By Jim Mulvihill
North Adams Transcript

Dallas, the world capital of superficiality, can really warp a person's priorities. Thankfully, I got an unexpected reality check last night.

I was doing the typical Dallas night out thing, which basically means trolling around aimlessly from bar to bar waiting for something — though nobody knows exactly what — to happen. My homeboys and I had just finished watching two episodes of "Entourage," which only heightened our moronic desire to be seen and look cool.

Eventually, around midnight, we wandered into a joint where there happened to be some live jazz. Dallas isn't exactly renowned for its jazz, but it should be, because their top cats could easily tear it up with the best of New York or New Orleans. Instead, these guys just exist in their own grossly underappreciated community, playing to the same 50 very lucky people week after week.

So my buddies and me wander into this small club on the edge of Fair Park right when these dudes are really finding their best stride. About 30 people filled the room, taking in three saxophones, piano, bass and drums, all wailing away on an improvised modern jazz number so effortlessly complex and beautiful it left me stunned.

I recognized the drummer right away by his distinctive African-style Kufi hat. He used to play with an acquaintance of mine, a young pianist named Giancarlo Colombo, who had dated my girlfriend's sister back in the day. When I used to live in Dallas, we would go see Giancarlo at a sketchy hole-in-the-wall called the House of Jock. To pay the cover for a Sunday matinee session at this joint, you had to pass your $5 to a guy locked in a phone booth-sized closet behind bulletproof glass.

Giancarlo was an unlikely young star in the House of Jock house band, comprised of a revolving cast of mostly aging South Dallas jazz veterans. Giancarlo, barely old enough to order a drink, was trained in classical music from the age of three, but devoted himself to jazz after falling for the infinite possibilities of improvisation. At the time I met him, Giancarlo had just made a difficult decision to drop out of Stanford University and commit to the Dallas jazz scene full-time.

I remember when, in the summer of 2004, Giancarlo told me how much he enjoyed trespassing on the construction site of a high-rise condominium tower in Uptown, now known as The Mondrian for the painter who inspired the building's disjointed style. Giancarlo would break in at night and climb the stairs to the unfinished top level, 20 stories up, where he could stand alone on the edge of a floor with no walls and look out across the buzzing eight-lane Central Expressway to the imposing neon-lit Dallas skyline. This was where Giancarlo liked to think about how he fit into a confusing and unpredictable world. Looking back now I would bet he also thought often about taking one more step off the side.

Later that year Giancarlo gave up on being a full-time jazz musician. It never delivered the fulfillment he was looking for, presumably because music doesn't have provable correct answers to confirm one's brilliance. Math, on the other hand, presented the opportunity to find answers that were absolute truth. So Giancarlo went back to Stanford and resumed earning straight A's.

And then, one day, seemingly out of the blue, Giancarlo wrote a suicide note, pulled his car onto a railroad crossing and sat there until a speeding train took him away. The most common theory for why was that he was such a perfectionist he never felt he was good enough at anything.

One of his former bandmates told me last night he thought Giancarlo was most comfortable and happy playing jazz in Dallas. That was true, to an extent, but only because it didn't matter what he tried, Giancarlo made every endeavor look like something he was born to do. He just happened to be the only one who didn't see it.

The flashback to Giancarlo was a good wake-up call for me, right when I was starting to lose sight of what matters. Somehow I doubt a young man so focused on getting the most out of his life ever spent much time contemplating his tan.