Foreword: Let It Get into You

Summary

When I left New York City for Morocco in 1982, my flute teacher gave me his most recent cassette as a parting gift. He took out the cardboard insert, imprinted with a picture of him playing his golden Muramatsu on one side and a list of compositions on the other, and wrote “Let it Get into You” across the cover. It was good advice for a fledgling performer, off to explore North Africa for the first time.

My teacher's playing had already gotten into me, of course. He combined the pure blue-glass tones of a classical musician with the fluent looseness of someone not bound by genre. He played Bach as well as he played Brazilian samba, and his own compositions were haunting and hip. He was also an accomplished and exhibited visual artist, his paintings full of bold color and the abstract patterns of Kente cloth. They lined the walls of his studio, where I went for my lessons, a loft in the Village, not far from the one where Barry Harris gave his weekly classes on jazz improvisation. I attended those too, thanks to my teacher's introduction.

But my teacher, male, African American and twenty years older than me, also captivated me in other ways. It happened one day when I was practicing my pentatonic scales for him.

“Who are you?” he asked, breaking the spell of my playing and casting another. Not long after, we climbed the stairs to his loftbed to find out.

There was no coercion. He was attractive and I was a lusty young woman in awe of his talent. There was a seduction, however. Had I chosen this? My agency in this situation is hard to pin down. Bodies are connected, and desires move through them in ways not always subject to conscious decision. Like the intertwining of sound and environment, so yearning reshapes flesh in its image.

When my teacher had taught me everything he could about the flute, he suggested I study with his teacher, a professor at Brooklyn College. The following year I had a scholarship there to do my second BA, this time not in literature, but in flute performance.

Who was instrumentalizing whom? I had sought him out, after all, in a club on Bleecker Street.