"And if you please....": the late Joey DeFrancesco and a dream

Then come kiss me sweet and twenty: Youth's a stuff will not endure. --Wm. Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

I missed seeing Joey DeFrancesco by a month or so. His early and unfortunate passing left many people in mourning, not to mention, I am sure, his family. Before he passed, I had obtained his last album as leader, More Music, and it turned me on to jazz organ. The multi-instrumentalist thrilled me with his trumpeting and saxophone-ing. Previous to my hearing More Music, I said to a close family member that I didn’t understand why anyone would want to listen to vibes or jazz organ. The late, great Joey D taught me how to hear the jazz organ greats, late and current: Barbara Dennerlein, Jimmy Smith, Jimmy McGriff, Brother Jack McDuff, and others, not to mention the great vibes players such as Bobby Huthcherson, Dr. Lonnie Smith, Milt “Bags” Jackson, and Gary Burton.

I awoke this morning from a dream of an eternal present, where past and present are the same, in some way, with a friend from many years ago appearing as an essence of a sort—as one way to put it. Like the passing of Joey, the passing of youth, remarked upon by Shakespeare in the quotation in the subtitle, is part of the temporality of human existence. Even the past exists as an absence. The future exists as a projected possibility. And possible paths from past to present and future exist as absences, and often involve regret. That is to lead into saying I regret the early passing of some jazz greats, including Joey D, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Bill Evans, and others I do not even know of.

As illustrated by the array of instruments in the photo below, on the inside of the gatefold album *missing the word at the moment—the thing the LP is kept inside, the “case” :-% *, Joey was—even musically—many things. Organist, saxophonist, trumpeter, keyboardist, and probably other instrumentalist roles that are not indicated in the photo. The people in our lives are many things. And they are, furthermore, different things to different people—and they are not, to be clearer, things at all, except when speaking biologically of their bodies. And one might argue that we extend to and beyond our bodies, as some have, such as David Chalmers with his extended mind thesis.

The passing of times and of people—and of peoples—is both tragic and a matter of course. The closing off of possibilities, with the opening of others, allows for our projects to continue, to fail, to undergo changes into different projects than what they began as. The appearance of past and present in a phantasmagorical dream, meaning what you will have it mean, of figures from our lives, can be haunting. This morning I was haunted by a dream. Gradually, I allow it to fade. Dreams are the fading of memory, the closing off of past experience, and the opening of possibilities and of the impossible, as realizable in a dream. They are more than this, too. The people in my life, and the jazz musicians whose music I’ve come to enjoy and even treasure, are more than I will know, more than I can know.