2024-- Finally Snagging the Brass Ring on the Carousel Ride

It happened the way one would expect it to happen in a movie. I'm a middle-aged man with a particular set of skills, renowned in certain corners but technically on the outs, when I got a call out of the blue about a life-changing opportunity where I'd uproot my life for a shot at the brass ring, even if it has its own complications. Of course, if this were a movie, the call would have been a guy flying in on a helicopter and landing in the park across the street from my previous home in San Antonio, with my boss walking up my long driveway, taking off his sunglasses, hair tousled in the wind, and starting with "You're a hard man to find", but a phone call out of the blue also sufficed.

Last year around this time, I was stuck in a rut. I had gotten the job I thought I wanted managing the adorable hot spring bath house resort/craft beer & wine bar on the Southside of San Antonio, Texas, that my landlord spent years dreaming into reality. People found it charming and it found some sort of footing in the hospitality scene of a city built on the hospitality industry. On the outside, things seemed to be working, even when they didn't, and they didn't a lot. However, my years of adopting the communications ethos & strategy of telling the best version of the truth, an ethos I called "Come to Splashtown, now with shorter lines" based on the creative commercials I grew up on as a child fighting swaying tides and corporate disruption, projected the message all the folks over and under my head wanted the majority of the time, much to the chagrin of my mental health. What I last year called a year "whittled down to one story" in which I was figuratively looking after my "landlord's pet" had sapped me of my vitality; it drained me of my joy. I felt my temperament getting shorter with those around me, I felt my nervous ticks growing in intensity. My stammering expanded to stuttering and occasional panic attacks. I lost the ability to tend to an ever shifting group of people who were dissatisfied to some degree with the work I was able to provide. 

All the while, I still felt I had everything else in San Antonio how I wanted it. My living arrangement was obscenely affordable, especially for the space I had. My friends were varied, interesting, and supportive with schedules I had memorized to maximize my constant state of aroundness. My partner was brilliant and kind and talented beyond belief and one of the best humans on the face of this earth. My best friend was a nucleus and hub and a fount of interesting Whats to solve with my always busy mind and desire to figure out How to pull them all off (that bathhouse included). I didn't want to leave San Antonio, but San Antonio is a tourism town and I've been working long enough to know that every job I've had started because I was positioned in front of someone getting my foot in the door. I had seen a lot of that city and been through a lot of doors, but I couldn't see any other jobs for me there with my particular set of skills. I was always able to cobble together an interesting life spinning a multitude of plates, but I was getting closer and closer to 40 and there was no clear way I was going to make a living there. I had a job and a salary as a manager of an adorable resort in the seventh largest city in Usonia making $40,000 a year before taxes with no health benefits. This was my ceiling in San Antonio. I could see no way further than this.

In January of last year after something at the bathhouse depressed me, probably something minor that I can't even remember anymore, to the point that I understood how my father felt in the weeks before he died a year and a half earlier. He had gone on a trip with my mother and, despite his health not being the best with his kidney dialysis, he flew on the plane and said he was too tired of the process of wearing a face mask while in transit. He caught COVID on that trip, weakening him to the point that he suffered a stroke which started his precipitous fall in health until he passed. At some point, he saw his life as subsistence or mere maintenance. That cold January night this year, I understood him. I could only see a future for myself of tending to people who would forever be somehow unhappy. I lost that vision I try to keep where everyday is some interesting adventure where anything could happen and the surprise of it all is really cool. I lost interest in the mystery. I knew something was up and I had to get out.

I've always said that if I were to leave San Antonio, wherever I would go, I would have to find my way onto the radio again. Even if it weren't a job, I would still have to be on the air. I would volunteer just like I had for the last fifteen years and find some way to stay connected to the jazz world that took me on as an authoritative voice by mere inertia for the last decade and a half. I had already sharply curtailed my presence on the digital scene since 2020 and the old blog's implosion (though it didn't actually die-- much of its content is still live, and its stalwart owner even gave the site a new facelift a few months ago). My reputation was still intact and I was still freelancing for DownBeat Magazine and submitting year-end ballots with jazz journalists as I always had. I was published in a book edited by an honoree of the National Endowment of the Arts all about the genre's bereftness of Black voices. I was preparing to host my tenth year of my free day party of jazz acts (unofficially) in the middle of the largest music festival on Earth. I didn't know how it would all pan out, but I'd forge a path forward somehow if I were to leave and after all this time working on so many things, I had an impressive and varied enough resume for me to search for something new, so I started looking for radio jobs. Coincidentally enough, an old friend was looking for someone in Portland.

