Everything had turned inside out. The events that preceded our departure from Amsterdam had left me having no idea how we were going to get back to L.A., and no idea of what would happen once we were in Lisbon. Who would greet us from the jazz festival, which was located in Cascais, a small fishing town up the coast from Lisbon. Would we still play? Would we just get on another plane, and go home? I felt weightless. A feeling like I was walking through a Cassavettes movie that he had never made. I thought to myself “just keep walking… things will work out in some strange way… think of it as a Kafka short story…”
Coming off of the plane I saw a short gentleman with a mustache who was scanning up and down the line of exiting passengers. He came up to me and in somewhat halting English, asked me “and Freddie?……. where is Freddie?” I had to inform him that Freddie had been pulled off of the plane in Amsterdam, and that we weren’t sure when to expect his arrival. “When is he coming?” he inquired, and I had to give him the disappointing answer that I really didn’t know, and that our road manager Chase had stayed behind with him. He nodded, his eyes darted back and forth quickly, and I thought that I detected a few drops of sweat on his forehead. With incredible composure under the circumstances, he took us over to baggage claim, where we gathered our bags and instruments. As our equipment was loaded into a white van, I gradually grasped that the slight man who had met us was actually Paulo, the promoter of the festival.
We wended our way up the coast from Lisbon, arriving at a lovely hotel just a few blocks up from the beach, where there were fishing boats parked, and I could see other fishermen coming in, dragging their boats in from the day’s work at sunset. As we entered the lobby the promoter stepped over to a phone while we waited to finish checking in. After about ten minutes Paulo came up to us and informed us that he had spoken to Chase, who had informed him that Freddie would not be arriving on the next flight. “I spoke to your Chase….Freddie had breakdown,…. Chase put him on next plane back to Los Angeles.”
We all wondered what exactly would be the upshot of this unexpected news, each of us grabbing our suitcase and making our way towards our room. Paulo told me that he would let us know how things would be dealt with once Chase arrived on the next flight.
After setting my bag down in the lovely but spartan room I wandered down to the beach. I had never seen a more quaint and beautiful fishing village. I sat down on a short wall in front of the sandy area where small waves hit the sand. I’m not sure how long I sat there for, looking at the water lapping up onto the sand. I slowly made my way back up the hill to the hotel. Walking into the lobby, Paulo was sitting in an old upholstered chair in the somewhat baroque lobby, then stood up and told me that there would be a dinner at a small restaurant later that evening for us, and that he would be back to pick us up.
The restaurant that had been organized for our dinner was a charming and small Italian place. Walking through the restaurant, we walked over to a long table at which there were a group of people associated with the festival as well as a number of people who apparently were friends of Paulo’s, jazz fans who lived in Lisbon, including an older expatriate couple from London who now lived in Cascais. Paulo was incredibly gracious, especially considering the circumstances. We ate well, and drank bottle after bottle of what I think was Portuguese wine. There were many stories, and Paulo revealed what his plan was for the concert the next day.
As we crossed into the part of the night where people begin to repeat themselves, the expatriate English couple landed on an invitation to me to spend the night at their house. “Come to our house…. you can sleep!” became their repeated mantra. After the fourth time that they repeated this, I began to see that I was dealing with a variation on some sort of “Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf” theme; a couple who had retired and escaped to a fantasy of a Portuguese paradise, only to become tired of each other, and now, after drinking themselves into an anesthesized state, were seeking some kind of sexual adventure with a young jazz musician. I managed to slip away from the table, and out of the restaurant, into the warm Portuguese night, and walked back to the hotel thinking to myself “George and Martha…. sad, sad, sad….”
The next day was the last day of the festival, and as time went by, and other artists did their sets, a feeling of impending disaster began to come over me. It was a frequent modus operandi for the band to do 2 or 3 songs without Freddie as a warm-up, then for him to join us. The plan that Paulo had come up with was that we would do our warm-up songs, he would make an announcement, then Lee Konitz, who had already played his set, would join us.
As we made our way through the second of our three songs with the rhythm section featured, I gradually felt more and more of an intense sense of nervous agitation. Upon finishing the third song, Paulo approached the microphone to speak. It was late in the day, about 7:30, and the crowd by this time was thoroughly sloshed with cheap beer, but still excited about being able to see Freddie Hubbard play at a Portuguese jazz festival in a small coastal town. The hall in which we were playing was quite large; in fact I suspect that it’s normal use might have been to sell livestock. As Paulo began to address the crowd, a low and guttural murmur began to rise up from the crowded floor. With my minimal ability to understand Portuguese, I could just make out that he was telling the crowd that Freddie had become ill, and was not going to be able to play, but that Lee Konitz was going to play a set with us instead. The low murmur gradually got louder and louder, eventually reaching a crescendo, as beer cans began to fly toward the stage and over us on the stage. At the same time as being worried that I would be knocked out
by a beer can, I was palpably excited, as I have always been a big fan of Lee Konitz, and playing some standards with him was actually a high point of sorts for me. Feeling myself slip into deep concentration on what Lee was playing; the elegant perfection of structure that has always characterized his playing, I simultaneously somehow found myself in some way viewing the whole scene from above the band and crowd in my mind. A rowdy and drunk audience that felt that they had been cheated, and at the same time one of the true greats of jazz, weaving gorgeous and somehow spontaneously perfect solos over and array of jazz standards. I was playing and listening, thinking about the beauty of perfectly structured bebop, and at the same time somehow flying through a surreal Fellini-esque dreamscape. We finished our set with Lee, retreating quickly to the backstage area, as the crowd gradually exited the hall; drunk, sweaty, still somewhat angry, but somehow also satiated and hypnotized by the subtle beauty and perfection of Lee’s playing.