Some of the best memories of music can come from something experienced or witnessed that involved an event or interaction that was completely unplanned and unexpected.
Here are a few of mine:
On The Streets of Sopot
In the early 00s, my wife and I were in Poland for her brother’s wedding, and at one point in the trip, we traveled with the newly married couple to the northern part of Poland that borders the Baltic Sea.
When we were in the town of Sopot, we happened upon a group of street performers in the town square.
They appeared to be from somewhere in the Far East, and the main attraction was a girl who was a contortionist and could fit into an incredibly small box.
The others were playing folk music, and in the very back of the group stood a man who briefly began singing with a technique called throat singing, where one can produce two pitches simultaneously, one a high-pitched melody, and the other a very low-pitched drone.
I knew of this but had never actually heard it, and was mesmerized.
I have listened to many recordings since, but that remains the only time I have experienced it live. It remains one of the strangest and coolest musical things I have ever encountered.
One Night In Denver
Back in the early 90s, I took a trip with my brother Greg and his wife to the Denver area to visit our brother Mike and our sister Patty and her family.
The trip became known in family lore as the “blue beast” trip, named after a monstrosity of an old Jeep Wagoneer we borrowed from a friend of Mike’s to get around for about a week, because my sister’s car was in the shop.
The blue beast had a busted window covered with a garbage bag and would routinely die out if the car was going up hill or stopped at a traffic light.
We would all have to get out and push it until it started up again.
Patty had to be in the middle because she didn’t want her neighbors to see her.
But I digress.
One night, my brother Mike took us to a bar where a jazz saxophonist led a jam session.
He had raved about her, but I wasn’t sure what to expect. At that time, we were still in the reign of smooth jazz:
And the likes of Kenny G.
The jazz I had come to love in college was mostly the bebop of the 50s and 60s. I was quite shocked when that was exactly what they were playing and man, was that sax player the real deal along with her whole combo.
Outside of my college world, I had never heard this kind of jazz being played in the wild.
One person in our party suggested that I could get up there, and that I was better than the guy at the piano. I said, no, not even close. It was not false modesty.
Another shouted over one of the more fast-paced tunes, “there’s no beat. I can’t hear a beat.” “Oh, it’s there”, I responded. Afterward I told Mike how great it was, and he smiled and said, “I thought you would like it. She’s really good.”
In The Tiki (Tiki Tiki Tiki Tiki) Room
During winter break of 2019, my wife, daughter and I took a trip to Disneyworld in Orlando, Florida.
Without thinking it through, I planned the trip so that we would be in the Magic Kingdom, on its most crowded day of the year:
New Year’s Eve.
While in Adventureland, we were looking for something to do while waiting for our fast pass time for one of the rides. I noticed an exotic looking building called The Enchanted Tiki Room, and suggested we check it out, since there was no line.
We walked in and were soon serenaded by hundreds of animatronic birds, flowers, masks, totem poles, Polynesian gods – you name it.
All singing an extremely catchy theme song that repeated the word “tiki” a mind-boggling number of times.
It was the sort of old school attraction that looked like it had been around since the park had opened and basically hadn’t changed at all.
- My daughter thought it was kind of terrifying but cool.
- My wife found it to be rather ridiculous.
Me?
I thought it was amazing and couldn’t believe we had the good fortune of stumbling upon this magical world that I had somehow missed out on as a child. I instantly declared it the best attraction in the park, and could not stop singing the theme song afterward.
The Birthday Party
When I was in my late 20s, friends of mine and I were invited to a birthday party for a guy we knew, though not really well.
We were surprised to walk into a party that resembled that of a young child’s, though no children were present and Eric was around the same age as us. There was pin-the-tail-on-the donkey, and we all received gift bags that had pictures of Big Bird from Sesame Street on them.
Mine had a purple flashlight in it that I used for years afterward.
At one point, Eric, who had written many songs, pulled out a guitar and said he wanted to play one of his songs for us. The instrument was horribly out of tune and the song had no more than three chords. The singing was at best unpolished. It was about a friend of his who had died, but it wasn’t maudlin, and he sang it with a straightforward sincerity.
My friend Doug, an excellent musician, was standing next to me, and we both began sobbing uncontrollably.
It broke nearly every rule of what either of us would have considered to be good music, but it went straight to the heart, and did so in a way that very little music ever had up to that point in my life.
Jekyll Island
Back in the late aughts, my wife and I took a trip to Jekyll Island, Georgia shortly after Christmas.
