Lester Simon at Work

by Dr Lester Simon.

Can I dance with you tonight? Can I hold you in my arms again without disquieting the neighbours? I cut, trimmed and filed my nails as low as they can go, to gently run the tips of my fingers and the hairs of my bow over the strands of your Pirastro Tonica strings. My feet are awash with the dearth of tiredness. My hands are warm, clean, and dry without lotion, armed with the right motions to make you open up to me again and sing aloud a pensive, lonesome song of six senses with pockets full of wry.

I am in Jamaica. This time I have my violin with me. More than 55 years ago, I came here with a tenor saxophone to study medicine. This time I am going to an apprentice luthier to remount the fallen sound post of my 103-year-old Italian Cremona violin. During this delicate operation, I hear of an Antiguan with the last name of Simon who was the dear friend of the family of the apprentice and who had come to Jamaica as a child and became a Jamaican Rhodes scholar. Due to that possible relation connection, but more so because of his usual generosity and our musing on music and music schools in Jamaica, I was not charged a cent for the repositioning of my violin sound post. Give thanks.

Later that evening, with my violin nestled in my hands and once again ready to sing and dance with me, another musician sends me a note “accusing” me of converting him and other musicians into Mixolydian men. I quickly remind him that the blame should not be leveled against me but rather at the truly guilty one, the late Antiguan musician, the eclectic Roland Prince.

The studies and practices of medicine and music have many parallels. We should change the definition that says parallel lines will never meet. Somewhere beyond the horizon in another spatial, geometrical universe, they not only meet, they also send common, useful signals back to us. The common link is very simple and universal. How to find a master key that opens all the doors, or as many doors of life as possible. The universal holy grail. The simple, common sense hiding inside complexities. The unifying theory and practice of everything.

I have met many musicians and doctors in my life. The good ones show. The better ones teach. The best ones draw out the latent talent inside. In doing so, both of you can become vulnerable. You take in what the teacher is imparting, but you must also learn about the elements of the teacher and of yourself that should be sequestered, since both the student and the teacher are challenged and exposed.

Without venturing into the musical and historical complexities of the word, Mixolydian, suffice it to say it describes a set, scale or mode of musical notes that has an intrinsic degree of tension that demands resolution. It can be made even more complex by altering it to make it more dissonant before arriving at its release. It is one of the many gifts Roland Prince left with us. Sometimes a musician can be overwhelmed by the various contrasting possibilities when improvising. He taught us that one way through the maze of improvised jazz music was to use the Mixolydian scale in its native or altered form and apply it in the context of tension and release, the cornerstone of music. Some of his students extended his Mixolydian principle to a philosophical approach to life.

Living in Antigua can be a very difficult, lonesome undertaking. The lonesomeness has little, if anything, to do with friendlessness. We have our friends, some close and some not so close. That is normal. But in this psychologically parched land that goodness sometimes forgets, there is this poisonous, claustrophobic air of communal isolation, separation, and stark division. It is not even as awful as a bad football match in which your team loses; you curse and quarrel, but eventually you accept the loss, shake hands and have a drink with your opponent. No. This is many times worse. Here lies a dreadful communal ether that sometimes stinks to high heaven and descends to the very pit of hell.

We have to find a way to be more human, more organic, more humane. We have to walk away from both ends of extremism and find a middle, common ground. Accept the fact that some of us will never change and see and use the difference between us as an essential basis for variety and diversity, rather than possess a morbid fear or dislike for the other with the vulgar need to convert or vilify others. Surely, evil stalks this land day by day and does not sleep with the moon at night, but there are good ancient and modern ways to fight evil. Do your job as best as you can, and as well as your resources allow.

The Mixolydian man seeks resolution of conflict. He is not necessarily loud and boastful. Any fine musician or ardent music lover will tell you that while the lead singer and lead instrument are wailing and carrying on and seemingly getting all the praise and applause, it is the harmony, the second fiddle, the viola, the double second steel pan, cello and bass that enrich the music, adding matter, stuff, fiber, body and enrichment to the music. We see this in personal and social relationships in which even when you know you are right, seeking and finding peace is more important than quarreling and fighting with the lead. This is not to say that you abandon your position. No. You simply create the setting, the atmosphere, the mood in which the light of truth can shine more brightly instead of wrangling just to exhale and bite off the sound of those looking many terabytes of sound.

Wherever you are Roland Prince, whichever molecular parts of your body and soul have infused themselves into reincarnated life forms, we give thanks to you for the lessons you taught us, including the ones about you and the fallible aspects of your life that managed to escape and run free, if only to remind us that you were human. We saw how, like Icarus, you sometimes flew too close to the sun, but we give thanks that Daedalus cushioned your fall back to earth. And hence the ultimate lesson from the Mixolydian man is that, with a useful tool to resolve inner and outer conflict, to walk between tension and release, you allowed the conflict within your soul to be exposed to us, lest we think the master and the master key were perfect.

If only we could become as emotionally naked as you, the Mixolydian man, and accept our imperfections. Continue to rest in peace, my dear maestro.

This article was originally published by Antigua News Room. Read the original article here: A Mixolydian Man.