...I liked Charlie Parker, but he could be an ass.

Funny thing for an old blind man in a Viking helmet to say, right? But seriously, I jammed with Bird and he had more talent in one finger than any other sax player has in both hands. But he only worked two or three layers deep. I saw more of the music than he could and I told him...I told him he was didn't see most of the picture.

You don't have to point out the irony in that statement.

I'll let you in on a secret. Bird and Monk and Christian, they all put on this...attitude...like they were pissed off at The Man for stealing their swing, but that was just an act. Well...maybe it was more than that...but still, they wanted to sell people on the idea that they were closer to the source of the rhythm.

You probably think swing came from Africa because black guys were playing it, but that's part of the fiction they used to sell the performance.

No, swing came from the Indians.

Not the Hindu kind. I mean the Sioux, the Arapaho, the Apache.

Monk knew that everyone thinks all the Indians play is the whoa oh ohoh oh trash you hear in some Jack Palance western, so when he said swing came from Africa, no one knew any better, and people believed him.

But that syncopated rhythm came from the plains. I know because I heard it before anyone ever thought of swing bands. When I was six years old, my father took us over to Wind River for the Sun Dance. That one dance lasts for seven days, but they use the first three just to get ready. The oldest man starts a song as loud and high pitched as he can like an eagle screaming into the wide blue sky, and the women finish it soft and low so it gradually dies out. A song could last half an hour so by the end the women almost whispered these bass notes that you couldn't hear, you only felt them, like hoof beats through the earth.

Then another old man started screeching a new song to take its place. One overlapping the other.

Chief Yellow Calf let me sit on his lap and showed me how to beat the tom-tom--just a hoop of wood with buffalo hide stretched across it--but it had this magnificent red bird painted on its face, wings stretched out like it was going to wrap the world in feathers. It seemed enormous to me at the time. I wanted to pound that skin hard as I could, just to make it thunder, but Chief Yellow Calf told me the drum wasn't a thing like a spoon, the drum was alive and talked, and I had to help it find its voice. He gave me the beater and wrapped his fingers around my hand. They were bony, and rough as the leather handle. Then he started this syncopated bom bombom. It felt like a tremendous heart beating in my hands.

After that, I could always hear it in the background of everything--a rhythm that slides like a snake coiling around a metronome.

Bird and those other guys could hear that snaketime too and they put it in their music, but they let their scales climb all over the place like old roses in an abandoned garden. They're pretty and wild and romantic, but out of control.

That's what I meant when I said Bird could be an ass.

Still, most musicians only manage to get a saddle over one horse--rhythm, melody, harmony--and  ignore the rest of the stable. They gallop around, hook an audience, sell some records, get laid, drunk, famous or whatever, and then they ride it into the ground. They don't see the power champing and stamping behind their easy scores. They only care about what it can do for them right now.   

I might never have known any of this, would have been happy to listen to whatever manure the studios want me to buy, but I was a shortsighted teenager. Ten years after that first Sun Dance, I was fooling around with a blasting cap I found on the railroad tracks, and it exploded in my face.

The metal shredded both my eyes.

My tear ducts wouldn't work, so my father cried for me.

I'm fortunate I didn't lose my ears too, but a perforated eardrum heals up quick. I wondered some days if it would have been better if the thing had blown my whole head off, but they let me study music at the School for the Blind, and realized that I already knew most of what they were telling me, I just didn't have the words to string it all together.

My sister read a lot of philosophy to me, and I couldn't get enough of Pythagoras. He figured out the rules that governed everything from the tone of a blacksmith's anvil, to string harmonics, to the spinning of the planets.

A lot of those ancient ideas undermined my notions of Christianity. But don't believe anyone who tells you I'm an atheist. I'm not a pantheist either, despite this horned helmet.   

Yeah...about this whole Viking thing.

