SAXOPHONE COITUS

Fun with the Mingus Big Band

In 1995, I was living in Eagle Rock, LA, with my musician boyfriend, the late Kevin Gilbert.  We lived in a strange, old Golden Age of Hollywood-style Tudor mansion with a couple of musicians he worked with on TV soundtracks. It was vaguely haunted and looked like something Snow White would live in if she had a role on Gossip Girl.   Anyway, Kevin and I had an opportunity to go to New York together, because I had a play I wrote in production, so we went to see it. 

There was some interpretive drift about Los Angeles and dating a musician that made me dress like a slut.   I had a completely thrashed convertible ice-blue 1976 Cadillac El Dorado with white leather interior, that I used to drive around in a bikini top and cowboy hat.  I wore over-the knee white fetish boots and dresses made of plastic. 

Maybe this was the reason why, when we visited a prominent Catholic cathedral, an old woman hit me.   When Kevin and I stood up to sing a hymn, I pet him on his back, because I knew this was deep Catholic, roots-level shit for him.  And I felt a walloping on my own back, and turned around to see a crazily angry old woman, seething with disregard for me.  Maybe my kilt was too short.  Maybe she was filled with too much love for Christ.  Anyway, she hit me. I’m strictly a protestant lass, in the DNA — and apparently a harlot. 

Anyway: whenever I was in New York, I would go to the Time Cafe on Broadway, and the club I loved more than any other club in the world, that I have ever been to:  Fez, a Moroccan bar and performance space underneath the giant Time Cafe. 

(This was in the days before West Elm came along and diluted the bloodline of Moroccan furnishings, and it was still beautiful and edgy and exotic.)  The harem-style rooms upstairs were full of amazing paintings of Saudi pop stars and Arabic calligraphy ( I loved these paintings for decades, and then I found out some 25 years later they were painted my friend Scott Lifshutz, and nearly died of joy.) 

Fez downstairs, a large performance space, was the home of the Mingus Big Band.  Mingus was dead, of course but his orchestra lives on to this day, populated by jazz titans.  I wanted to see the tremendous sax player John Stubblefield, who was a bit of a legend in his day. 

When Kevin and I arrived at Fez, I was wearing a little tiny baby blue midriff shirt  — shiny, with a Japanese word on it — a black wraparound skirt that stopped mid-thigh, and black patent leather four inch wedgies.  In retrospect, my silhouette was somewhere between that of a Bud Light Girl and a naughty cheerleader.  Decidedly not East Coasty.   Fortunately for me, in the stadium-style seating they had at Fez, I got seated right down in front of John Stubblefield.  

The band tore through the Mingus codex  —all that marvelous swirly Mingus music with its punches and chokeholds and flights of ducks. 

African brass is about my favorite sound on earth. I love the Mingus horn arrangements.  Towering, angular and sweet.  Sweeping across savannas and into traffic.  Unexpected yet rooted in the past.  Elegant and dirty at the same time. 

John Stubblefield came to the edge of the stage for a solo, and looked right at me.  I was all a flutter and blushed.  Kevin looked at me but I didn’t look back — John Stubblefield was still eyelocked with me.  Then he started his solo, still staring into my eyes.  It started innocently enough, with him rippling fluently over the chord changes.  But he didn’t stop staring at me.  At first I was excited, then I was sort of frightened, but he had me in his tractor beams and wasn’t letting go as he started ripping all the solo’s clothes off and putting it facedown on the couch.  The solo got wilder and louder and more crazily ornate and I fanned myself with the program. Kevin was now staring at John Stubblefield staring at me, and I was buckling down in my chair from the weight of this performance but I couldn’t shake off the staredown, it was too potent, too alive — John Stubblefield and I were doing something, and it was consensual. Everyone in the audience was in on the joke.  At the end, he was bucking his hips into the saxophone and plunging it into my airspace repeatedly, screaming into the horn.

The solo finally ended and I was flushed, if not traumatized. I giggled nervously and hid my face. 

“Guys are making cuckhold horn signs at me with their hands!” Kevin whispered at me, hotly.  I was half mortified, but there was no not taking that Stubblefield ride.  That was once in a lifetime. That was a dirty magic carpet.  

“He gotcha,” someone said to me on the way out. “Stubblefield got ya.” 

“He got me,” I had to agree. 

I’d never seen Kevin so jealous in the whole time we’d been together.  He talked about it for a long time afterwards.  “That’s the way I look at strippers,” he said, of the way I looked at John Stubblefield.  It was great.  He was squirming with possessiveness the rest of the night. 

I finally felt like I deserved getting slugged by the old lady in St. Patrick’s cathedral.  

It was just music, wasn’t it? Nah.  That solo was nasty, brutish and long.  Mingus himself, that prince, would have gotten a kick out of it. 

His autobiography, “Beneath the Underdog,” is one of the most pornographic (and probably least factual) pieces of reading material since Hustler.  

Got to hand it to them old jazz men.  They sure know what they’re doing, and it’s probably not nice. 

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Theme song: Jack Black

Artwork: “Get Me The Fuck Out This Salt Marsh,” oil on linen, Cintra Wilson 2023