The following article was written by The Smoking Jackets:

Hey guys, it’s Will here. I graduated from college on Sunday and the only job that I’ve been offered so far is as a professional musician. One of the advantages of this profession, however, is that there are plenty of entry level positions that involve paid travel to interesting places around the world. In my case, I was lucky enough to be offered the bass duties in my college jazz professor’s Latin jazz trio on a three week tour of the Czech Republic and Greece. I thought it would be an interesting cap on my college experience with some time to unwind, reflect, and get my first really serious taste of a profession that I’ve been amateurly involved in for about a decade. So like I said, I graduated from college on Sunday, and I was in Prague by the following morning. The trip has been amazing but absolutely nothing like what I expected so I’m doing my best to write down at least some of the insane things that happen.

It’s Monday afternoon. I just got off of a plane in Prague. I graduated from college yesterday morning, after staying up all night partying, and spent yesterday afternoon packing up everything I own. Then I ran to the airport to meet the drummer, Tiago, and the pianist, Joel, that I’ll be playing with for the next two weeks on this tour of Joel’s through the Czech Republic and Greece, and spent the night on a flight to Paris and, finally, now, to Prague.

As I exit the airport, a few minutes later than Tiago and Joel because I had to pick up my bass from the over-sized luggage counter, I see Joel laughing and shaking hands with someone whom I presume is our driver. He is a short Cuban with dreadlocks and he is introduced to Tiago and me as Mario. Joel runs off to change some money, and Tiago and Mario break into rapid Spanish. Apparently I will be the only member of our foursome who doesn’t speak Spanish. All I can understand of the conversation are the words for a few musical instruments (I couldn’t have made it this far without knowing what “bajo” means), as well as a few indicators of various sizes (my understanding may be heavily aided by hand gestures). I act attentive but wait for it to become apparent that I don’t understand the language, assuming they’ll switch to English as soon as Tiago tells Mario about my tragic uni-linguality.

Tiago finally turns to me. “Sorry man, he doesn’t speak English.”

“Ha, no worries. And he’s the only one that speaks Czech, so all of our Czech is gonna have to be translated through Spanish. Ha. How does Joel know this guy?”

“Ha, yeah, I think they’re old friends, played together before or something. But actually, he says he doesn’t really speak much Czech either.”

Joel gets back and we go to the van, which is packed with all of our rented equipment (drums, amps, keyboard, etc), and we find out that it’s not really a van, as ordered in our contract, but a relatively small minivan. The equipment takes up almost the entire vehicle, leaving enough room for one passenger shotgun and maybe one or two more crammed in back. We might be able to squeeze ourselves in, but our luggage and additional equipment is absolutely not going to make it. So Joel starts discussing the problem with Mario in Spanish, and it quickly becomes apparent that Joel does not, as I have assumed for the past four years, speak fluent Spanish at all. This is sort of a shock to me because almost every one of his songs has a Spanish title, hardly a day has gone by when he hasn’t dropped some Spanish into his English, and never have I seen him not try to speak Spanish when there is another Spanish speaker present, Tiago included. That’s not to say that any of this is really a problem, though, because we have Tiago to bridge the language gap, nor is it to say that it makes me think any less of Joel, because I’m always too self conscious of my own limited language abilities to even try, but it’s still weird to see him completely unable to communicate with Mario after years of assuming he was fluent. Then again, everything seems weird after being awake for two and a half days.

Regardless, we need to rent another car. It’s already 4pm here in Prague, and the gig tonight is at 7pm in a town called Zlin, which is supposedly four hours away, so we’ll be incredibly lucky if we get to the gig less than two hours late. Commence bartering for a rental across a chain of four people and three languages.