Sunset on Thursday,
August 28, was supposed to happen, according to my smartphone app, at about 8:00pm
– although sunsets are attenuated diminishments, not sudden closures of the light,
so the timing was no doubt loose enough. But I was still running a bit late,
and cutting it close. It was about 7:45. Taylor Ho Bynum had announced that he was
beginning his west coast bicycle tour this evening with a sunset fanfare on
Wreck Beach, Vancouver’s famously clothing-optional strand, at the tip of Point
Grey on the University of British Columbia campus. I wanted to be there to hear
him play. Getting to the beach involves descending a fairly steep set of
400-odd wood-framed earthen stairs. I had rushed past some former students at
the top, saying hello but that I was headed for what I thought was to be a solo
concert of improvised cornet music on the beach that was about to start so I
was sorry but I had to go. At least, that’s what I think I said. I took the
stairs two-at-a-time as I started down, but that soon proved to be too
dangerous a tactic, so I dialed the urgency back a little and settled into a
one-by-one descent. Tanned and mellow, loosely garbed nudists and dreadlocked
dudes passed by me on their way up from a day of sunbathing in the heavy, bronze
August light. The staircase itself is shadowed and cool, snaking along a gully
in the cliff-side amid stands of west-coast cedar, poplar and the odd birch.
Clumps of oversized ferns open in the various cusps of hillocks a few metres
off the south side of the path. As I made my way down, at speed, I was pelted
by what looked in the dimness like scissor-winged dark moths, small meandering
swarms of them newly airborne, a sign of the oncoming night. One or two clung
to the folds of my t-shirt. I brushed them off, and, passing the green plastic
Johnny-on-the-Spot, emerged from the trees onto the beach sand at the foot of
the stairs.
I couldn’t see anything that looked
like a concert. It took a moment to orient myself. Scattered beach-goers were
still perched against logs, facing the Georgia Strait, watching the sunset in
the west across the water. A naked, deeply tanned old man nodded and passed me.
Nothing out of the ordinary seemed to be happening. I thought I might have
missed Taylor Ho Bynum.
And then I heard what sounded like a
Harmon-muted horn, a little faint, off to the right of the stairs. Perched
against one of the many driftwood logs that serve as breaks and that define
limited privacies amid this reach of open public space, Taylor – shirt off –
was playing to some seagulls who had waddled up to him, curious. I came over
and sat on the log next to his. There seemed to be a few other people around
the space, at their own chosen logs, who were listening, too. Most of the folks
around us were couples, however, out for some kind of romantic postcard moment.
The seagulls squawked at Taylor’s playing, and he engaged in a little playful
conversation with them, before they wandered off. The couple I took for lovers
looked over, once, then went back to themselves. The Harmon mute on the cornet
gave his sound an intimacy, a hush that was a little swallowed in the rhythmic
wash of ocean on sand, and in the wide-open air. You had to be sitting close by
to hear.
Taylor finished what he was playing,
set down his horn, and put on his shirt. I came over to him and said hello.
He’s a very affable, open person, and chatted for a few minutes, telling me how
on the very first leg of his bicycle tour – what would probably amount to 1800
miles over the course of five or six weeks, from Vancouver to Tijuana, playing
concerts and ad hoc gigs along the way – he had fallen and cut his leg and arm;
he had just been washing his cuts in ocean water, which he told me he hoped
would work as a kind of natural antiseptic. (Taylor’s own
account of his accident, and of playing on Wreck Beach, can be found in his on-line journal for his Bicycle
Tour.)
Another listener, whom I recognized
from jazz festival gigs this past June and whose name, if I remember right, is
Michael, sat down on the log opposite, and joined in the casual talk.
Taylor noticed that the sun was
beginning to set in earnest, and said he ought to play some music, like he’d
intended. He was concerned that he might be too loud for the thinning community
of beach-goers around us, so he placed a soft hat over the bell of his cornet.
He improvised an angled fanfare for a little under ten minutes, eventually
removing the hat and letting the horn sing out a bit more fully. Michael and I
sat a few feet on either side of him as he played, facing the water. The open
ocean seemed more or less to swallow up the sound – I don’t think there was a
danger of him being too loud here – while the cedars lining the embankment
behind us occasionally bounced a cluster of notes back toward us, gently
resonant. He was recording himself on an iPad that he had placed to his right,
against the log. He put both performances on Sound Cloud – they’re called
“Gulls” and “Wrecked at Sunset” (the latter presumably in honour both of Wreck
Beach and his crash) – and you can easily make out the ways in which he shifts
from counterpointing his lines with the aural textures of the local biosphere
through a form of call and response, leaving space for those ambient sounds to
overcome his notes before reasserting his voice in tandem with that soundscape,
shifting foreground and background, and finally, to my ear, melding his voice
into that variegated chorus. You can hear at the close of “Wrecked at Sunset,”
if you listen closely, the trees returning his melodies like ghosts.
For those few minutes, it felt like
Taylor had begun to initiate a musical ecology: situated and embodied, even a
little wounded, this wasn’t a “concert” but a shared auditory space, or better:
a temporary entry into the layered networks of place, a kind of sonic
reciprocity. The inescapably linear monody produced by the cornet gains depth
and polymorphous heft by combining expressive assertion with attentive
deference, by concocting instances of responsive, correspondent exchange. A
conversing. Not playing for so much
as playing along, playing with.
 |
| Actual sunset with which Taylor Ho Bynum was playing on Wreck Beach-- including a couple in the right foreground. |
After Taylor finished, and we chatted a
little more, one of the RCMP officers who patrol the shore strolled past, and
politely suggested that the beach would be closing at dark, and it was time to
go. Taylor picked up his horn, and played the Miles Davis outro
tag-line from “The Theme,” a light-hearted nod to the historical spectres
of improvisers who inevitably haunt our musical memories and an
acknowledgement, by quirkily twisting jazz convention, of the ways in which
this was no concert, no outdoor club date. He packed up his horn, and picked up his bike,
which he had carried down to the beach and which he would have to carry back up
the stairs with him. And that was that.
