Free One Train Later: A Memoir by Andy Summers

odd syncopation, minor seconds, and upside-downness, he creates a cracked perfection that hits me as the essence of jazz-the central message-and he does all this with big flat hands splayed out on the black and white keys to create a music that is beyond anything I have heard from a guitarist (or any other instrument, for that matter). Monk's playing cuts to the core experience of American life. After this I collect more Monk albums and become a lifelong fan, eventually recording my own album of Monk music, Green Chimneys.
    Gradually my local reputation grows and I get invited to play at dances and private functions around town. For me, any chance to play is good enough, and I grab them like a man getting an extra slice of birthday cake. One night, driving back from a party I had played at in a village hall in the New Forest, Lenny (who has undertaken the task of driving me, my guitar, and amp out to the gig) turns to me in the front seat of his Morris Minor and says, "You know, if you keep practicing, you might just ... ," and his words trail off, but I get it-this is benediction from on high. A small sob almost appears in my throat, and as we drive on through the night back to my parents' house, the stars above appear unusually bright and clear.
    There are a number of young musicians in the town, and I try to form little groups with anyone who will play with me. My friend Nigel Streeter plays alto sax, and the two of us-both Sonny Rollins fans-spend hours listening to The Bridge, Sonny's latest recording. The word is that Sonny has spent two years away from the public, during which time he sat on New York's Williamsburg Bridge and practiced for hours every day, his horn sending myriad streams of notes out over the East River. He has been searching, trying to take the music to another place, trying to move beyond the conventions, and refusing to come back until he has something to say.
    We are inspired by this idea: the search for truth through music, the quest for higher consciousness, the concept of transcendence. Although we are only half aware of them, these ideas are beginning to float in the air like pollen. Kerouac has written On the Road and The Dharma Bums, Esalen has been established, and Timothy Leary is being fired from Harvard for his experiments with LSD. There are murmurings in the pages of Down Beat of Asian spirituality and Eastern philosophies beginning to infiltrate the music scene, and suddenly it seems as if all the hippest cats are embracing Buddhism, Sufism, Islam, and yoga. It all sounds very exotic, and we ponder phrases like avatars of the new consciousness and wonder what that means. Avatar? It sounds like some kind of trombone.
    The jazz community, with its long history of pot smoking and heroin, is a natural place for this to start. Altered states may arise from strict spiritual disciplines but are more likely with the imbibing of drugs, things with weird names like horse and tea. We sprawl on Nigel's mum's Axminster among endless cups of Darjeeling and Pontefract cakes and read articles in Down Beat about withdrawal, cold turkey, or monkeys on the back and musicians who have bad colds or are heaped to the gills. Rather than jazz, it sounds like the zoo or the butcher's shop or a visit to the doctor. But it is the quest, the search, that inspires us and we play the new Rollins LP over and over. We don't speak much with our parents about this world; it belongs to us, and our mums and dads, as they busily vacuum, dream about Sunbeam Talbots, and plan next summer at Butlins, are somewhere back in time-lost in a Pathe newsreel. We ignore the fact that they have survived the Second World War and may have spiritual reserves of their own, and in the arrogance of youth and the pebbledash frame of suburbia, we guard our secret code with grunts and snobbery.
    Sixteen, and as my skin breaks out and I turn my collar up James Deanstyle, my brain becomes a pastiche of bebop, Kerouac, Down Beat reviews,