June 24 - Beefy Blows off the Stress

Music gave John "Beefy" Yonezawa more joy than anything in the world.
It had always been that way. Music made him free. Whenever he played his trumpet he closed his eyes and it was like towering mountains, crashing seas, soaring landscapes, majesty, grandiosity, monumental beauty on an epic scale.
And he was good. Solidly good. Good enough to play professionally and quit his day job and have a respectable career.
But he wasn't stellar. He was a solid B or even B+, but not an A. Not the next level. If he were a baseball player, he would be single A, maybe double A. But not Major League.
And he was OK with that, he was OK not being on the cover of Downbeat and recording on Blue Note. It wasn't that he lacked ambition; he just wanted to play. And the fact that he could actually make a living doing so was the biggest cherry imaginable on an already unbelievable cake.
Everything changed on the night when his wife was in a car accident and had to be taken to the hospital. It didn't turn out to be anything serious, the accident, but at the time it was very stressful for him. He was just about to go onstage, when the police called him from the emergency room and told him that his wife had been in an accident but that she was fine. He even talked to her and she herself insisted she was fine and that he should play. And she sounded convincing and he believed her when she said she was OK.
But he didn't know she was OK, not when he took the stage or at any point during his set, but what could he do? He had a gig and he was a professional. He played.
And the stress he felt that evening had a profound effect on his playing. It gave his playing an extra edge, an adrenalin spike, a 100-proof shot of raw emotion.
The fans noticed it and responded. The ovations he and his combo received that night were unlike anything they'd ever gotten.
His manager noticed it too.
And she also noticed its absence: A week after Beefy's wife's accident, when everything was back to normal and Beefy's wife really was fine and Beefy's combo had its next gig, his playing had lost that edge, that tension. It was still good, but it didn't pack that same urgency. The audience still liked him and his combo, though. They just weren't as enthusiastic as they had been on the night of the accident because he wasn't as good.
A few weeks later, the manager of the club they were playing in accused Beefy and his combo of arriving late to the venue, which was patently untrue. Beefy was never late. However, the manager threatened to not pay them unless they played an extra 30 minute set.
The argument was still unresolved as they took the stage, and Beefy blew the audience away. So jaw-rattling was his performance that the club's manager backed down immediately and apologized. He plied them with free drinks and told them not to worry about playing the extra set--just play again next Saturday, any Saturday. Just come back.
His mind at ease, Beefy and his combo took the stage for the second set, and it was good--but not nearly as good as it had been when his stress level was so high because of the argument.
This confirmed his manager's theory about stress being what brought about the radical improvements in his performance. And so from there, it was an easy managerial decision--and one she kept from Beefy--to keep him under as much stress as possible whenever he performed.
For his solo east coast tour, she "lost" his trumpet and gave him a shoddy replacement. She also booked him in rat-trap hotels in sketchy neighborhoods, and secretly paid his neighbors to keep him up all night long by (pretending like they were) having sex.
It worked. The more stressful the conditions she created, the better his performances (and paydays). At least at first. The problem was that stress is a relative thing. In time, he got used to the terrible travel conditions. And when it got to the point where terrible, stressful conditions were the norm, they were no longer stressful and thus didn't have the same effect on his playing. And so his manager had to raise the bar.
She told him the small label his combo was on was considering dropping them. She conspired with his combo to threaten a walkout if he didn't meet their impossible to accomodate demands. She slipped sound mixers cash to walk out in the middle of a gig.
The increasingly stressful situations she put him in continued to keep his stress level--and performance quality--high, but he also continued to get used to it. And so she had to continue cranking up the tension. Next up: Rumors of his wife having an affair with her boss, the bassist, others. Bomb threats. She got his wife on board and talked her into telling him she'd found a lump.
It quickly got to the point where each night he played, the stress he was under was almost unfathomable. Imagine a sleep-deprived air traffic controller doing his job on a tightrope while people below are shooting off Roman candles. He was fried, constantly on the edge.
And yet his playing was spectacular, and people noticed. He and his combo were booked into bigger and bigger halls. Major labels came sniffing. Audiences grew exponentially, and the money kept rolling in.
And no matter what kind of stressful scenario his manager cooked up, eventually it became normal for him. She secretly hired a former interrogator from the CIA to devise ways to keep ratcheting up the tension for him. And every situation they came up with worked great until he got used to it, and then they had to find a way to kick it up a few notches. They hired someone to mug him. They demolished his bank records, stole his identity, started a fire at his house, and kidnapped his wife.
And then finally he snapped.
For the first time ever, Beefy was late to take the stage. It happened at a headlining gig at Lincoln Center.
His manager went to his dressing room to check on him, and he was catatonic. All his vital signs were fine, but he didn't move, didn't respond to anything. He just sat still and stared at the space in front of him like he was frozen in suspended animation.
He never played again, never talked again.
He was put into a nursing home, and that's where he is to this day.
Most days he sits by himself in a corner. His fingers twitch like they're pressing trumpet keys. He spends his days with his eyes closed, thinking about majestic mountains and crashing seas, playing the music he loves in his head. Smiling.