{"id":241,"date":"2021-04-12T20:07:10","date_gmt":"2021-04-12T20:07:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/english.illinoisstate.edu\/euphemism\/16-2\/?page_id=241"},"modified":"2021-04-28T20:59:17","modified_gmt":"2021-04-28T20:59:17","slug":"jazz-house","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/16-2\/jazz-house\/","title":{"rendered":"Jazz House"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n
Gabriel Miranda<\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\r\n

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Smoke wafted out the double doors as I drifted through and the bright horns spoke to me through the dark hall, coaxing me in, taking my hat, and finding me a seat. The black velvet of the chair I had taken on the outskirts of the room seemed to stretch over the edge of the upholstery, grasping me, pouring out onto the floor, and clambering up to the ceiling, embracing the whole room in a heavy fuzz. Gin and tonics corralled the crowd into captivity, entranced under the mellow hum of a chordal melody and a cloud of steady smoke. The show was about to begin. The players fiddled with their tuning gears and ran up and down their scales. Soft velvet whispered from the shining grand piano. Hot-white neon poured from the trumpet and percussion.\u00a0\u00a0The thump and hum of the legato mumble of the bass swung the jazz through the tip-toes and sidesteps of all those on the dancefloor. Music flooded into the hall, tied together through swung rhythm.<\/p>\r\n

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People swung from wall to wall, pinned cheek to cheek. Or hip to hip. Or locking eyes in a love deeper than tonight could possibly seem. They moved in unison. In singularity. As pairs. And as a unit: driven to a common jive left unspoken. The motion of the room could sway any onlooker and pulled them into participation. The fruits of sexual tension and reefer wafted through the air under the guise of \u201cjust another Saturday night\u201d (no, more seemingly, \u201cjust one LAST Saturday night\u201d), parading into the noses of the dancing lunatics, high on moonlight and neon. One could feel joy with the eyes and hear the voice of God in a three-piece band. The juice was good, and the vibe was brighter.<\/p>\r\n

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Now the singer has taken stage. A songbird. An angel. A preacher. With a short introduction from the night\u2019s MC, the music broke into a sprint. The bellows of her against the screaming of the neon on stage moved the dancers into a frenzy, kicking the floorboards to pieces along with their memories of the past week, drowning their secular sorrows under the haze of celestial song. In all places in the world, you could not find a place where the people were tighter, warmer, or more velvety. The spells that decorated the room in blacks and blues held us all here, together, as if to say, \u201cyou don\u2019t want to go back outside, it\u2019s cold out there\u201d, easily convincing us all that the safest place on this hot July evening was in here, in this concert hall. All the smoke in the world couldn\u2019t stifle half the oxygen of that room; Saturday nights were not for the suffocated, but for the bold, the bright, and the inflated. Spitting horns and our treasured songbird blasted holy light into a dark venue, speeding up time in our frozen snapshot of jubilant oblivion.\u00a0Towards the end of the evening, the night\u2019s soundtrack swung us all to sleep in each other\u2019s arms. Or cross the bar with heads down in our own loving arms. The outlines of our dark silhouettes blurred together under a dark enveloping fuzz\u00a0\u00a0\u2013\u00a0\u00a0a fleshy conglomerate of soft velvet summertime \u2013 and our breaths became one, mixing in a cloud of soft smoke and purple jazz gesticulating above our heads. The room became gelatinous, moving in half-time to the soft goodbyes of the music, and the night was coming to doze off. Saturday night sizzled to a close, and we all found our hats and coats. The smoke ushered us out and closed the doors behind us, closing us off to face the week alone. We all look forward to next Saturday, when the jazz house comes alive, for at the end of the week, it feels as though its what we did it all for.<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gabriel Miranda   Smoke wafted out the double doors as I drifted through and the bright horns spoke to me through the dark hall, coaxing me in, taking my hat, and finding me a seat. The black velvet of the chair I had taken on the outskirts of the room seemed to stretch over the… Continue Reading Jazz House<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":42,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-241","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/16-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/16-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/16-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/16-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/42"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/16-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=241"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/16-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/241\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":850,"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/16-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/241\/revisions\/850"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/euphemism.illinoisstate.edu\/16-2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}