To keep myself warm as the cold evenings close in, I often think back to a hot night in Toronto when the music of a great jazzman helped to thaw a relationship that had been frozen for far too long.
"Jazz," to quote Fats Waller, "is like an orgasm - unless you've had one, you will never know what it is." Life, as we all know - whoever we are, no matter what we do - is full of jazz, the up-beat and the downbeat, virtuoso moments and sometimes a stunning solo.
I was approximately 21 years of age that June in Toronto in 1968. I had spent the previous winter and spring in the environs of Reykjavik, Iceland. The work had been tough on the trawler, which was a small cod boat working out of Grindavik, to the south of Iceland's capital. Hard too was the labour in the local fish factory. But work on the trawler and in the fish factory enabled me to finance a flight to New York, from where I hitch-hiked, via Detroit, to see my long-lost eldest brother, Leo, in Toronto, Canada.
Family dissent
But all the baggage of age and generation had built up between us in the years since we last met. Our relationship, jaundiced by family dissent in the mother-house at home in Ireland, was taking a nose-dive towards the point of no return. There seemed no hope of a reprieve. We needed a thaw in the ice, some easing of our entrenched points of view.
One hot summer night in downtown Toronto, we went to see Louis Armstrong and the All Stars playing at the Ambassador Club. The musicians warmed up and flexed their musical muscles on stage, with the Filipino drummer in good form, tapping his skins adeptly, beating out rhythms from the heart and soul.
A short time into the musical fray, "Satchmo" appeared centre-stage, with his cherubic smile and his flashing white teeth. He came across as a Mandarin of geniality, a physician of human ills and a healer of the spirit of despondency.
Basin Street and Bourbon Street in New Orleans was the cradle, as far as I knew, of Satchmo's early jazz experience and of the black culture of the Deep South. A little more than a year before that evening in Toronto, I had tasted some of the bittersweet justice of a jailhouse in Orleans, Mississippi, complete with its strict code of segregation. The black woman I had heard calling out for her baby from her nearby cell in the middle of the night - what had she been trying to articulate? I suspected Satchmo's music provided some of the answer.
Melting snow
As the band played on, the ice between my brother and me was melting like Icelandic snow in springtime. The atmosphere was transformed into one of ease and new hope. I said to my brother that this was the universal music of the hurt and dispossessed. He smiled and his attention drifted back to the music.
As the night went on the band's tempo increased and Satchmo blew out his magical notes of harmony through blues and jazz. There was a deep feeling that this was no ordinary experience we were privileged to experience.
His large white handkerchief appeared as the trumpet lay at its ease on one side of Satchmo's bulky frame. His shining coal-black was lathered in perspiration after the great work of once again giving and giving to his audience, no matter who they were, black or white, Jew or Gentile, happy or unhappy.
Autograph
After the musicians had left the stage, I discreetly manoeuvred myself to the side of the stage to try to negotiate an autograph. I was in luck. The tall, formidable figure of a security guard welcomed me at the star's dressing-room door. On entering the inner sanctum, I came face to face with Satchmo, who was seated behind a table. He was courteous and friendly as he asked to whom I wanted the autograph addressed. "For my nephew, Stephen," I said.
"Is that with a ph or a v," Satchmo said.
"Ph," I replied.
For a few precious moments I was alone with the black Pope of jazz and art. I offered my thanks and then ventured: "When are you coming to visit Dublin, Ireland, Mr Armstrong?" The deep bass voice replied warmly: "Boy, I played Dublin in February."
I will always remember that warm summer night in Toronto when the barriers between my brother and I came down through the good grace of a great man's magic.