Anyone in their mid-thirties at this point in the 21st Century, or slightly older or slightly younger, should in their well traveled time on this industrialized planet have friends who they mostly know from the internet. I have an internet friend I know who I followed for over a decade because he wore a pair of custom shorts to a music festival and a band I've befriended shared a photo, a fact that still completely confused him when I tried to explain this to him when we hung out two years ago while he attended a music festival in Las Vegas. I have a friend I've never met who I've known for over twenty years from a forum about high school debate and I may be more emotionally tied to him than many other people in his or my life. There are those professional colleagues I've known for years from emails and DMs from platforms of all sorts, of one time meetings that became connections forever. There's musicians I've loved and kept up with since I first booked them or first saw them or smoked weed with them or first hitched a ride in the trunks of their cars. There's so many folks where the connection lives on because our technology allowed it to, keeping these characters otherwise lost to time in sight and in mind. Through a certain degree of serendipity, my present boss was one of those internet friends.

I met Matt Fleeger, the program director of KMHD Gresham back when he was the operations manager & program director at KRTU San Antonio. For KRTU's annual spring concert of 2009, he had managed to book pianist Ramsey Lewis to perform. He had gotten FL!GHT Gallery co-conspirator Ed Saavedra to paint a portrait of Lewis as a sarcophagus in the same brilliant gold as Lewis' 1974 Sun Goddess album. He'd gotten FL!GHT Gallery executive director & co-conspirator Justin Parr to shoot photographs at the VIP reception. These technically aren't relevant details at this point of the story, but considering these two would later become some of my best friends, I always relish in the serendipity of it that some of the most important, impactful people in my life were already present together and I just hadn't encountered them yet. I met Fleeger and the KRTU music director at that time, Aaron Prado, in line at the VIP reception as a guest of the late Kathy Clay-Little, who had gotten me my start as a freelance music journalist for her community newspaper, African-American Reflections, as I was not even one year out of graduating from Morehouse College with an English degree at the beginning of the Great Recession, the first of many a global calamity to stunt the development of all Elder Millennials. Fleeger & Prado immediately thought I was an interesting personality that would fit on the air there. Fleeger had also that day gotten the call that he got the job as KMHD program director and would be moving to Portland in a few months. After meeting with Matt perhaps one or two more times, I never saw him again for fifteen years.

In that decade and a half, I built my career in the jazz scene, writing for and editing Nextbop for ten years. Parlaying the modern jazz show I inherited at KRTU San Antonio into a platform for contemporary jazz that could find relevance around the world-- eventually finding a second temporary home at other endeavors The Art of Cool Project, Jazzfuel, and OneJazz. I became a contributing writer for DownBeat Magazine. I built a reputation on the internet and sought the appeal and attention of folks on the scene internationally because I knew it was the way to make relevant work to others outside of my immediate area and eventually a way forward. As much as jazz is an artform that is celebrated locally, I wouldn't be able to build an audience internationally by focusing on the South Texas scene. It took time for me to realize that for a genre defined by scene, and ultimately turning most conversations into lists of names, the way to continue those conversations would be to list names that certain movers and shakers would recognize. In doing so, I built my taste around the smooth jazz of my past meshed with the prickly, East Coast-influenced contemporary jazz that can scare off the uninitiated and act as a far too busy a chore to listen to for the unaccustomed ear. Nevertheless, I made my connections. I carved my path. I covered my beat, and Matt remained my friend on the internet.

