All through our short visit to New York I was finding pennies on the street, which has not been happening much around these parts of late, raising the question—if the finding of pennies is indeed, as I have all my life believed, cliché be damned, a luck signifier—whether one’s small scale prospects might not shift depending on physical location. Luck being a quicksilver modification of the already fickle play of circumstance, however, there is no way of telling. But my sense is that different locales represent adjustments of the playing field—each has its own densely unique play of forces-- and the way you interact with those forces, at even the humblest levels, determines to some subtle, but vital, degree the disposition of the day. Living in a place means accepting those local laws—how things happen, how people act in given situations--and internalizing them to the point where we are not aware that they’re not universals. To travel, then, is to remember. Which I did, though it took finding pennies in unlikely places to jostle me, make me feel that the play of things around me was, however slightly, different from how it is here, at home. This is not to say that all is unvarying here—of course certain days are strongly marked one way, and another—but in a new place the change is felt as over and above. Does it seem a stretch now to shift to the club, La Lanterna, where we ended up our first night in the city? The thread, so it seems as I write, is jazz, what was being played with such focused intensity just a few feet away. The music, maybe more than anything else around, and more than any other kind of music would have, was drawing directly on the time and the place, the immediacy, drawing on it and taking its impression, and at the same time giving it amplification, form. Of course the tune is the tune, its structure the same whether it is being played by these same instruments—guitar, bass, drums—in Buenos Aires, or in a club on McDougal Street. But that structure, that sameness, is in a sense just a frame around the defining activity, which is the impulsive making of unique music from the available premises. On the premises, as it were. The specific excitement of jazz—and for me the inducement to sit as close to the musicians as possible—is in that moment’s making. How it comes about, how a mood gets created, how that mood then passes as a signal between the players, influencing each of their specific choices, whether to inflect a note this way or that, extend a phrasing, echo a certain note, or counter it with another, whether to come down hard on a string, to pull toward or away from the melody. I am not a musician, not savvy in jazz, so I am guessing based on what I see; but I do believe that if these three could verbalize the specifics of what they are doing, as they are doing it, in the middle of the thing, if the drummer, say, could offer the voice-over explanation to make clear why he changed pattern with his brushes just then, or tapped the rim with his stick like that, or hushed his high-hat at the very moment the guitarist eased up, much would be revealed, not just about how music builds outward from the hyper-intense listening and body-sensing of all involved, but also about how these artists—and their bretheren—pay attention. This, just possibly, is where music and that loosely construed notion of luck, luck as somehow pegged to shifts in the direction and momentum of any moment’s energies, come together. The best music feels like an enactment of, or, better, a creation, of luck. It draws on what is around in a thousand ways, and then it confers shape, expressive integrity: it intercedes, calls back to the moment unfolding, gives to those in vicinity the gift of the moment’s elements transformed. Which is why I like to get as close as possible—to not just hear, but also through my other senses take this action in, possess it. So many nights, over the years, I would walk out after a night of music and feel myself at least for the moment changed, and always I thought it was just the pleasure of the melody and the impact of seeing a thing done well. But I’ve been occupied in the last while with the odd notion that artistic making is—in just the way I have suggested—an intervention; that it has the potential, at times, to influentially alter the composition of a moment, effect a change. In the context I’ve taken here, jazz improvisation, the transformation has a perceptible, if limited, public effect—the redirecting of energies in the listeners. But I’ve also wondered if there is not a more immediate personal effect, one I can relate to writing. At my very best moments—there have not been that many--it has seemed so. I have come to the desk in one state, one relation to everything that is around me, and I have worked and felt something start to take me over. Not in the sense of possession—nothing occult—but as a distinct increase. And I have also felt, stepping away later, that more happened in that time than just an ordering of thoughts and impressions. It’s as if I had in that period, that hour or two, moved myself to a different position--changed floors, as it were—thrown my influence more directly into the mix, and that because of that, at least for a short time, all that happens to me happens a bit differently than it would have otherwise. Could I be any more obscure? I can’t begin to say how this happens, and I certainly can’t say why, but it feels like there has been a surprise scatter of luck in my life.