Bass Playing

The unexpected pleasures in life are often the best sort, like a new car as a birthday present. Those things that you don’t need to plan at all but just seem to happen to you, the sort of things that sweep you along like your in the wake of a wave. I had one of these experiences a few months ago while I was staying in a hotel in Hamburg. I was there for a regular business trip, which is something I do every couple of months in a number of different European cities. They are normally pretty bland affairs, my business trips, with nothing really to note afterwards. This trip was different though, as I got to spend some time with one of my jazz musical heroes.

I had booked into the hotel at about two in the afternoon after making a reservation on the zleep.de – Hotels in Germany website, it was a rainy Thursday afternoon and I wasn’t really looking forward to the next two days in Hamburg. I worked for a business which sold software to many different retailers all around Europe. My company offered a follow up service which involved training staff to use this software, and this was my job. It wasn’t particularly satisfying for me and I just coasted along really, doing what I had to do but nothing more. My real passion was music, jazz music to be specific, I was a double bass player. That is why this particular trip to Hamburg stuck so hard in my mind. It was like a message from the gods reminding me not to give up on my dreams.

I came down from my room at about 7pm to get a meal and a drink at the hotel restaurant, but did not expect to see what I saw when I got there. Right there, only about ten metres away from me, with a crowd of only 15 people, was one of my jazz heroes. One of the men who had inspired me through the years and whose soothing jazz music had helped me through some tough times. Right there on a tiny little stage was John Dankworth, Sir John Danworth no less, I couldn’t believe it. This was a man who played at opera houses and performing arts centres around the world, was it really him in this Hamburg hotel? The more he played his saxophone I knew that it was really him and that I seemed to have stepped into some kind of dream. I ordered a drink and sat down to listen to the soothing music wash over me, forgetting all about the fact that I hadn’t eaten yet.

As he continued playing I realised that only two or three people in the audience seemed to even know who he was, the rest were simply hotel guests who didn’t know how lucky they were. After he played for about three quarters of an hour he stopped and got a couple of drinks himself. I managed to strike up a nervous conversation and found out that he was actually a good friend of the hotel’s chef, and was playing him a special session for his birthday. As soon as I got home I pulled out my bass right away, and have been playing it every day since, trying to forge a new career out of my passion. Nothing that happens is an accident, and this event has given my passion another chance to grow and my music another chance to be heard.