Perhaps barely a year after that spring concert, I met Justin Parr, who became one of my best friends. I met Ed. The pair that had run FL!GHT eventually became a trio. I even led the procession in Ed's wedding. Matt learned that I befriended his best friends and everyone involved felt like this was the perfect connection to make. I had a support system in my hometown that I never felt before and a connection to so many different creative people in San Antonio that I felt capable of making things happen there that I couldn't make happen anywhere else. Matt would call and check in every now and then over the years, see what all I would publish on the internet or what all was talking about the work I did in some other virtual corner of the scene. When Nextbop imploded in February of 2020 and every musician, publicist, writer, and person in the jazz scene who knew me contacted me to figure out what was going on while I was too lengthily explaining the matter and my distance from the site since November of the year before, Matt called Justin to ask what was going on, to which Justin put his phone on speaker (since I was sitting right in front of him at the time as we were preparing a gallery opening later that evening) so Matt could guide my communication strategy with elegance and clarity, and ultimately saved my reputation from the tarnishing my erstwhile partner was creating at the time. Matt was a very good internet friend.

That being said, we as a society can never be angry enough at the algorithms that read resumes for job listings. My application for the host job in Portland was actually rejected in January, and quite quickly after I sent it off at that. KMHD had filled the position, but later had to reopen it, and one day Justin once again got a call concerning me and my future in jazz. Things were up in the air around March so my focus in putting on my tenth annual (Technically it was the tenth annual, although it was the tenth over the course of twelve years but one shouldn't count… the interruption [the COVID years]) Jazz for the Masses unofficial SXSW day party in Austin, Texas, was to put on another great party like I usually do while also noting that KMHD would send folks to watch and I wanted to impress them with my abilities as a host, facilitator, booker, and all around asset. The party was a success, particularly since it would be one of the four times I would see Kassa Overall perform in the past year, and no matter what happened, I felt capable again. Jazz for the Masses X felt like my best time of putting on this party in years. I felt invigorated, whereas before I felt like going out on a high note and a round number. Then came the call.

There was no helicopter landing. Sam Waterson didn't peak around a corner with a bowtie, a former lover, a new concept, and too much Coldplay on the soundtrack. My resume wasn't recited back to me for expositional reasons. Yes, I'm leaning on too many Sorkin references. Nevertheless, an old colleague who I had previously known professionally, tangentially, briefly, but deeply called an old hand, on the skids but not quite on the outs, and asked him if he wanted to give up everything for a shot at doing professionally what he had not been able to grasp for the last decade and a half. Yes, I was still interested in the job, in working on the thing I had always wanted to work on, even if it meant leaving the comfort of everything I had left behind.

I moved forward with one more Fiesta season in San Antonio. One more Cornyation with my group-- I, the only gay guy in the group of straight folks in the queer San Antonio Fiesta event and the only Black person in all of Cornyation this past year. Did my group's sketch tie for the favorite amongst the voters because it was indeed one of the funniest this year or because of these intersectional complexities? We'll never purely know. I do know that I did have a sense of pride in bringing my group a win while sensing in the background that it would be my third and otherwise prematurely final year in what could be considered San Antonio's equivalency to a New Orleans Mardi Gras krewe. That and I made for a pretty good Wemby. The text I sent to my Corny group was my favorite of my announcements, hearkening to Lebron's "The Decision" as I told the group that I was "bittersweetly delighted" to tell them that I was "taking my talents to Portland".

My last interview with KMHD was the same day the previous and upcoming president of the United States was convicted of multiple felonies, an event that felt giddy in the moment and ultimately pointless over time, itself maybe a symbol in itself, the way I make metaphors of everything. Then came the dismantling of my life and the reassembling of it elsewhere-- ending a lease with my landlord at the same time I was resigning from his bar, hiring movers, shipping a car, the going away parties and the heartfelt goodbyes. The forging forward because the only way forward is through.

There were all the signs that Portland made sense once I got here. There were the people I knew that tied me to here, or the neighborhood that I picked that fell into place, the bar I found on the second week here that embraced me with open arms and became a community center to this corner of town in a relatively short three years, the record collection of my namesakes that seemed destined to find the ears in this place and my learning to play those records here when I never was a vinyl DJ before. There was the band I've covered since almost their inception -- BADBADNOTGOOD -- playing at a festival in town two weeks after I arrived. There was two-time Jazz for the Masses party performer Daniel Villarreal rolling through the station for an on-air interview on my second day of work and his delighted surprise to see me there. There's Kassa Overall headlining the 40th anniversary party of the station some seven months after playing my SXSW day party in Austin and San Antonio's Echo Bridge for which I was often a door guy (as much as one can be a door guy for a pathway down a hill under an acoustically impressive bridge). There was my running into a co-worker at the grocery store on my eighth day of my arrival like I was already following in the continuum of my great-grandmother in no time at all on the other side of the country. 

