strand is the world’s great­est dis­count book store. For twenty bucks, you can go into The Strand and come out with enough great read­ing mate­r­ial to last you a month or more. That’s exactly what hap­pened yes­ter­day, only I spent an addi­tional five dol­lars, thanks to a copy of Steinbeck’s Trav­els with Charley (one of the few of his books I haven’t read) that I saw on the way to checkout.

After lunch at Dojo, an afford­able Japan­ese restau­rant near NYU to which I’ve devel­oped an inex­plic­a­ble attrac­tion bor­der­ing on obses­sion over the years, I headed out to Williams­burg. The sub­way line run­ning clos­est to Connie’s is the J train, which fea­tures some of the crap­pi­est sta­tions in the entire New York City Tran­sit Sys­tem. Cer­tainly the Cham­bers Street BMT sta­tion, where I ended up trans­fer­ring after a snafu too long to explain, is one of the very worst in Man­hat­tan. It resem­bles some Twi­light Zone-like vision of a New York sub­way sta­tion after the last hydro­gen bomb has reduced the city to rub­ble and forced remain­ing humans to live under­ground where they mutate with the rat pop­u­la­tion to cre­ate a race of rat peo­ple, only one would hope that the rat peo­ple would take bet­ter care in main­tain­ing their liv­ing space than the City of New York takes in main­tain­ing the Cham­bers Street BMT station.

The walk from the Marcy Avenue sta­tion in Brook­lyn to Connie’s loft took about 15 min­utes. I got there at exactly the appointed time of 3:30. I took the ele­va­tor to her floor. The vestibule door was locked and there was no buzzer. I pulled out my cell phone so I could call and have her let me in.

As I did, I noticed I had a new voice mail mes­sage from Jay. It seems that Fran­cois was sick and couldn’t make it, so Jay decided to can­cel, too. Con­nie came to the door. She had been out most of the day and hadn’t got­ten the mes­sages until about an hour or so before, at which point it was impos­si­ble to get in touch with me – not that it would’ve mat­tered, since I’d got­ten on the train at 10:48  AM, after which there would’ve been no turn­ing back.

Con­nie was exceed­ingly cool about it, though. She’d already called Steve and told him we’d resched­ule. But since I was there, she sug­gested we play a duo ses­sion. I said I thought that was a good idea.

We sat around an talked a bit before­hand. She filled me in on her plans for build­ing a big jazz com­mu­nity cen­ter in Harlem (it’s a tough slog, but if any­one can make it hap­pen, it’s Connie).

We also talked about the cur­rent state of jazz in gen­eral. Not sur­pris­ingly, we see things in much the same light (although Con­nie is much nicer and more gra­cious in her eval­u­a­tions than I am). We both share a cer­tain opti­mism about the open­ing up of jazz in the post-music-biz-bust era.

Our talk moved to more strictly musi­cal sub­jects, at which point I did a great deal more lis­ten­ing than talk­ing, because her sto­ries are a lot more inter­est­ing than mine. She talked about her the­ory that Louis Armstrong’s scat­ted duo with gui­tarist Lon­nie John­son  on “Hot­ter than That” was maybe the first exam­ple of truly free impro­vi­sa­tion in jazz (she played the record for me, and she’s got a point).

She also spoke of her friend­ship with Roy Eldridge. She told how she once played a free impro­vi­sa­tion with Roy in the audi­ence, and Roy came up after­wards and told her how much he loved it. He told her how he had done some free impro­vis­ing him­self with Chu Berry in the ‘30s but they couldn’t get any record com­pany to record it. She recounted a con­cert Roy him­self played with pianist Dick Katz as part of Jack Kleinsinger’s High­lights in Jazz series, in which they played out. Con­nie also recalled hear­ing Roy play some very hip, very atonal impro­vised piano.

Think about that: Roy Eldridge play­ing free jazz, not just before Tris­tano and Ornette and Cecil, but before bebop! The dis­cus­sion led us to rumi­nate on the schism that’s so long sep­a­rated the in and out jazz crowds. Con­nie is the rare musi­cian who bridges the divide. “I used to catch it from both sides!” she laughed. “The straight-ahead cats say­ing, ‘that free stuff is B.S.’, and the free cats say­ing, ‘play­ing those tunes isn’t true improvisation.’”

The time came to play. I was a lit­tle sad I hadn’t brought my soprano instead of the tenor. I am capa­ble of much greater sub­tlety on soprano than I am on tenor. In my hands, the tenor is strictly a free jazz horn – my broad brush, used to paint large swaths – whereas on the soprano I’m capa­ble of much greater pre­ci­sion. The soprano is also my bebop horn (strangely enough, since I picked up alto and tenor again with a mind toward using them in a straight-ahead con­text), and I would’ve liked to have played some tunes with Connie.

Play­ing was nev­er­the­less a joy. Con­nie is infi­nitely flex­i­ble, well-able to adapt to the loud, scrawl­ing hyper­ac­tiv­ity that’s a char­ac­ter­is­tic of my tenor play­ing. ‘Scrawl­ing’ is indeed the oper­a­ble word. Impro­vis­ing has always felt like a kind of aural drafts­man­ship to me. Con­nie con­trasted my extremely lin­ear­ity with tight, per­cus­sive clus­ters, ener­getic and pow­er­ful, com­ple­ment­ing and fram­ing every­thing I did. I would’ve liked to have moved in more sub­tle direc­tions, but that’s just not me on tenor. It any case, it didn’t seem to bother Con­nie a bit. We both laughed like kids at the end of every improvisation.

We parted with smiles and a hug, with the promise to get the band together before the end of the month.

The walk to the sub­way seemed a lot shorter. I missed my train home by about five min­utes, so I had a bowl of chili in Grand Cen­tral and buried myself in the pages of Von­negut. I caught the next train, where I fin­ished God Bless You,  Mr. Rose­wa­ter (a great satire of free enter­prise and a med­i­ta­tion on the pathol­ogy of wealth). I pulled out a book of short sto­ries by T.C. Boyle, who’s new to me. I’m not sure I’m going to like him, but it’s always excit­ing to dis­cover some­thing or some­one new.

It should snow like this every day.