Free IGMS Issue 4 by IGMS Page A

repeated. It was as though the trumpeter had no song in mind, but simply played on and on, forever defining a new phrase, a new melody.
    Some of them fast.
    Others languorous, creeping slowly and marking out a passage of aching beauty.
    Jimmy tried to chart it at first, replaying sections over and over. His theory was rusty, but he managed to define a few note progressions before combinations of complexity went beyond him.
    The sun disappeared, and almost immediately the wind came in, cold; whispering across the sands.
    The longer he listened, the less Jimmy thought he understood the music. At times, he wasn't sure it was music at all. Among other things, he couldn't find any definite rhythm. The time signature eluded him, so that he could never identify individual phrases.
    Finally, he stopped, putting his headphones aside and dropping to his elbows to watch the light go completely out of the sky. For a moment, he lost himself in the reassuring sound of waves upon the sand -- something he hadn't done once in all the time he'd been tracking the movements of the great ocean.
    . . . learning the sounds of the earth, the sounds of nature, writing it down, learning the patterns . . . There's power in that, my friend. The power to undo.
    Jimmy's gift had always been a very good ear. Any sound man worth his salt had one. Consumers rarely heard the difference, which explained the popularity of digital song downloads, in which compression technology had removed so much of the acoustic information.
    Jimmy hated those. Not because they were free. Because they sounded thin.
    Not like this.
    The almost laughing sound of water rolling toward the beach came full-bellied, rich and strident every time. If the earth had a voice, this was surely it. And no place more certainly than this strip of sand on the Oregon coast.
    But still something in it evaded him. If he could just understand.
    Stories of Vaudevillians, old instruments, and warnings about his own musical incompetence only made him more eager to understand what it was he heard in his recordings. They may not want to see him profiting on the music of their beach here, but they wouldn't run him off with creepy stories. The thought of it made him laugh.
    Hell, he'd lived in Los Angeles for eight years, nothing was creepier than that.
    Then it happened.
    Just reclining there on the beach, he began to count.
    Simple eighth notes.
    Seven of them.
    Then again.
    Jimmy sat up straight, staring at the water as if he expected it to talk. With alarming regularity, the water tumbled and fell to a beat of seven. The time signature carried its own power, but could scarcely be handled by most musicians. Standard time, swing time, the 3 count of a waltz, each of them could be danced to, internalized without training. Even phrases of two and five and nine fell more frequently in the music pantheon, adopted often by classical composers, used in songs with regularity.
    But seven.
    Jimmy counted, and counted.
    When night had descended in full, something occurred to him. He quickly got his recording equipment from the car and set it up. This time, he dialed the frequency only half way in, and listened.
    There it was.
    The languished melody of the horn came in musical phrases to the beat of the surf. Jimmy now heard them together as he hadn't before, and in a flurry, he began to scribble out bars of seven, transcribing the song as it wafted and sang across the great time keeper.
    So busy was he at his transcription, that he did not hear the rumblings deep in the earth. He exulted at the possibility that he might put definition to something that had never been written down.
    He owed it all to the bugling of a horn. He owed it to George Henry.
    The sky suddenly darkened and crackled with lightning. The waves swelled, a flurry of wind swept down upon the dunes.
    All in perfect seven time.
    Jimmy madly went on, oblivious to the changes around him.
    Soon the tumult of thunder and pounding surf and shrieking