Oscar by Mauricio Segura

Author:Mauricio Segura
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2018-04-11T16:48:27+00:00

4

The night Oscar performed at Carnegie Hall in New York, the concert was broadcast live on the CBC, where he had been working only a few months earlier. Even if most people in the neighbourhood had a radio, or at the very least a rudimentary receiver that you had to take a fist to every so often to keep it going, the rumour mill had done its work, and all you had to do was to follow the electric wire that unspooled from sidewalk to sidewalk, from street to street, fording rivulets of urine, skirting brothels where one fornicated loud and clear, bisecting the din on the jazz-club strip, and slicing right through the baseball diamond where the last holdouts were trying in vain to complete a ninth inning that refused to bite the dust—all you had to do was follow the wire leading to the set perched on the rise at the north end of the park, deposited there by Oscar’s brothers and sisters, to hear, in the company of other enthusiasts, the shower of notes from the piano-playing prodigy. There were at least two hundred, perhaps three hundred souls huddled together like wasps around an upset honey pot, their ears straining to hear all the cascades and arpeggios. Not a bit nervous, he played as if he were in his parents’ living room and once more twelve years old: he performed his music not only with youthful passion, but with a joyous vitality and a light touch that has always been the mark of greatness, of courtesy wed to intelligence.

Of all the pieces he played, the one that from one day to the next raised him to glorious heights was a slow swing, restrained, tinged with mischief, shot through with swoon-inducing staccatos and legatos. It was called “Tenderly.” How did he manage that tour de force, transmuting piano chords into human vocal chords with such gentle grace? Bah, said the brothers and sisters to whoever asked the question, it runs in the family. Still, it was this subtle amalgam of sophistication and simplicity that won the hearts of all the music lovers in the park, such that at the end of the concert, while everyone prepared to disperse, several made a show of wiping some irritant from their eyes, powerless to hide the feelings that had welled up in them, as if Oscar had miraculously interpreted the scores of their inner lives.

Norman G.’s great innovation was to have his protégés—about fifteen of the most prominent musicians in the world of jazz—play in concert halls usually reserved for classical music, and to bring in box office receipts far exceeding the meagre sums offered by nightclubs. According to him, not only would jazz be profitable in those prestigious venues, but it would also free it from its reputation as a marginal art form promoted by a few mobsters trying to redirect their activities into music, a reputation recently enhanced thanks to the boppers, whom neither Norman nor Oscar held in very high esteem.

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