The lights go down and nobody moves. The last note is still in the room. You can feel it in your chest where your heartbeat used to be the only thing you could hear. The show is over but nobody leaves. Nobody reaches for their coat. Nobody checks their phone. The room holds its breath because the room is not ready to become a room again. For a few seconds the room is still a church.

John Coltrane played A Love Supreme and when the last note faded the audience sat in silence for eleven seconds before anybody clapped. Eleven seconds is longer than you think when you are sitting in the dark with a hundred strangers and nobody knows who is supposed to break the spell. Somebody clapped. Then everybody clapped. But those eleven seconds were the real review. Those eleven seconds said more than any critic who ever wrote about Coltrane. The audience was not applauding. The audience was recovering.

The Arkestra plays and when Marshall Allen puts down his alto the band keeps going because the Arkestra does not end. The Arkestra transitions. Marshall Allen is a hundred and one years old and he has been playing since nineteen fifty eight and every show ends the same way. The band walks through the audience playing their instruments and the audience becomes part of the show and the show becomes a parade and the parade becomes the street. There is no encore because the music never stops. The frequency just moves from the stage to the sidewalk to wherever you carry it next.

At Woodstock Jimi Hendrix played the Star Spangled Banner at eight in the morning to a field of people who had not slept in three days. Most of the crowd had already left. The ones who stayed heard the national anthem played through a wall of feedback and distortion that sounded like bombs falling and sirens screaming. Hendrix did not announce it. He just played it. The encore was not planned. The encore was a man with a guitar saying this is what your country sounds like right now and the people in the mud at eight in the morning were the only ones who heard it.

You sit in the dark and the lights come back on and the room is a room again. The chairs are just chairs. The stage is just wood. The microphone is just metal. But for an hour the room was not a room. For an hour the chairs were not chairs and the stage was a doorway and the microphone was a transmitter sending a signal to every nerve in your body. The encore is the moment you realize the show changed something. The walk home is different. The street sounds different. The key in the door sounds different. The frequency does not stay in the room. The frequency goes home with you and it hums in the background of your life until the next show when you sit down again and the lights go down again and nobody moves.