I owe much of what I’ve come to know about hanging out to both of my Pittsburgh bands, but especially to The Armadillos. It was with them that I gained, or perhaps gave myself, permission to revel in the kind of shared quest for meaning that is the privileged domain of youth. In the other band, the good band, I was the youngest. Everyone else in it had jobs and homes and kids and responsibilities. But with The Armadillos, it was different. If we had jobs, we hated and were trying to quit them. Our homes, meanwhile, were marked by similar conditions of contingency: they came and went, evaporating at the end of a lease or due to a sudden rise in the rent and, in some cases, proved even temporarily nonexistent.

We weren’t famous, but we were popular, at least in a limited, local sense. That meant we had connections. We hosted bands when they came through town and then asked and received the same favors, in turn. Each summer, we toured south to Asheville, North Carolina—Big Rock Candy Mountain as we called it. There, you could sleep out every night, if it was summer and if you had to, and the handouts really did appear to grow on bushes, just like in the song. In Asheville, an hour’s worth of busking usually got us a full tank of gas, plus a round of burritos and beers on the side. We were friendly with another band that was based there. Its three members lived in a tiny rented house that sat jacked up on stilts and fronting the Swannanoa River. It was one in a line of identical houses, all of them similarly filled with musicians and bandmates. It was a whole neighborhood of splashy, summery, musical mayhem, without a single guy downstairs in sight.

On it went. We’d seen no cars approach and had no idea where they came from, these improvisatory ghosts. They sprang up out of the night, armed with a knowledge of our chords and our songs or, at least, enough skill to quickly piece it all together and join right in. I played a Gillian Welch song. The woman with the fiddle asked if I knew any more. I started in on “Red Clay Halo” and she was ready with a complementary fiddle part and also vocal harmonies on the chorus. It was fluid and easy, like a conversation between old friends. It was hanging out—delighting in a shared project, a shared language, with no guys downstairs and no one listening in from the outside, badgering us with requests or demanding a sculpted, polished performance. There was no performance. There was just us, a group of strangers, all gathered together in the dark, listening to each other.

I said before that jamming with those mystery musicians in Asheville was like conversation, like talking. This is because, though we were strangers and hadn’t met before, we already spoke the same language, to the point of being able to comfortably improvise and embellish upon each other’s uses of it. This is Fred Moten’s way of viewing improvisation which, he says, “is located at a seemingly unbridgeable chasm between feeling and reflection, disarmament and preparation, speech and writing.” The “speech” of improvisation is immediate and ad hoc, while the “writing” of improvisation involves laying something down that can be returned to later. It is this combination that leads Moten to call improvisation “speech without foresight.”[7] It lacks foresight because it cannot see what is coming and so is driven to constantly adapt and make use of whatever is there, even as it is still arriving. But there’s an undeniable element of futurity—Moten calls it “prophecy”—that arises from such processes. To improvise is to anticipate and plan without working toward a definite outcome. It’s a form of prophecy without pronouncement, a way of imagining the future without committing to the limitations of what that future has to be.

These questions help to focus attention on the narrator’s brother’s ambitions. Sonny explains that playing jazz is “the only thing” he wants to do[9]—the only thing that excites and compels him enough to keep him away from more destructive forces, namely heroin. His brother is opposed to the idea because it’s an incomprehensible one to him. To commit to playing jazz would be to commit to a whole life of improvisation, not just in musical terms but in the larger terms of employment and futurity. The narrator wants to be able to rest knowing that his younger brother, who already has a criminal record and drug conviction under his belt at age seventeen, is safe. He does not want to suffer through years of watching Sonny improvise his way through the world.