We stayed in the Jekyll Island Club, which in the late 1800s to the 1940s was an exclusive winter playground for the ultra-wealthy, such as the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts. Some of the families had “cottages” built around the resort that were actual mansions.
Needless to say, it was not our usual vacation destination, and we were rather agog with our surroundings.
On New Year’s Eve, we attended a swanky ball, and as we sat down to dinner, a group of three African American musicians came out and began singing old spirituals in deeply soulful harmonies.
Both my wife and I found it incredibly moving and it quickly became one of those “I’m not crying, you’re crying” moments. We were riveted throughout their entire set. I will never forget it.
On The South Side Of Chicago
For a few years in the 90s, I volunteered on and off at a day care in an impoverished neighborhood on the south side of Chicago, teaching music to kids while their moms were in either a GED or ESL class.
I used a menagerie of percussion instruments I had picked up here and there over the years. I would teach the kids rhythmic patterns and we would play them together.
One day, only one student showed up, a 10-year old boy.
I grabbed a bass drum and a tom from an old Sears catalog-esque drum set that somebody had given me after it failed to sell at a garage sale.
I showed him a rhythm pattern, and we began to play together. I could tell he had it locked in, so I started to improvise over the top, slowly adding different rhythms, and becoming a bit more complex as we went along.
He stayed right in the pocket, and soon I just started feeling the groove and letting myself get into the music:
Until it was no longer teacher and student in a lesson, but two people jamming together.
Not being a percussionist, I had never been able to feel a rhythm and just become a part of it before, but that was what had happened. It was an incredible experience. I lost complete track of time, and we finally had to stop because we were both exhausted.
Nothing like it ever happened again at that day care. I’m not even sure I ever saw that student again, but what I experienced that day has stayed with me as the power of the connection we can have through music.
In The Park
About a decade ago, I was playing at a park with my daughter, who would have been around six at the time.
We heard music coming from somewhere nearby, so we walked through a row of bushes, and came upon a music stage where a band was set up.
It was an American Idol-style singing contest, albeit a very local one. We decided to stay, and sat down on the lawn to watch.
Middle school and high school girls proceeded to each take a turn singing with the band. Most of them chose current or recent pop hits such as “Firework” or “All About That Bass”.
Then, out of nowhere, a sixth-grade girl got up.
She beautifully sang the heartbreaking early 90s Bonnie Raitt ballad “I Can’t Make You Love Me”.
There was a profound sadness in her voice that felt far beyond the realm of emotional capacity for someone her age, and yet, there it was. I could not hold back the tears.
My daughter, in what would become a frequent question, asked loudly “Dad, are you crying?” I felt very self-conscious about it, but less so when the adult male emcee got up and wiped tears from his eyes before announcing the next contestant. The memory remains as a reminder of just what music can do when it comes from somewhere deep inside, no matter who they happen to be.
Karaoke Night
Starting in 2017, for three years I was a karaoke regular at a bar for the first time in my life.
During that time, there were seemingly countless occasions that I witnessed a singer who would get up and do something surprising, or flat out mind-blowing.
One that was most certainly something I could not have imagined encountering was a man that looked like he just got off of a construction job:
Getting up to sing “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You” by Led Zeppelin.
As you can imagine, this would be an extremely difficult song to pull off at karaoke, or really by anyone who wasn’t 1970s Robert Plant.
What we witnessed was a man channeling Plant note for tortured note, spot on key the whole time. Every bit of it seemed to forcefully pour out from the very depths of his soul.
When he was done, it was as if he had emptied himself completely on that stage.
Absolutely floored, without thinking, I ran up to him and just simply gushed, “that was AMAZING!”, even though I had never met the man before. He awkwardly smiled and walked off.
What made that whole thing even more surreal is that the next time my crew and I saw him sing something other than that song, it was Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are:”
Which is about a solar system apart from “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You.”
It wasn’t bad by any means, but it was just sort of basic karaoke. We couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to the guy we had seen that night that nearly touched immortality and left us all agape. It would remain a mystery.
He was absent from karaoke after that for awhile and the next time I saw him, he nearly ended up in a fight with another bar patron whom I did not recognize.
If “Just the Way You Are” hadn’t already accomplished it, the illusion had now been fully shattered. Apparently, he was just an average guy that hung out at a dive bar, who happened to transform into something bigger than life when he sang one particular song. Still will always make him extraordinary to me.
Now it’s your turn:
What are some experiences you had with music that were completely unexpected that left an indelible impression on you?
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