I’ll Remember April

Summer, 1995

Who ever thought my first love affair would occur in what we called the jazz shack—a once-proud open air chapel in the middle of the forest that Boy Scouts had repurposed with makeshift plywood walls? I also never imagined it would be with a piece of music, but that is truth. It's possible to fall head over heels in love with a melody. For me, it was I’ll Remember April, that ballad made famous by Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, and countless jazz legends.

The wind blew right through that chapel's gaps, carrying with it an assortment of uninvited guests: bees that buzzed around our heads as we played, flies that landed on our sheet music, and the occasional spider that would drop down from the rafters onto an unsuspecting musician. The acoustics at music camp were terrible—sound bouncing off hard surfaces in all the wrong ways, escaping through cracks before it could properly resonate. But we didn't care. The music was great, and in our teenage minds, the rustic setting added to its authenticity. The sweet smell of pine sap mixed with the metallic taste of my trumpet mouthpiece, a sensory backdrop that would forever intertwine with the music in my memory.

I was fourteen and had only just started understanding the fleeting bittersweet nature of young love. Beautiful warmth, inevitable parting. During breaks, the saxophone section would casually wander over, finding flimsy excuses to talk to me—my first experience with flirting. I innately understood the glow of new romance, rosy and spring-like, but I didn't have the capacity yet to understand the heaviness, the introspective auras that would come later.

In that imperfect, magical jazz shack, we played I'll Remember April and it was fitting that the first rendition I ever heard was the version performed by Clifford Brown—a trumpet legend who died tragically young. His interpretation was upbeat, celebratory—an ode to love that is still in some form alive.

How do I describe playing that song, learning the hard bop intricacies, the driving drums, the repetitive piano and sax lines at the beginning? The free, improvisatory brilliance of the interaction between sax and trumpet in the introduction. The clarifying moment when the melody comes in after ninety seconds of controlled chaotic interaction. There. I'm in love.

That summer I dragged my neighbor to thrift stores around the state, my best friend spent afternoons shuffling through CDs in bargain bins at Borders Books and Music with me, and my father helped me comb the shelves of no less than thirty libraries. It wasn't just love, it was obsession. That song made me feel some kind of way and I needed more.

Each new version of the song I discovered was a revelation—the melancholy crooning of Frank Sinatra, the sultry lamenting of saxophone legend Stan Getz. Same song, but infinite in its variations and interpretations. My sister thought I was crazy. I had thirty-two versions of the song by the time that first summer was over. Each rendition was becoming a new movement in my personal symphony, changing me, and I didn't yet understand the price I would pay for this love affair.

Fall, 1999

Adults ignore you when you're getting into "Good Trouble." That's what my history teacher called it—borrowing from civil rights leader John Lewis—when she caught me practicing trumpet fingerings during her lecture on the Civil War. "Get in good trouble, necessary trouble," she'd explained with a knowing smile. The hall monitor that should have questioned why I wasn't listening to a lecture about plant taxonomy just smiled and nodded as I went by. The teacher who should have been correcting my conjugation of Spanish verbs never mentioned my excessive absences.

I was loud. Everyone could hear that I'd decided wrestling with jazz improvisation was more interesting than the inner workings of the characters in the Chaucer I was supposed to be analyzing. As long as I remained a straight A student, no one stopped me from sneaking off to practice. The trumpet's bright tone echoed down empty hallways, a fortissimo declaration of my priorities.

The adults got it, but the other teens didn't. Maddie eventually stopped asking if I wanted to come over and check out her new Final Fantasy game. Danny stopped asking if I wanted to walk around town with him and maybe grab some pizza.

Natalie was different. We'd been friends since third grade when we bonded over a shared hatred of dodge ball and a love of drawing maps of imaginary worlds. She stuck with me even as music consumed more and more of my life. She finally broke down one rainy afternoon as we huddled under her leaky porch, the rhythmic dripping of water providing an ironic metronome to our conversation.

"You have to put the trumpet down and be a human being once in a while." Frustration wrinkled her brow after I'd declined yet another movie night to practice. "I miss you." She twisted a strand of her copper hair around her finger, a habit she'd had since we were kids.

"I'm sorry," I said, not really meaning it. "This is important."

