God knows when it’s best for me to sing

GRAMMY Award winner Herbie Hancock recalled that when he was a member of the Miles Davis Quintet:

“Right in the middle of Miles’s solo, I played the wrong chord and it sounded like a big mistake.”

Davis, however, took that moment in his musical stride. After a slight pause, he continued, improvising on the chord that the anxious Hancock had just played.

“He didn’t hear it as a mistake and felt that it was his responsibility to find something that fit,” Hancock said.

I was once disregarded as a potential chorister. It could have been because of the multiple off-key notes that I was able to deploy with a certain ease in my vocal range.

The combined confirmation classes of St Nicholas and St Andrew Anglican congregations had gathered for a service at St Nicholas.

We figured that we were being auditioned for the choir. The wife of the priest would walk along the aisle as we sang a hymn.

I must say that she had selected this particular hymn soema soe uitie bloute uit.

She would pause ever so often, at the end of a row of pews, listen a bit more and invite the person whose voice she’d approved to join the other chosen ones.

They stood in front of the altar, gathered like preening cats who knew what real fresh cream tasted like.

She walked past my row without even a pause. She might even have shuddered a bit when she neared where I stood first in my pew. But this could just be the reawakened bitterness prejudicing my memory of that dark day.

I must also add that this hymn was not sung at St Andrew’s, Eureka Estate. At our end of Elsies, we could skut toe Vrou van Samaria and rock through action-choruses with corresponding movements, such as forming the shape of a pregnant woman when singing the chorus, “It’s loves that makes the world go ‘round”.

I believe a more gifted choirmaster would have discerned my potential and coached me in the right direction.

However, such is life’s ironies; one of the fellows chosen on that day when my potential was ignored is Jonathan Langenhoven, the cathedral choirmaster.

On occasion when chanting the mass on a Sunday I might soar into a note, which to the untrained ear might just sound a trebling, tad too high.

But as a jazz devotee, I know the note you hit is the one you needed, and subconsciously wanted to touch on, a view underscored by Miles Davis’s affirmation:

“It’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note – it’s the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.”

And Langenhoven understands this. As I initiate the “The Lord be with you” of the Sursum Corda of the Eucharistic Prayer, my musical maestro homeboy does the Davesian business.

The brother, retired traffic cop that he is, in anticipatory stance with head slightly bowed, turns in the direction of my voice.

He listens with subliminal intensity with an ear that can distinguish the distance of a gunshot – as he stands in his backyard garden in Elsies River – as to whether it is coming from the Clinic on Halt Road or further up on Balvenie Avenue.

He has even on one cold, Saturday night at about 11pm been able to hear shots fired from the distance of the Tickey-stage end of Connaught Road (almost five kilometres in an easterly direction).

It is all a matter of timing and commitment: If I affect a Smokey Robinson falsetto as in his Baby Come Close, or head in a contra direction of Marvin Gaye’s Let Get It On, Mr Lang is there, like Jesus, calming the stormy seas of the moment and gifting the tenors and sopranos of the choir with the perfect-pitched, murmured interpretation of my offering.

And in that moment, I am healed of the neglect of my choir-aspiring past.

God always knows best, and when it is our time to sing and with whom.