UPCOMING DATES

• Friday, July 12: Full three-hour gig (not dependent on winning a second round in Battle of the Bands), McGinty’s, 8-11 p.m.
• Saturday, Aug. 30: Full gig at Celtic House, Arlington, 9:30 p.m.
• Friday, Sept. 13: Full three-hour gig at Solace Outpost, Falls Church, 8-11 p.m.

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Nov. 4, 2023. Pearl Street Warehouse. Washington, DC. Nearly midnight.

One of the happiest moments of my life is 17 minutes and 30 seconds into this video:

I’m playing with a group of considerably younger musicians who are brimming with skill and charisma. The next oldest person is nearly 20 years younger than me. The lead singer is nearly 30 years younger.

She has the crowd in the palm of her hand. I knew I’d won the lottery when I wound up in a group with her, even if it was a group that only exists for about six weeks and plays a little more than 15 minutes. The program is called Flashband, in which 25-50 people are gathered for some jam sessions from which we form these groups that live short, energetic lives like the particles produced by the Large Hadron Collider. I couldn’t have asked for a better band — capable musicians, friendly people.

In our last full song, we planned a pause of a couple of seconds. It was up to the singer to restart us, and we would follow.

Her timing, as always, was perfect. The crowd roared as we resumed. As I pounded a floor tom and a drum pad, on which I’d programmed a big booming drum sound, I could feel the energy.

Cliche? Maybe. But why does it work?

My theory is that it reinforces a connection between performer and audience. We’re taking a journey together. A live rock concert is an interaction.

Consider this Green Day performance. Nearly nine minutes into the punk-rock mini-opera Jesus of Suburbia, Billie Joe Armstrong sings almost all of the final line (“tales from another broken …”) and stops for about 20 seconds while a piano tremolo sounds. Drummer Tre Cool makes some comical faces, then yells, “ONE TWO THREE FOUR!” to cue the finishing pyrotechnics, both literal and figurative.

For a more extreme example of building and releasing tension, consider this performance of the Pink Floyd song Echoes. This is a David Gilmour solo show, but with keyboardist Rick Wright in the band, it’s also half of the Floyd lineup that recorded the original and memorably played it at Pompeii for a film in 1971. It’s a journey — at times, to be honest, a meandering one. To get the gist of it, come in around 16:30, when the guitar and drums slowly and steadily ramp up while Wright and another keyboardist hold pensive organ chords and play the distinctive “ping” that sounds like a call from a distant land, maybe even a distant planet. At 18 minutes, Gilmour suddenly breaks into a loud, swirling guitar riff accentuated by a lot of lasers and flashing lights. A minute later, Gilmour and Wright (and the other keyboardist) abruptly shift into the song’s last verse …

And no one sings me lullabies / And no one makes me close my eyes / So I throw the windows wide / And call to you across the sky

Then they break into the riff that Andrew Lloyd Webber swiped for Phantom of the Opera and ratchet up the intensity once again. They peak around 20:45, and note the stage presentation here — the overhead screens showing the band members showed mostly hazy light and fog during the quieter portions, but the fog has receded, and the audience in a Gdansk shipyard has a clear view of six musicians playing with power and urgency. Then it fades, and Gilmour and Wright spend the next few minutes trading beautiful melodies, slowly disappearing into near-darkness as they trail off. The last sound is a Shepard tone, an auditory illusion in which it seems the pitch you’re hearing is continually ascending.

Echoes is all about making connections, no matter the distance — physical or metaphorical. Let’s forget for a moment that the man who wrote the lyrics, former Floyd bassist Roger Waters, seems determined to spend his twilight years on the wrong side of history, and let’s forget that Echoes does indeed sync up with the closing sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey in eerie fashion. This performance is powerful and poignant, all the more so because it is the last one. Wright died two years later, and Gilmour refuses to play the song without him.

But these connections don’t have to be so grandiose, with thousands of fans watching overhead projections and lights. Sometimes, smaller is better.

Funny thing — I didn’t care for music as an elementary school student, which haunts me today as I do substitute-teaching stints in elementary school music classes. But I started piano lessons in fifth grade, took up clarinet in middle school, and taught myself guitar. That coincided with a momentous occasion for any Gen Xer — we got MTV. Even better, I transferred to a small private school and thrived in a unique musical environment led by the free-wheeling Jim Sherman, who inspired me to try anything. If you don’t know how to do it, figure it out.

Check out what we’ve done in our first few months:

A few more of the best moments of my middle-age music career: