“Rain is coming.”
What’s that you say?
Just another sorta darn decent quick-opener. That’s what folk journalists call it.
Something to get it started. A convo popper if you will.
Try it sometime. I did, with excellent results just this morning outside a Peet’s in Santa Monica.
A gentlemen sat down and I said, looking at the sky: “Rain’s comin’.”
You could smell it. (Not the conversation, the rain.)
But indeed this did lead to a lovely conversation with this fellow. A jazz musician just back from Japan, trying to recover he said because he was so jet-lagged from a 14-hour flight.
“How long were you in Japan?” I ventured. Two months, he told me, adding how awful it was trying to get his bass clarinet in the overhead bin of the airplane due to the protestations of the host aboard Thai Air who wanted him to check it, but of course he made it fit.
“Never fly Thai,” he said.
Then he pulled out his phone and showed me two wonderful spots in Thailand where warm springs run not far from a hideaway cabin.
“I didn’t play any music there,” he said. “I just sat and wrote music.”
In downtown Osaka he lived with his wife in a hotel while he played. How wonderful the Japanese people were to him. But although they loved jazz in Tokyo, “in Osaka, I don’t know what kind of music that was.”
With the coming rain came the end of our conversation. He bowed a farewell, told me about some music he cut with jazz legend Kenny Barron and where to find it on YouTube.
Conversations everywhere!
