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| Kate performing in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 2004. |
THIS is a poem that I wrote in 1998, which has been published several times, about Kate's struggles to make it as a musician while living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which is where we met:
- - -
Kate’s Band Plays the Worst Bar in New Mexico
It’s the kind of gig that drives musicians
to become lawyers. A Gemini convention
at the meeting of the moons: half the patrons
are all about hugs, the other half ready
to rumble. Sixteen people crowd
the four-foot square dance floor, tripping
over darkness and their own bad tempers,
and all of them claim they just want to have
some fun. Tall man throws a chair at a fat
tourist in a rainbow sweater, whose only crimes
were dancing and being in love. As they separate
the combatants and the doorman sweeps up
the glass, the owner takes a bigger percentage
of the gross and threatens the drummer in Greek
or Turkish or Serbo-Croatian, or some other
language where P’s are R’s and the human
tongue moves odd ways. The two bartenders
shrug and chagrin, knowing their boss is
an asshole. Amid the melee, the quartet plays on.
Guitarist solos while the bassist puts his years
of epée training to use, parrying another flying
bottle. Kate thinks to herself why am I here,
remembering all of the days as a girl
when she’d lock herself in a room, eschew
malls and movies and climbing trees to practice
her unsociable saxophone, never thinking
in a million years it would ever come to this.
She could make more money on the Plaza
downtown, or selling velvet renditions of Elvis
in the meeting rooms at the Holiday Inn.
The highway to the Blue Note and Carnegie
Hall is dotted with thousands of sinkholes
and swan dives. They play the dark roadhouse,
the roller skating rink, 2-for-1 night at the tavern
with sawdust on the floor, and parties for which
they’re paid in seafood and cinema seats.
But she’s going to get better, damn it,
she’s going to get out of this place alive,
so she grips her baritone sax a little tighter,
places the mouthpiece to her lips and swings.
- - -
She came a long, long way from those days. She was a wonderful musician who played all over the world, and played at some of the finest venues:
Kate died Sunday, at the age of 49, after a 13-year battle with cancer. She was my hero, and I will miss her very much. My hope is that she would be as proud of me as I was of her.
Kate regularly played in the Bay Area at The Sound Room, which is a nonprofit center for Jazz performance and education that is trying to raise funds to acquire and renovate a new performance space in order to provide opportunities for local musicians. Please, if you have a few dollars to spare, contribute in her honor.
