My sister Miriel and I explore a new jazz club--so new, it's only half-built. Full of balconies and odd corners. She drops a paper, I pick it up--it's a song one of us wrote, that we've been practicing as a duet. Try singing it. Wonder what people will think.

We find out. I turn a corner and meet a tall black guy & his short plump friend; know the tall guy's a major singer from the sixties, though I'm embarrassed that I go blank on his name. He sings one note--in exactly the style I did. Not imitating me; it's his signature style, been doing it since childhood! I may have unconsciously picked it up from him, heard on the radio. Or were they practicing too, in the back?

But I want my voice to be unique not derivative, so I try the song with a different vocal approach...

And round the corner come another two black guys, one tall one short, and again the tall guy's a famous singer whose name I block on, and HE TOO opens his mouth and sings just one note... and I realize I first heard THIS sound from HIM.

Desperate, I sing a strange gravelly noise only I can do, at least among the singers I know.

Two more guys appear, and the tall one matches my sound. Is that Leadbelly? Louis Armstrong? And I got it from him.

I try falsetto. Two guys. Derivative!

I quack like a duck. No matter! Two giant ducks appear. The taller one quacks... in my voice. Done already. Decades ago.

Originality is hopeless. Black ducks quacked first.

• Quack? when I was a kid I discovered I could do a good Donald Duck impression. Somehow it stuck--when startled, or just trying to get someone's attention, rather than yelling or whistling, MY reflex is to quack like a duck. So no, I don't think it's a dream-pun about quack doctors, or smoking quack, or earthquacks. It really is just what it seems--about making funny noises, and whether originality is even possible in a media-drenched world.
• Miriel & I, songwriting, escaping predecessors: Literal. We're both songwriters stylistically pretty far out on the fringe.
• Black musicians did it all first:
  1. Experimental jazz really did try pretty much every sound imaginable. Often with painful results, but undeniably first.
  2. At the library today, my co-worker Adjo didn't quite claim ancient Africa invented EVERYTHING, but (as usual) she came pretty close. Art, science, whatever. The dream pops me into her Afrocentric world. It felt exaggerated. Cramped, too--all those Wise Ancestors leave you no elbow room! Makes me worry about Allan Bloom's sorta-Freudian theory that ALL artists just squirm around trying to escape the shadows of famous predecessors. And here I thought I just wanted it to sound good...
• Race anxiety? I get the feeling the dream's thumbing its nose at both black & white insecurity--even as giant ducks, nothing changed a bit! Now, SPECIES anxiety...

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