April’s sweet gift

Louisiana music blooms brightest each April, a time when I recall with deep fondness one of the best gifts anyone’s ever given me.

Nearly two decades ago, my younger brother took me on guided tour of New Orleans music that was to last six glorious years.

Tim was a musician, a rare talent who loved hearing great music as much as playing it. A stellar student, he attended college in New Orleans on a scholarship with plans for medical school. He also found time to play in his school’s jazz band, volunteer on an ambulance crew and form a band called Smilin’ Myron.

Somewhere along the way, the city’s rhythms stole his heart, no doubt in late-night jam sessions with fellow jazz students, or at music clubs like the Maple Leaf, Tipitina’s and Muddy Waters, where icons such as the Meters, the Neville Brothers and Walter “Wolfman” Washington and the Roadmasters moved audiences into the wee small hours.

After graduation, LSU Medical School invited him to attend. But he wrote a letter declining the offer, opting instead to pursue a career in music. Some people, including my parents, worried this was a mere dalliance, a short-sighted impulse of a naďve young man.

But Tim plunged deep into musical study and practice. He listened to great artists’ entire musical catalogs, often scribbling on stacks of sheet music, annotating and analyzing the memorable pieces. And he spent untold hours playing his Fender Stratocaster, the same gritty-sounding guitar played by Stevie Ray Vaughan, U2’s The Edge and Eric Clapton.

His band played funky New Orleans music in the improvisational jazz style. Its revolving members were as adept at locking tightly into loose grooves as they were at trading solos. They toured, recorded two CDs and earned a respectable following.

Tim was a master musician who improvised inventive, fabulous solos. But what he really lived for was locking in with his bandmates on what he would describe as “sick” grooves—rhythmic harmonies that were literally hypnotic. Some of those grooves, improvised on the fly and nourished by the enthusiasm of that show’s audience, were the sweetest and most powerful moments of my life.

When he wasn’t performing or working part-time at a bakery to pay the bills, Tim was haggling with music club doormen for discounted admission to live performances. I was with him to hear some of the city’s greatest performers: Astral Project, George Porter, the Marsalis family and others. He’d lean in and explain to me astounding musical feats of harmony and improvisation I’d have otherwise missed out on. More than anything, he taught me how to listen to music.

Then, like too many young people in our state, Tim was diagnosed with cancer. After a two-year fight, the disease ended his life in 1997. He was 28.

I don’t see as many live shows these days, but festival season each April brings new opportunities. If I find myself in a packed audience, when I can truly forget all of life’s petty distractions, I’m sometimes overcome with a familiar elation. It’s in such moments that memories of my brother are their most vivid, and that I feel the most alive, and privileged.