It's getting the freelancing equivalent of a promotion -- moving into DownBeat's Hot Box, reviewing four albums every other month and cementing myself as a voice in the canon -- just a few months after starting at the radio station. It's the other Atlanta University Center connections sprinkled here and there or the other Texans I'll encounter. It's all the ways in which being here makes all the sense in the world, even in the face of all the other difficulties of any change, especially when forging out on one's own.

I've definitely encountered issues I didn't anticipate on top of the ones I did. I've been stalwart in the face of the steady rain and the early sunset. I already knew about the history of the state of Oregon and its original establishment as a white refuge (and how the abundance of white people here are very sorry about all that while not understanding the intersectionality of it all and certainly how not to center themselves in every narrative). I was warned of the complexities of the corporate world. I made sure to always carry a light jacket. But there were those things I didn't anticipate, like how TexMex would never be quite right again, especially since everything grows here except particularly spicy peppers. I'll have to find some new place to pace and talk to myself as I've always done. Absolutely no one wants the right of way and pedestrians hold either far too much power or the appropriate amount for how dark it gets here. The odd multitude of folks who won't greet good morning when passing by. The even odder number of Black folks who won't exchange the nod.

Whenever I feel bogged down by how uproariously expensive Oregon is or bewildered by a Zoom meeting that feels interminable and unproductive or slighted by awkwardness that shrouds itself in courtesy, I remind myself that this is the brass ring-- my job is playing jazz music on the radio in a state where weed is legal. I was called back into the game again. I have a blog again if I figure out what I want to do with it and what I want to say about this music. All the complications of here just happen to come along with that. I have the potential to make something really cool; all the while, I'm still in the middle of something that's already very cool. I play jazz music on the most widely listened to jazz station in Usonia. As niche jobs in the arts go, that's life in the NFL. (Sorry, that's my last Sorkin pull.)

What bothers me is I moved halfway across the country to struggle, earning a salary that barely covers the bills, and the only people who seemed to benefit are the listening public of the Portland metropolitan area and PGE, a utilities company that heats your bank account with the same gas as your disproportionately modest-sized home. The steady creep to sudden jump in my utilities bill put me in a daze through December, forcing me to lie to myself about my lot in life in order not to sour this entire enterprise so early out of the gate. I'm trying to live life as best I can but it's still a life that moves in fits and starts, much like my father's car that I shipped up here did after a few months until its need for a new fuel filter popped up a week after my bicycle was stolen. I knew the first year would be difficult; I prepared myself for that in advance, too.

At the end of this December, I'm day by day heading into my first winter in Portland, a defining time for many who move here, and there are oh, so many who move here in the face of the oh, so few I've encountered who are from here. In this state without a sales tax but a not-insubstantial income tax, these people have liberty with accountability to one another and not just the rugged individualism I know of Texas. In this place originally founded as a white refuge, I'm seeking the same validating career high in jazz that I had ten years ago for a magical week in the very Black Durham, North Carolina (Art of Cool Fest 2014, you had to be there). In this dream job where the music I've loved is all around me and just a bike commute away, there's bullshit involved like anything else in life. I like the people I work with and the neighborhood I moved to. I can sense my inexplicable openness-- a nature in myself I never understood for me to feel like such a natural curmudgeon that only my stepfather could have instilled in me the kind of countenance that can make these connections happen. I can see in my mind's eye that openness breaking down the barriers and seeking out the paths to accomplish things, to find good things and make them great, to endeavor to make things a little better wherever I go because that's what I've always tried to do. The fear that I wouldn't be able to accomplish here in Portland what I could in San Antonio because of some inherent nature in a populace may still be there, but when one begins with the premise that everything exists, the next supposition is that anything is possible. Winter is rearing its head but every day after this gets longer (up until the day that it's not). I play jazz music on the radio in a state where weed is legal. Things can't be all that bad, and if they are, I'll try my best to laugh my way through it.

In the meantime, I'm definitely not looking after my landlord's pet anymore and I definitely didn't see any of this coming a year ago.