"More important than friends? Than life?" The hurt in her voice was palpable, but I couldn't feel it properly then. The music had become a wall between me and everything else.

She was persistent. It's probably the only reason we're still friends. When everyone else gave up on pulling me back into the normal teenage world, Natalie brought me to the mall to shop, slipped me raunchy romance novels, and sometimes dragged her homework to the practice rooms just to be near me while I played.

Senior year was a lonely time for me, but I didn't notice it as much as I would have had I not had a singular goal—I was going to make the all-state jazz band. Hundreds of students auditioned for four trumpet spots. I knew this was my year, and as if by cosmic design, the audition piece was Clifford Brown's solo from I'll Remember April.

This is it. This is what you've been preparing for since that first summer.

Every waking moment was devoted to study of that piece. I listened to the track on repeat, teasing out every nuance. I walked to school in the morning, hands hanging loosely at my sides, fingers practicing the song as I heard it in my head. Natalie, stalwartly walking next to me, rolled her eyes as I began to hum.

"You know there's a dance this weekend," she ventured.

"Can't. Practicing."

"There's this guy in my calculus class who'd like to meet you."

"Maybe after auditions."

I sacrificed a lot that year. It seemed like everyone had a boyfriend. Everyone was playing new video games. Everyone was going to The Meadows to hear Dave Matthews or Counting Crows. Everyone had a date to senior prom. The leaves changed, fell, and gave way to frost, but I barely noticed, locked away in my bedroom with my trumpet and a CD player.

My obsessive practice had been worth it. At the audition, the metal of my trumpet was warm against my lips, my fingers flying through passages I could now play in my sleep. I heard one of the judges utter "holy shit" under his breath. The three judges broke protocol and came out from behind the screen to shake my hand. One asked me where I would be studying next year. Another wanted to know who my teacher was.

"The ghost of Clifford Brown.”

I made second trumpet in the all-state jazz band that year. I got a taste of what it would be like to be a music major next year, ensconced in a bubble of musicians that were as obsessed with music as I. The lead player and I argued at length about which album of jazz trumpeter Miles Davis was the best. The bass player taught me a basic swing step and whirled me around the room during a break as the guitarist and pianist jammed. The pianist offered to take me to prom. I'd found my people.

But later that night, I saw Natalie standing alone by her front door. For a moment, a pang of guilt broke through my euphoria. Had I left too much behind?

Winter, 2002

Sergeant Jenkins—we all called him Marcus—was the lead trumpet player in the university jazz ensemble. Forty-something with salt-and-pepper hair, he'd played with everyone from Wynton Marsalis to Diana Krall before deciding he wanted the stability of academia. Getting his doctorate while finishing up his time with the army field band, he somehow still managed to carve out time for me. He'd taken me under his wing from my first week of college, recognizing the obsessive gleam in my eye that mirrored his own at my age.

Marcus had gotten tickets for us to see a trumpet player I loved at the famous D.C. jazz club, Blues Alley. He must have known I would do anything to be in that tiny brick carriage house to hear that set. The promise of that music was like a gravitational pull I couldn't resist.

I had ignored his entreaties that "you need to socialize more, you're in college now" and "you really need to get laid." I had asked him if he was offering, but as a morally grounded, married military man with two kids, he just laughed at me. I was annoyed when he canceled on me at the last second. I wanted so badly to go to that concert.

"Don't worry. I've got you," he'd said, dropping a CD of the performer on my music stand before walking away. Told me to be there at 6 when the doors opened, he had someone he'd like me to know better. A blind date? For Blues Alley, I'd forgive him for setting me up.

And that is how I started dating the university jazz ensemble's drummer.

I fell in love with him that evening when the first strains of I'll Remember April eased across the room and the light of excitement in his eyes told me everything I needed to know about him. The pianist's touch was light, the bassist's tone was warm, but it was the drummer’s subtle brushwork that made my heart race.

"This is one of my favorite songs." His conspiratorial whisper had sent shivers down my spine. He leaned in close, his shoulder touching mine as we both closed our eyes to listen.

We sat in his dorm room into the early morning talking about music and life and how we both kind of like math and what was that about. I told him of my obsession with the song and how it had started my jazz collection. He'd ducked into his room and come out with a huge binder full of CDs. He had thirty covers of All the Things You Are.

