I had the best Saturday night. I loved it. I want to take it home and croon ballads to it.

I mentioned in my last entry that I had a busy Saturday planned -- work, meeting with my language exchange partner, seeing Sister Chunha, and then a jazz club in Daehangno. Everything was cool -- I especially like meeting with my language exchange partner because she and I have similar viewpoints about pretty much everything -- and I got some errands done with Sister Chunha, but I was dead tired by the end of the afternoon, when Chunha had to go back to the convent for prayers.

Around 6 pm, I sat in a Dunkin' Donuts and had a cup of coffee and tried to regain some energy. Thanks to the regenerative powers of caffeine, I headed off to Daehangno, the hip artsy part of Seoul, with a second wind... which was immediately crushed out of me by the immense crowd that squeezed itself into the subway car. There hadn't been a train by for a while. And then we didn't move for several minutes, for lord knows what reason. I do believe I could have drawn up my feet and just hung there, held in place by the bodies around me.

In any case, I finally got to my stop and pushed my way out, along with nearly everyone else -- Daehangno is pretty popular -- and apologized to David, who said, "I'm getting used to it." (I was late the last time too.)

We picked a takgalbi place for dinner, but it wasn't as good as the one in Chuncheon. David told me about being interviewed for a newspaper the day before, in an article about families and Chusok (the Korean Thanksgiving, which is on Sept. 11 this year). The reporter had gathered a bunch of Korean adoptees and asked them If they had found their birth mothers, what they thought of Korea, what they were doing for Chusok. David answered: "no," "it's good but has some problems," and "nothing."

I asked him how the reporter had found him, and he said through the UN Korean Adoptees organization.

After dinner, we wandered around for a while, talking about watching "Lassie" and "Little House on the Prairie" as kids. David had been to a small jazz club with a friend before, but he couldn't remember where it was, so we tramped around Daehangno for some time. Finally, we encountered a jazz club and decided, "what the hell, let's just go here," and descended into the place, whereupon David said, "Hey! This is the place I went to before! We found it!"

At around this point, the evening became the sort of Saturday night I want to marry someday. We sat down at a table in the back, which meant, in that tiny place, that we were a whole five feet away from the stage, and ordered beer. The waiter plunked a dish of shrimp crackers in front of us (the de facto Korean bar snack), and we started listening. After a few minutes, I knew. I knew the way you know when you know. I knew that this was the sort of Saturday night you don't blow off to hang out with your friends. This was the kind of Saturday night you take home to your parents and show off proudly to your friends.

Okay, enough with the cheesy metaphors. Sorry. What I mean to say is that we started listening to the pianist and the bass player, who looked like college kids and were dressed like college kids and probably were college kids, and then a girl wearing a white cardigan and khaki pants went up and sang "Koko" and "Sir Jones" in perfect English with perfect husky sweetness and then their set was over and we watched Santana on the TV set for a while until the new band set up, and the new band, with the bassist that looked 12 years old, the hipster electric guitar player with the earring and the cool square glasses, the pianist wearing a red polo shirt and khaki skirt, and the drummer with her long hair pinned back -- the new band was fantastic. The first band was fantastic. And at around 10:30 or so, we were the only people in the bar, getting a private concert of 1950s-style straight ahead jazz -- classic Miles Davis, John Coltrane -- with no atonal, acid, cross-over or otherwise experimental stuff.

I used to play the saxophone in high school, and Saturday night brought it all back. I thought I recognized a Real Book on the piano, and I thought of my own E flat Real Book, with all the jazz standards transcribed into my instrument's key. Names floated up from my memory that I hadn't thought of for years -- not just Miles and Trane and Astrud and Ella, but people I hadn't even had a chance to listen to much, just seen over and over in the jazz aisles at Virgin Records -- Pat Metheny, Lester Young, Maynard Ferguson. I remembered meeting Billy Higgins at a jazz performance club in L.A. with Nina and shyly and awkwardly talking with a bass player that night, a big fat black man who said, "Hollywood? Hollyweird is more like it," and chuckled at his own joke. Going to an amateur night at a jazz club with Jim, the trumpet player who unexpectedly gave me the Real Book when I graduated, and getting lost in Compton -- two little prep school kids, we were, and felt it -- before arriving there. The irascible Dr. Margolis, who gave me the solo part to "Taxi Driver" in my high school band, smelled of pipe tobacco, and didn't let us play Danny Elfman's "The Simpsons" theme because we were fooling around too much. And David, of course, my old sax teacher, who was both my de facto therapist and object of obsession in those days.

It was like meeting a part of myself again, from a time long enough ago to have acquired the dignity of a sepia-toned photograph and to have softened the harsh edges of high school. It's strange to think that I remet it here, in Seoul, in a little basement club frequented by nearly no one on a Saturday night. (Though when I think about it, the set-up could not have been any more perfect.)

There are bigger jazz clubs in Daehangno which are better attended, but on the whole, Seoul isn't known for its jazz scene. It makes sense that the music the bands played were 1950s standards -- as there aren't that many jazz enthusiasts here in the first place, there would be mighty few receptive to experimental jazz.

I thanked the David I was sitting with for bringing me to the Basic Jazz Club, and proposed that we come back soon and often. He congenially agreed.