Paul and I shook ourselves out the door before dawn this morning to go to this year’s solstice concert — now in its 33rd year — and on the way over I was telling him about attending this same concert four years ago, when nothing went as planned. As I reel from the news that my fractured foot has actually gotten worse, not better ( I can’t … even ...), it seemed worth sharing the piece I wrote in 2019 again. Happy solstice one and all. Let’s keep showing up for each other.
I've been going to Michael Zerang & Hamid Drake's 6 am winter solstice concerts for years -- not regularly, but enough so that I know the drill. (For those who don't: Michael and Hamid are Chicago-based percussionists in the jazz and experimental music world -- though they seem to spend at least half their time on tour in Europe. Both are master musicians, expert improvisers adept at conjuring music from a vast array of hand drums, shakers, gongs, and whatnot.) A beloved tradition in bohemian Chicago now in its 29th year, the solstice concerts usually begin in darkness and quiet, a host of people meditating sleepily in a room, seated in chairs and on the floor. The musicians set up in the center of the room, their playing space delimited by a circle of small candles. The concerts last usually an hour, and in my memory of concerts past often start out gentle -- a tap of the drum, a low chant perhaps -- and then build over the hour from minimalism to a crescendo of percussion as the sun rises outside and the room wakes to greet the day and the new season. It's great! It's hard to get up that early, but once I do, I'm always glad to have made the effort.
This year, I dragged myself out of bed at 5:25 in the morning after another of the sleepless nights that have become my norm of late and stumbling, coffee in hand but not nearly enough, went to go pick up a friend. We rushed up Western Avenue, worried we were going to be late, but when we pulled up at Links Hall at 5:59, our wooly brains were confounded by the sight of 100 or so people, including the artists, standing on the sidewalk outside, waiting for someone to come unlock the theater. Oops! My friend had told me in the car that she had dreamed that night that she overslept and missed my texts and missed the concert. Ha! Was it possible, she said as we huddled in the cold, that she had dreamed the box office person's dream by accident?
It took 45 minutes for, first, someone to arrive with a key and then for the musicians and helpers to get everything set up. Rather than meditative silence the audience was chatty and hopped up on coffee by the time it all started, and the sun was already coming up. It was all just ... wrong. And yet.
When the set started the music came out of the gate swinging and didn't stop. I'm no music critic, but I heard this urgent hour of percussion as a call to action and attention, a refusal to stay quiet, a denial of complacency. Don't take anything for granted, the drums said to me -- it could all get turned on its head in a hot second and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.
Usually after these concerts Michael and Hamid talk a bit and this day was no different, though by the time it ended the sun was streaming bright through the glass brick window. Hamid told a long story about a recent tour that took the two of them to Hungary that involved a friend there making a knife for Michael that had some of his hair embedded in the handle, and then using that knife to cut some of Hamid's hair in the promise that next year he would be gifted a knife as well (it was complicated!). But the point was to remind us to actively appreciate and love our friends. Try even more, this year, he said, to live consciously and compassionately and to cherish and fight to protect all that is worth protecting.
The whole morning was a good, embodied reminder that more often than not nothing ever goes as planned. That life is messy and disorienting, that people may surprise and fail us, that things may just be eternally wrong, but we're still all better off being in it together. We're still better off showing up even it it's a pain to get out of bed. It was the best solstice concert ever.
PS: The image at the top is of the candelabra in the Hallgrimskirka in Reykjavik, which I visited in January 2018. I wrote a bit about it then here, and about the poem that accompanies those candles. "Light the light!" it urges and, well, I've always liked the winter rituals of light -- they both recognize darkness as part of the cycle but also honor the importance of illumination, and the active role we as humans have to take in making it. Paul is not generally a fan of Christmas, or Christmas trees, but last week he pulled some twinkly lights out of the attic and we decorated one of our fig trees, a very much appreciated gesture toward my own more pro-Christmas tendencies. It's been dark at times this year; making the effort to bring a little glow into the house seemed like a good idea, and it was.
I am sure I remember reading this the first time, and it is a wonderful piece, boosts the old spirit a little-- reminding of the balm that fluidity is and chaos met with companionship can be. Happy solstice, and hope healing beams hit your foot! and the world.