The Minor Blues

      I took an introduction to jazz class in college, and Tommy Flanagan sat in one day. He was slouching and playing quietly when we arrived. Each student stopped at the door before entering, awe-struck and nervous, fearful, for once, that we were interrupting something clearly more important and profound than ourselves. Our teacher, Fred Haas, waved us in with a smile.
      We tiptoed past the man who famously accompanied Ella Fitzgerald, who recorded with John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins, who was probably the most revered jazz pianist of the 20th century.
      He played cool and mellow. If a friend had tried to play the same way, it would have sounded like melancholy soup, but Flanagan’s thick, smooth chords and wandering melody went down light and easy.
      Some time after everyone arrived, he stopped, almost startled out of a reverie, and slowly turned around a little towards Fred to apologize for keeping everyone waiting.
      “I’m sorry—” he said, peering over his glasses.
      His voice was raspy and slow.
      Fred smiled, “What were you playing?”
      We had already pulled out our notebooks and pens and were ready for some secret wisdom that we could absorb, for words that would allow us to transcend scales and chord progressions and make music that spoke to generations. We armed ourselves with attentiveness, our styluses at the ready.
      He turned back and looked down at the piano through his glasses like he was seeing the black and white keys for the first time.
      “That…” he said, and then paused, and then started up again, “…was the minor blues.”
      We furiously wrote down in our notes: “minor blues.”
      We looked up again, ready.
      He exhaled, let his head bob down a little, put his hands back on the keys, turned a little back towards us, peered over his glasses again, and continued.
      “…which is like the major blues…”
      He paused again and looked around, as if thinking about how to say it right.
      We scribbled down: “like the major blues”
      We waited. This was going to be it. The minor blues were like major blues…
      “…but minor.”
      We etched his words into our notebooks: “Minor blues: like the major blues, but minor!”
      He turned back to Fred as if to check if the answer was satisfactory. A little perplexed, we followed his gaze to see how—if—our teacher would respond. Our rudimentary knowledge of scales and progressions couldn’t yet absorb what Flanagan had meant, that modes meant moods, that major and minor keys translated into feelings and states of mind. Or even if we did understand it, we certainly couldn’t yet turn that into practice.
      Fred, on the other hand, understood quite well. He smiled, sat down at the second piano in the room, and started up a duet.