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saxophone improvisations for island life, Part 3:The bugle boy and albert |
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December 2010 |
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While the various components - photographs, video, soundtrack, environment, and story - taken in isolation have an independent aesthetic quality, the piece can only be completed in the mind of the ideal reader/viewer who reads the story while sitting in the couch in this environment as the video and soundtrack plays. |
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This is the story of a man, marked by an experience from his past. The scene that haunts him, and whose meaning he was to grasp only decades later, happened on Governors Island in New York, immediately after World War IV. New York city and the five boroughs had been depopulated in a matter of minutes. The fate of the rest of the United States and the world was yet to be known. From his point of view, he alone survived. He awoke to the water smashing him against the sea wall. His legs burned from the night’s overexertion or a neurological weapon. The island, like him, remained intact as if having been protected by a great bubble. His survival is inexplicable, but it is exclusive. During the next several days and nights, sounds frighten him. He searches for life forms, for food, for water. Eventually he discovers the severity of his aloneness and reconciles with it. |
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The very next morning, he awakens to the sound of a bugle. The player is frustrated, unable to get the melodies right. Streams and clusters of jammed notes break up the natural cadence of the rhythm. Gradually, angered frustration turns into elegant improvisation. He finds a bike on the rocks at low tide, repairs it, and searches. He rides in the direction of the sound, but he only hears it behind him. After unrewarding days spent circling the island, he begins to think it originates from inside himself: there is nothing left of humanity, so he must be hallucinating his own memories. He finds himself back in his eleventh year with a saxophone hung from his neck. His attempts to play ‘Mary Had A Little Lamb,’ ‘De Camp Town Races,’ and ‘On Top Of Old Smokey’ end in frustration. His solution: to scream through the horn as loudly as possible. It was in these moments that he felt free. Once he broke the cycle of the melody, he found the freedom to explore. But no one encouraged this. The school band he played in specified what to play and how to play it, when to play and for how long. Playing from sheet music seemed unnatural. As he reconciled with this memory, and took pleasure in the entertainment provided by his own psyche, he found peace again and slept, often dreaming to the sounds of a bugle in the distance, familiar then shattered, but then elegantly cobbled together into beautiful improvisations. He didn’t remember playing this well when he was young, but that’s what dreams were for. |
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The next day I was awakened at daybreak by a persistent jabbing to my shoulder. A funny little voice referred to me as ‘fresh fish.’ “Please teach me the Reveille.” I leaped up as if I had been struck by lightning. I rubbed my eyes hard. I stared. And I saw an extraordinary little fellow staring back at me very seriously. Remember I was on an island surrounded by impenetrably contaminated water. No humans could have survived the devastation. While it was true that I had survived, and I could not explain this, I had searched every corner of the island and found no signs of another. But there in front of me was this little boy, no older than twelve in a funny outfit, jabbing at me with a bugle. “Hey, fresh fish,” he said again, “Teach me the Reveille.” “I opened my eyes wide and looked around. He was the only person around. This little fellow seemed to be neither lost nor dying of exhaustion, neurological damage, hunger, or thirst, nor did he seem scared to death. There was nothing in his appearance that suggested a child stranded on an island, a sole survivor of a calamity. But in the face of an overpowering mystery, you don’t dare disobey. Absurd as it seemed, a thousand miles from all inhabited regions and in danger of death I took up the bugle. I told the little fellow that I didn’t know how to play. |
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“That doesn’t matter. Just teach me how to play it.” So I put the bugle to my lips and tried to make a sound. I remembered playing the Reveille on the saxophone when I was a boy of his age, and even then I wasn’t very good at it, but, still, I didn’t know how to translate that to the bugle. So I let out a few notes. “There you go,” I said. “The Reveille. Now, who, may I ask are you?” “That’s not the Reveille,” he snatched back his bugle. “It goes like this.” He began to play the Reveille, but at about the sixth note he lost his place, and in his frustration he blasted a flurry of seemingly random notes that flowed from his mouth. I jumped back several feet from the blast. He continued on like this for a moment seeming to find his own path in the random notes he had set himself off to, concocting, in the end, what I thought to be a wonderfully lyrical composition of his own making. Once he finished this flurry, he pulled the bugle from his lips in frustration. “It goes like this,” he said again, and this time he hummed the short melody of the Reveille, perfectly in tune. “Please teach it to me.” |
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“I can’t play the bugle, but it sounds as though you have the hang of it in your head, now you just have to say it through the horn. Can’t you hum it into the bugle?” “You sound like Albert.” “Who’s Albert?” I asked, anticipating a father or someone he might be traveling with. While he asked me a fair amount of questions, he never seemed to hear the ones I had asked him. This I learned to be his habit. He once again put the bugle to his lips and began to play the Reveille. But again, after losing his train at the sixth note or so, he let out a torrent of notes that still made me jump back. Though not the Reveille by any stretch, I was still moved by the melodic sounds he produced. When he finished, he pulled the bugle away from his lips and repeated, “I can’t do it, so you have to teach it to me.” |
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“Why do you need to play the Revelie?” I asked him. “You’re playing just fine without it. Besides, since I’m already awake and called to arms, there is no one else to alert.” “But it’s not the Reveille. Can you teach me ‘To the Colors’?” “I don’t know that one either. Plus, I told you I don’t play the bugle. Once, a long time ago, when I was your age, I played the saxophone. But that’s a long time ago.” |
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Without seeming to hear or to care, he said again, “It goes like this,” and raised the bugle toward his lips, but this time he hummed the melody, perfectly in tune as if he were playing it on the bugle. “Please teach it to me.” “But you don’t need any of those bugle calls. There are no troops here to command, no flag to raise, no schedule to adhere to. As far as I can see, it’s only you and me, and for my sake, I don’t need the bugle calls to remind me when to wake up, to eat, and to sleep.” “But I need to know them,” he insisted. “My commanding officer requires it.” Here I saw my opportunity to get him to stop hounding me, and I took it. “As your commanding officer, I am commanding that you no longer need to learn the bugle calls. No, your new orders are to play what you feel, let your lungs play the songs they like. You just follow along with your lips and head.” |
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I was anticipating another blast out of frustration and defiance, but instead he lifted the bugle to his lips and played a lovely melody of his own making. When he finished his song, he gave me a stern look and asked, “How was that, sir?” “Fine,” I said, “Just fine. You’re getting the hang of it. Now keep practicing that.” “You sound like Albert,” he said, again failing to inform me who Albert was. He slumped down on a nearby rock and pulled what appeared to be a pipe from his inside jacket pocket, which I thought strange for a boy of twelve. “Commander, sir,” he said, “Do you have any tobacco?” And that’s how I made the acquaintance of the little bugle boy. Continued... |
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Three-Dimensional Literature; The Center for Three-Dimensional Literature; and 3Dlit.org ©David Colosi, 1996-2011. All artists and writers retain copyrights to their own works. Last Updated: Sunday, December 26, 2010
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