Memoir # 1

Since I recently took a memoir writing course at the community college I decided to occasionally add a snippet of my life, as only I can see it, to these pages. Here is the first installment.

Despite a non-stellar academic life in high school, I was an avid reader. I read biographies and learned that describing the life of most noteworthy people was rarely any better than hagiography. Otherwise I read novels, mostly old ones. I did have a really ardor for Jack Kerouac who died only months after my graduation, at age 46. I also read much Phillip Roth who lived longer.

I loved the beat generation aura, initially provided to me in Kerouac’s novels of the mid-50s. I read about jazz bars in Greenwich Village amongst many other things, about Village life and that in San Francisco as well. There were road trips described while careening to one side of the country to the other. I read about forbidden fruits like marijuana or dilaudid and it was the former that reached my neighborhood by 1967.

But it was the musicians that the beat writers told us of that intrigued me most. Charlie Parker and Charles Mingus, Miles Davis and John Coltrane all were invisible characters that were brought to life. Yet we did not hear them on the radio or see them on Ed Sullivan on any Sunday night.

Our top 40 radio station did play occasional jazz pieces and I loved them. Astrud Gilberto embodying the Girl from Ipanema to Stan Getz’ alto sax; Take Five by Dave Brubeck. Cannonball Adderley belting out Have Mercy on Me on the tenor; Lee Morgan’s Side Winder were about the only jazz records anyone could hear on the AM radio which was the main option for radio listeners in those days. It was typically the only band we could get on a car radio.

I came home from college during the winter break of my freshman year. I was depressed and doing poorly in my first swing at higher education. I didn’t do badly because of academic rigor but for the excessive partying that was such an attraction of my peers and myself.

I sat alone in the basement on a winter Sunday, watching the small black and white television my eight living siblings eschewed, leaving me to brood in solidarity. On the news I saw a military plane at Wilmington with caskets of soldiers whose lights went out in Viet Nam were removed. I thought, I’m heading there next at the rate I am living.

After the news I turned to the public television station and watched an interview program called Soul and saw that Pharaoh Sanders was the guest. He talked much of his tutelage under John Coltrane and I felt inspired. The next morning I drove into the heart of Detroit to a record store and purchased Sanders’ latest album as well as a Thelonious Monk recording. I was now not only enamored by these faceless artists I knew from novels, but began to learn their music as well. For the next many years I bought about 2 albums per month and amassed a vast collection.

It was about 1969 that I first got a radio that played the FM signal and could hear WJZZ a commercial station, and listened mostly to new recordings by the likes of Herbie Hancock whose song Tell me a Bedtime Story played at exactly 7:00 am every morning and functioned as my alarm. Then I discovered WDET the public radio station that focused on jazz both historic and current. I could also get that station in Ann Arbor where I lived, and went to school. In the evening the disc jockey held a jazz history class which I listened to at every chance. It was a great day for me. Not only did I find a new joy but also rebounded as a student and academics became a genuine love for me as well.

It was sort of a great era for jazz too. In Ann Arbor the bars that did not specialize in jazz music like Del Rios, would have special jazz periods like Sunday evening at Mr. Flood’s Party for example. New specialty bars like the Blind Pig with its selection of about 4 beers and hundreds of wines played only jazz. The performers were all local musicians and unknown outside of their own gigs. It was a hot time. Then King Pleasure opened up in the basement of the Beefeater’s Restaurant. The place had a large statue of a steer on its roof. King Pleasure drew nationally known musicians such as Charles Lloyd and Sonny Stitt who I got to see the first of many times at this local establishment.

Despite the big names and a reasonable cover charge, this venue only existed for about six months and one complaint that I heard from fellow jazz enthusiasts was that they could not find the place. I knew from the flyers that while they gave the address, it was the same as Beefeaters, there was no street level signage for King Pleasure and no mention of a giant cow on the roof. I never knew for certain what caused the business to fail but I blamed the poorly planned advertising flyers.

From the radio I would hear about jazz venues in Detroit and occasionally in a suburb and frequented them when my schedule allowed. They were forty miles plus from Ann Arbor so it was not until I graduated and moved back to “The City” did I attend them regularly. The best one for national names was Baker’s Keyboard Lounge which I went to about twice a month and saw players such as Mose Allison, and Detroit’s Kenny Burrell to name two of about a hundred. That lounge still exists today and apparently is a hangout for Detroit’s politically elite. It only provides music from local players today.

I only lived in Detroit for about 18 months at that juncture, and left it for the last time to take on a job in Grand Rapids about a hundred and fifty miles to the northwest. This town and the surrounding suburbs were founded by Dutch Reformed ex-patriots from the Netherlands. They came to the new world to escape what they perceived as the religious persecution from the Catholic majority and to set up a local theocracy of their own. I arrived there about a hundred and seventy years later, but the descendants maintain the faith and jazz remained in the mid-1970s, largely an industry of sin and was sequestered into only a few venues downtown. I haunted all of them and despite the cultural restrictions there were many good local musicians. There was another bar about 15 miles out of town that played my music. It was also not so easy to continue my habit of purchasing about two albums per month…but I did.

Two years in Grand Rapids was enough for me and so I moved back to Ann Arbor for a year, got married and planned for grad school where I went a year later. It was 1979 and I was in Bowling Green, Ohio which as you may suspect, was not known for its jazz music scene. Toledo about 30 miles north did have a station that played my kind of music for a few hours a week and some downtown bars there would feature a big name a few times a year. We discovered a jazz forum in the town of Maumee that a group of us stumbled on after a Toledo Mud Hens baseball game. I still had my albums now well over a thousand but I was too busy with academics and projects to devote a lot of time to my love. I did make some semi-converts among some of my class mates and the woman I was married to but the ardor waned some for the time spent on other things.

Once degreed at Bowling Green we headed for Baltimore for a new life. Baltimore has a rich jazz tradition but by 1981 when I got there, the local scene was pretty tamed compared to Detroit. Only one station played jazz but this was about the same time this tepid and banal genre of “smooth jazz” was nascent and has largely taken over what many term as jazz. A few times a year one of my favorites would come to town. Freddie Hubbard played at ArtScape, and annual outdoor event in Baltimore. I saw Pharaoh Sanders playing at a local mall where he walked amongst shoppers in a very peculiar presentation. It was not the same.

Jazz was the prominent but not the only sound that was played in our home. Two daughters were born a year and a half apart in the late 1980s. When the younger one, Lucie who was five, came home and put the CD of John Coltrane’s version of My Favorite Things on the moment she walked in the door from a rough day of kindergarten. She said that she had to hear it right then. Her sister Hannah when she was eighteen, took a road trip to Chattanooga and south from there to the Mississippi Delta in order to see live performances of Delta Blues and jazz at various juke joints. She also went to historic music venues like Sun Records.

Neither of them lists jazz as their favorite form today though each listens with some regularity. Both have bragged to me that when asked, they tell their friends that jazz is what they grew up with. Lucie currently plays bass with a local metal band in Seattle. I’ve heard that term –metal band, and guess that it means that is loud but I really don’t know.

In the late 1990s I digitized all of my records-over 2400 albums. It took a couple of years but I shrunk the physical size of my collection to a slightly more portable CD Rom size and could sometimes get more than one record on one CD. Then a few years prior to my planned move to the Northwest, I copied about a thousand of those recordings onto thumb drives shrinking the burden of transport even more significantly.

That is the story of a nearly lifelong obsession with jazz music. My interests in other genres has grown. About the time my kids were born attending live music performances abated dramatically and today I still listen to music quite a bit and listen to classical and Gaelic folk as well, but my first love in terms of music has always been jazz.