"I thought I was the only crazy one," he said, flipping through pages of meticulously organized discs.

"Guess we're both a little obsessed," I replied, feeling like I'd found a mirror image of myself.

His dorm room was lined from floor to ceiling with snare drums and cymbals. Posters of famous jazz drummers peppered his walls. The parallels between his space and my own room cluttered with trumpets and mutes, jazz trumpet legends peering from my walls, was not lost on me. The air smelled faintly of drumsticks and coffee, a combination I'd come to associate with comfort.

Around practice and rehearsals and gigs, we managed to do normal people things. We went to the National Zoo, we toured the monuments in DC, we pretended to be tourists and walked through the cherry blossoms in the tidal basin. We experimented with cooking Thai cuisine in the tiny dorm room kitchen. He took me swing dancing and exploring hole-in-the-wall bookstores hidden deep in the city.

For my birthday that year, he arranged a mashup of I'll Remember April and All the Things You Are arranged for trumpet and drum set. The arrangement was brilliant and fast-tracked its way onto my senior recital. Our musical conversation on stage felt more intimate than any words we'd ever exchanged.

But even as we fell deeper in love, I couldn't help but notice how quickly he would abandon our plans for a gig opportunity. How he would disappear for days into practice rooms when preparing for performances. I recognized the pattern because it was my own. We were both in love with music first, and each other second.

Spring, 2004

The news came on an unusually warm day in March. He sat me down on the bench outside the music building, the same place where we'd shared countless lunches and impromptu jam sessions.

"I got the gig," he said, his eyes alight with a mixture of excitement and apprehension.

"Which one?" I asked, though I already knew. He'd been talking about the national tour for weeks.

"The Basie Band," he said. Wow. The the legendary Count Basie Orchestra. "They want me to start next month."

The silence between us stretched, filled with the distant sounds of saxophone scales drifting from a practice room window. The spring breeze carried the scent of hyacinth, but it felt suddenly cold.

"That's amazing.” The words finally out of my mouth, I forced a smile that didn't reach my eyes. "It's what you've always wanted."

And just like the song says, good things come to an end. Spring becomes autumn. Day becomes evening. Flames die down, and fantastic drummers land gigs and no longer have time for girlfriends.

He was leaving. For good.

Seeing the trajectory of his life was like looking at myself in a mirror. Music came first. He would never have time to settle down, to have a family, to grow old gracefully. And neither would I if I continued down this path.

That night, I sat alone in my dorm room, surrounded by my trumpets, my sheet music, my thirty-two versions of I'll Remember April and cried. I put on Clifford Brown's recording, the one that had started it all. As I listened, really listened, the notes cut through me with painful clarity. Was this what I wanted for myself? A life of constant movement, of loving the music more than anything else? More than anyone?

I thought about Natalie, about how she'd never given up on me despite my single-minded focus. I thought about all the birthday parties I'd missed, the family dinners I'd skipped, the human connections I'd sacrificed at the altar of musical perfection.

That night, I didn't practice. Instead, I called Natalie for the first time in months. The surprise in her voice when she heard mine was revealing.

"Are you sick?" she asked, only half-joking.

"No," I said. "Just...reassessing some things."

The next morning, I met Marcus for coffee.

"I don't think I want the touring life," I blurted out before I’d even sat down.

He looked up from his pastry, not particularly surprised. "I wondered when you'd figure that out."

"But I love music."

"You can love music in so many different ways.” He leaned back in his chair, hands behind his head. "Why do you think I’m here getting a doctorate? I have two kids under age two and a wife I never see. I’m going to find a nice cushy university gig and settle down."

I applied for a master's program in music education the following week.

On my last night before graduation, I played I'll Remember April one more time, just me in an empty rehearsal room. This time, it wasn't just a song about love, but about choices and consequences.

The same wind that had blown through the jazz shack all those years ago now seemed to whisper a different tune. I could still hear that melody in my head, but its meaning had changed, softened from obsession to appreciation. I would still play, still teach, still love jazz with all my heart. But I would no longer let it consume me whole.

Who ever thought my first love affair would be with a piece of music? But like all first loves, it shaped me, taught me, and ultimately led me to where I needed to be. The song had kept its promise – I would remember, and in remembering, I would smile.