A night at Bowl clears his clouds of worry

THERE’S something about jazz in the open air on a warm summer night that soothes the soul. Its sweetness reaches down into whirlpools of stress and calms a person’s most anxious moments. I felt that way the other night at the Hollywood Bowl.

I’d gone there all tied up from doubts and trepidations and left a couple of hours later feeling pretty mellow. It isn’t always that way. Sometimes the high-decibel sounds of classical music, accompanied by cannon blasts and fireworks, can leave you more jangled than you were when you came in. But not this night. Wayne Shorter made it different.

We go to the Bowl on a lot of starry nights, and although it’s not perfect, there’s a kind of comforting embrace to the combination of design and music on those summers made for dreaming. When this season ends, a multimillion-dollar renovation is supposed to make it better, and I hope so. Sometimes making a thing better robs it of those elements that made it worth renovating in the first place.

The acoustics, I admit, can get pretty strange, like a couple of weeks ago when the guitar music of Joao Gilberto practically vanished into the soft breeze that wafted through the Bowl. Gilberto has a whispery style to begin with, and technicians had to come onstage a dozen times during his performance in an effort to boost the sound.

We heard just fine the other night as Carlos Santana got his electric guitar screaming into the night, scattering stars along the way, and the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra managed a few noisy jazz renditions under the baton of Nicole Paiement. Herbie Hancock’s piano was almost lost when the noise factor was high, but when he came through, oh, Lord, can that man play.

You go to the Bowl for a lot of reasons: to be a part of the crowd or because you like all kinds of music, however badly it might be played, or just because you like the venue. To me, it’s being enclosed in an evening that descends like a magician’s cloak, muting the hilly skyline as twilight fades into night, and lighting the stars like candles in the sky. All things change with night and music.

There was a kind of smoky aroma in the air the other evening, as though someone had a barbecue going in the neighborhood, its enticing perfume encircling the crowd. We sat up in the cheap seats, which always seems somehow more egalitarian, and looked down at the swells in the box seats below, like peasants observing royalty. I don’t need proximity to close my eyes and let the music into the deepest parts of my inner self, and losing, with a long sigh, the travails of the day.

Wayne Shorter sure helped. It was his 70th birthday celebration, and gifts abounded at the Bowl. They were his gifts to us. Playing that alto sax as if it were a horn from heaven, Shorter blew stars and flowers into the night, creating a warmth that made the night somehow softer and sweeter. “What I want the music to do,” he told a Times writer recently, “is maybe trigger something in people that helps them to remember that they are eternal.” Indeed.

I’ve been a jazz hound going back to my days in San Francisco, when North Beach was the home of good music and you could stay all night and listen for the price of a couple of beers. I was never big on the intrusion of so-called modern jazz, a cacophony of discordant sounds that squeezes all the warmth out of the music and, like screaming babies, pierces the brain, not the soul, leaving you nerve-racked and jittery. I don’t much care for modern art either, so I guess that might say a little about my need for something smooth and soft, or maybe about my resistance to change. But I’ll take water lilies and haystacks over multicolored cubes and intersecting lines anytime.

I’m not a critic of anything really, because I don’t know that much about anything. I’m like a kid sitting on a curb watching life roll by, or a guy at the Hollywood Bowl needing a little something to still the angers in him. And even though everything wasn’t gold-plated perfect the other night, there were moments that put me in a kind of smiling way, easy with myself and the life around me.

Maybe it was the soft summer night. Maybe it was the wine. Maybe it was my wife crowded against me in the cheap seats, caught up in the mood of the evening. I guess it was all those things that put me at peace for awhile. I can still feel the night’s gentle touch and see wispy strings of clouds in the darkness and hear the soul-soothing notes of Shorter’s saxophone brushing moonlight into the sky.

Al Martinez’s columns appear Mondays and Fridays. He’s at [email protected].