I’VE MENTIONED BEFORE IN THIS SPACE that I’m a jazz fan. In part, I love jazz for the endless possibilities for expressiveness to which it lends itself, and for the communitarian and collaborative ethic that has always characterized the music.

Wynton Marsalis has said regarding jazz:

“As long as there is democracy, there will be people wanting to play jazz because nothing else will ever so perfectly capture the democratic process in sound. Jazz means working things out musically with other people. You have to listen to other musicians and play with them even if you don’t agree with what they’re playing. It teaches you the very opposite of racism and anti-Semitism. It teaches you that the world is big enough to accommodate us all.”

My own tastes are pretty eclectic — I’ve listened to and enjoyed most of the sub-genres of the art form, from ragtime to swing, through the beginnings of “cool jazz” and bop to the modal brilliance of Miles Davis and John Coltrane and the more experimental sounds of Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra. I’ve lately taken to Stan Getz and Paul Desmond, who made the most perfect rainy day music ever put on vinyl.

Among my favorite jazz musicians was a man named Von Freeman, better known as “Vonski” to his fans. Vonski was born in Chicago in 1923 and spent virtually his entire life in the city of his birth, so he was not as widely known as some of his peers, but serious jazz musicians knew about him and would look him up whenever they were in Chicago. His influence was profound.

His instrument was the tenor saxophone, and his jazz roots go deep into the history of the music. His father happened to be a close friend of Louis Armstrong — Armstrong actually lived at the Freeman house for a time when Vonski was a child. Vonski’s high school music teacher, a man named Walter Dyett, was a legendary mentor to many up-and-coming jazz and blues musicians, including Nat King Cole, Bo Diddley and the great Dinah Washington.

I first encountered Vonski’s music when I was driving home from work one day. I heard the beginning of a song I recognized right away as “Darn That Dream,” an old song written by Jimmy Van Heusen and Eddie DeLange in 1939, and which I’d first heard on Miles Davis’s seminal album “Birth of The Cool.”

The version on “Birth” was presented as a straight and somewhat jarringly schmaltzy pop song of the day; many feel that it sounds slightly out of place on the album that otherwise holds far more sophisticated compositions. The lyrics are:

Darn that dream
I dream each night
You say you love me and hold me tight
But when I awake and you’re out of sight
Oh, darn that dream

Oh, darn that dream

Vonski’s version was from his great final album “Vonski Speaks,” recorded live in Berlin in 2009 (one of his extremely rare forays outside the country). It was a purely instrumental version of the song, and his performance was a revelation. He got past the schmaltz and went directly to the grief that the lyrics only hint at, and it was like being transported directly into the experience of someone who is afraid he will never stop crying.

Vonski is known for occasionally sacrificing tonal precision for the sake of emotional range, and in the setting of this song it worked so well I found myself suddenly weeping in the car. I heard pure, blaring, inconsolable loss in his performance, a bleary grief I remembered from my own experience, and I knew that Von Freeman had, at some point in his past, suffered a severe heartbreak. It is an astonishing performance.

St. Augustine is credited as saying, “He who sings well prays twice.” I think you could say the same about the best jazz — it not only tells you a story, it takes you into that story in a very intimate way and makes you realize that you are not alone.

Matt Talbot is a writer and poet, as well as an old Benicia hand. He works for a tech start-up in San Francisco.

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