Jazz on the road less traveled

The northern New England jazz scene is eerily, icily quiet, but Adric Rosen has spent the past two and a half years trying to liven it up.  It’s been a long ride for him, sometimes beautiful but often tedious.  Whenever I have visited, I’ve heard something in his voice that hinted at a growing desperation, but somehow he’s managed without giving into despair and even, in his way, flourishing.  He’s found a way to find joy in the wilderness that, for a while, I hadn’t really thought possible, and he did it living a life that is far removed from the ones that have been familiar to me at Georgetown.
We went to high school together in the middle of the woods in central New Hampshire.  After we graduated, as more and more of our friends scattered off to school, jobs, internships, and summer conferences, he stuck around, pursuing a career built on his sax and flute.  When he left college after a tumultuous first year, we all wondered what would become of him.
He has always been a bit of an eccentric, and he doesn’t thrive within the restrictions of institutionalized learning.  His creed is: music is vibration; everything vibrates; everything is music.  Some said, if anyone can pull off a bohemian, anti-establishment lifestyle, he can.  Others tried to persuade him to come up with a back-up plan.  We argued: everything is vibration; accounting is vibration; accounting is music.  Take up accounting.
We were only half-joking.  After all, central New Hampshire can be an awkward place for an aspiring jazz musician to work.  It has been done—we’ve had our own array of local legends.  Adric had the talent and, certainly, the devotion. We didn’t know if that would be enough.
Adric started off searching for bands that needed horn players.  Ads would show up in the paper, or clerks at local music stores would know a guy.  Sometimes those leads would pay off.  But Adric found himself haunted by a hostile pattern: every time he joined a band, they’d split up.
It would begin with a bang, Adric leaping in head first, fully committed to the group, devoting all of his time to publicity and rehearsals.  “This is the band I’m going to make it with,” he’d think.  Then it would start to unravel as personalities clashed or enthusiasm waned, until the sad news came that the members were going their separate ways.  A new band would show up, and once more they would set off hurtling through initial joy toward slow decline and ultimate collapse.  It was a lot like a failed love affair.
So Adric tried something new: six nights a week he would set out from home in search of a gig. That’s a pretty impressive feat. Venues in New Hampshire and Maine are few and far between, and most of them might have music one night a week at most. Sometimes Adric would have to drive three hours just to find a concert. He’d arrive at the show with his saxophone and flute in tow, have a drink, get to know the bartenders, the band, and the clientele, and see if anyone would let him play along.
Results varied.  Artists who had been playing the scene for decades often had little time for a kid just looking for a break.  Other saxophonists could be particularly territorial.  Those who might let Adric step onto the stage quickly lost patience if he tried to play, not as a deferent student, but as an equal.  But some performers were more welcoming, and through the people Adric met, he started picking up a gig here, a show there.  After a while, he got a regular spot playing with a singer and guitarist named Rose at a bar in Manchester.
He and Rose were good—very good—and you could tell they enjoyed playing with each other. They even developed a fan base, a group of regulars who got to know them pretty well. But they played from five to eight; few people frequent bars at that time, and fewer still are going to care how well the saxophonist plays. They are just happy to hear some music.
That’s a fairly low criterion for judgment, and for Adric, it drained the show of some of its excitement. It was impossible to miss the frustration that constantly edged into his voice, but he never slowed down. Partly, this was because he loved what he was doing, even when it was at its most tedious; partly, because although the northern New England jazz scene is deathly quiet, when Adric hammered away at it, he occasionally drew a spark.
There were times when those sparks were all he had to go on.  That’s probably true for most of us; disenchantment and alienation, anxiety and desolation might seem like imperfections, but they are probably a standard of human life.  Perhaps there are times when our lives are more like Seattle grunge or New Orleans jazz, but there are certainly moments when it feels a lot more like blues in New Hampshire.  But even there, you can find sparks.  It won’t be much, but for a while, it might be enough.  You just have to be willing to do the driving.