【第一章】E01 外教版 | Someone with White-hot Passion

Chapter 1 Someone with white-hot passion

Joe Gardner was not someone who made people sit up and take notice. Not at first, anyway. He was tall but mild-mannered, with a thin mustache and a timid smile. He wore glasses with heavy black frames. At forty-six, his black hair was just starting to turn gray. He didn’t care about clothes, so his wardrobe consisted mostly of slacks and black turtlenecks.

Anyone meeting Joe for the first time would never guess that within his chest, his heart beat with white-hot passion—a fire that burned for just one thing.

Joe loved jazz music.

He’d fallen for jazz when he was twelve years old. Since that day, he’d devoted his life to the music—listening to it, studying it, playing it. Jazz was the first thing he thought of in the morning. At night, he went to sleep with riffs and codas swirling through his brain.

For Joe, the incredible thing about jazz music, the thing that kept it from getting old, was that there were so many ways to play it. And all those ways made you feel something different.

Jazz could be bold and confident. Or playful. Or melancholic. Some jazz made you feel on top of the world. And when you were down in the dumps, jazz could be a balm for your soul.

And then there was the kind of jazz that made you feel like you were being run over by a garbage truck. In other words, jazz played by a middle-school band.

Unfortunately, Joe was deeply familiar with this variety.

On a Friday morning in late fall, Joe stood at the podium in the M.S. 74 band room. Armed with only a conductor’s baton, he bravely tried to coax a harmony from the noise assaulting his ears. 

“One, two, three, four! Stay on the beat! Two, three, four—” Joe shouted, waving the baton in vain. He could barely make himself heard over the honking and shrieking of the horn section. “That’s a C-sharp, horns!”