What Have I Forgotten?

“They should rename all the freeways ‘passovers,’” my friend, Les McCann, used to tell me every spring. “It gets really busy during the five o’clock Rush Hashanah.”

Les was one of the great jazz musicians. He wasn’t Jewish, but he had material. We met when I opened for him at the Blue Note. He asked my name. “Joe Alterman,” I said. “You a rabbi?” No, I told him, but I am a — “Hebrew?” he interrupted. “Well, from now on, you’re my He-bro.”

He was 53 years older than me, and for 12 years — until he died — we talked nearly every day. For many of those years, Les was bedridden in a physical rehab center, but whenever I asked how he was doing, the answer was usually “beautiful” or “just a touch above perfect.” We spoke about six hours a week, and I can count on one hand the number of times I heard him complain. He was even dreaming up things we could do together, including a duo show he wanted to call, “A Hebrew and a Half-Brew.” The arrangement was simple: “You do the work, I’ll take the bows.”

Les didn’t really like calling himself my mentor. He preferred “reminder.”

“You already know all this stuff,” he’d say. “You knew it at birth. I’m just here to remind you of it.” Whenever I’d bring him a problem, he’d say, “Ask yourself constantly — what have I forgotten?”

That was how he taught music, too. “The piano is just a tool,” he told me. “Without that piano, without those fingers, you would still be hearing music. You’ve got to hear what’s in you!”

Shortly after we met, Les gave me an assignment: write a song a day for a month, with one rule — I couldn’t write any of them at the piano. “When you sit at the piano to compose, the first thing your mind thinks is, ‘What can my fingers do?’” he explained. “But when you’re not at the instrument, you’re writing what you truly hear in your heart.”

“You don’t do this because it’s fun, although it is,” he told me. “You do this because it’s you.”

As Rosh Hashanah approaches, I find myself thinking about all of this in a different way. Teshuvah is usually translated as repentance, but it can also mean return. Return to what?

I think Les would have understood the question. “Be calm. Be quiet,” he used to tell me. “The answer’s always there.”

Les loved the idea, often associated with Michelangelo, that the figure is already inside the marble and the sculptor’s job is simply to reveal it. That was what he was doing for me — helping me chip away at everything that kept me from hearing what was already there.

A few years before I met Les, I was opening for the pianist, Hiromi, when I looked out and saw Ahmad Jamal in the audience. It was the first time I’d performed for one of my heroes, and I spent the entire set in a state of crippling anxiety. Afterward I felt embarrassed, shattered and confused. I hadn’t been able to keep my fear from getting in the way of the music.

When I eventually told Les, he said he had a similar story. He was about the same age I’d been, about to play his first big Chicago gig, when Oscar Peterson walked in and took a seat near the piano. Les went over to Oscar’s table before the set began.

“I told him, ‘I love you, Oscar, but I can’t play in front of you. I’m so nervous.’” Oscar looked at me and said something that changed my life. He said, “I didn’t come here to hear me. I came here to hear you.” He was telling me to be myself, and that calmed me for the rest of my life. I never looked back after that, either.”

“There’s only two things in this life,” Les told me. “Love and fear. Everything we do is a challenge to one or the other. Choose love, Joe. Always choose love.”

During our first phone conversation, he told me to write “I choose love now” on a piece of paper. “Repeat that to me,” he said, and waited while I said it aloud. “Now keep it in your pocket.” I carried it for years.

For all our hours of talking, Les managed to compress so much of his philosophy into the message on his voicemail: “Give me time to get to the phone, leave me a message — but don’t forget to love yourself.”

The shofar doesn’t tell us something new. It reminds us of something we already know. This Rosh Hashanah, when it sounds, I’ll be listening for Les inside it, asking me what he always did:

What have you forgotten?