When I first got to New York, I'd attend rehearsals of the Philharmonic, and someone called me "the man with the face of Christ." Whatever the hell that means, it caught on. Everyone started calling me Jesus. I thought they'd get tired of it, but it continued for years. I figured if I wanted them to stop, I had to look as un-Christian as possible, so I bought the helmet and leather tunic and showed up all Nordic.

No one calls me Jesus anymore.

The costume works on the street too. People don't pay attention to a blind man with a tin cup, but it's a shock to see a Viking with a seven foot spear standing in the middle of 6th Avenue.

I do feel some connection to the Norse, but I'm not comfortable with the idea of surly deities deciding my destiny. I put my faith in Pythagoras' theories of an ordered universe. He understood that music and reality interlace, that harmonic notes aren't just randomly scattered along a continuum of noise, but all the pieces of the universe from sand to stars fit together according to the same mathematics.

Here's another secret. Listen up because this one might be important. There's one song thrumming through every particle in the cosmos, and it's more than seven days long. It's infinite and it's made of every possible noise--the whisper of a baby's tear dropping to the floor, the crackle of hydrogen as stars fuse it into helium, the...echo of mercury fulminate exploding in a boy's face.

It's joyous and painful and infinitely complex, but there's a rhythm to it, and a melody.

The human mind can't hold the whole song, but in '73, I was on the northwest corner 55th Street and 6th Avenue when I caught a piece of it. I play the oo, this little harp here, while I beat the trimbas with a maraca. You can hear me drumming all the way to Queensbridge park. That morning all the noises drifting up from the river wove around the rhythm of the drums, and I started putting together a canon in my head--a contrapuntal melody, you know, like "Row Row Row Your Boat" but with nine overtones.

And I heard this entire new world blossoming.

It was like Genesis.

So I thought, why stop at nine? Boy, was I naive. It sounds easy, right? You start with one voice and then you add a counterpoint, then a second, and it builds on itself like an inverted pyramid. Sure, when you start a piece, it may only take a day to write it but then the work really begins. It's note by note comparison, and in a sixteen part canon, there's 120 possibilities of making a mistake between any two notes, and you can't just change one note to fix a problem, you have to change the whole phrase to match the grammar, and it cascades up the pyramid.

But my canon was like a tiny model of that infinite cosmic song, and I understood that the Creator had to have been perfectly zealous to put all this together. I realized that I had uncovered a code, but I had no idea what it meant.

It took me twenty years to compose my canon, but it will probably be buried with me because no one will take the time to play it. It's written for four conductors, because there may be sixty parts going at any one time.

I guess it doesn't matter if it never gets played. The code is the important thing because it proves that whoever created the universe does exist, and wants us to know it.

Imagine the whole universe as the voice of the creator. It's like a symphony, but with infinite notes building infinite parts, all counter point in snaketime rhythm. It's the kind of thing that can make your head explode, or rip form from the void and hang light in the firmament.

And angels hang there in that voice, the conductors making sure the tones all go where they're supposed to go--through a rift in the fabric of space-time between universes, or down the gulf stream moving plankton south toward the Yucatan peninsula--because that's what angels do, they carry the voice.

What a job.

I wonder sometimes if the angel that follows me around ever says, "I could use a couple of weeks off." Maybe it stood there on the corner with me years ago when I was strumming and rattling on the sidewalk and it thought, "Jesus, this guy just doesn't get it! Can't I push him in front of a bus and find someone smarter?"

I imagine they put up with me because they know something we don't.

They listen to that crushing song and each angel conducts one note with tears in its diamond eyes, the ecstasy of the full orchestra ringing in their ears. My angel holds its breath waiting for the next beat on the trimbas to flash out under all the leather oxfords and canvas sneakers slapping the pavement, the gritty rhythm sliding against the grumble of bus engines, the bark of the fog horn, and the quiet beating of all those thousands of thousands of human hearts.

And that angel pirouettes on the pinhead of happiness grinning so wide that it's face might split in two.