Music, Memories and My Father
A Few Thoughts On An Unexpected Musical Convergence
Last night, after a difficult conversation with an old friend who is working through some challenging health issues with his father, I was laying in bed, thinking about my own dad - unable to sleep, hopped up on ginger tea and spiraling down the InnerTubes rabbit hole when I came across this gem.
Benny Goodman, Gene Krupa and Harry James all playing together. At once. On maybe the greatest big band song in the universe. I mean look at Krupa, his drum kit is begging for mercy.
In college, I took a jazz/rock appreciation class. The professor’s name was Mancuso. Everybody called him Mancuso and he looked like a Mancuso so darned if I can remember his first name. I can’t begin to even tell you how much I loved that class. I couldn’t play music worth a lick, but darn it, I could learn music theory, and history, and roots and that’s what I did.
‘Micky Mouse Learning’ is what my dad called that class. He had no idea.
Anyway, Mancuso spent an entire class on one concert, and one song; the famous 1938 Benny Goodman show at Carnegie Hall. The song of course was Sing, Sing, Sing, the song I came across that I posted for you above.
The song was written by Louis Prima, by the way. If you don’t know who Louis Prima is, get yourself to YouTube right away!
At Carnegie Hall, Goodman cranked that mother to 12; literally, the song lasted 12 minutes. The mythology behind that whole concert has grown over the years - some say that half the stuffed shirts in that audience fainted dead away or stormed out, while the rest tore off their tuxedos and danced in the aisles.
That song, the original live one I mean, is a revelation - it's like a miracle, a perfect storm of timing and talent, it leaves me breathless ever time.
I had never flipped through my dad's record collection until the day of that class and was shocked to find the album in his collection. (Columbia released a two-album set of the show in 1950.) Turns out it was my mom's album, of course. Mom had passed away a couple years earlier, but dad kept all her music.
Anyway, I slotted that right into my record player and turned it so loud that my cheap, plastic speakers begged for mercy.
I remember my dad's footsteps in the hall. He was always yelling about me playing Kansas or AC/DC or Led Zeppelin. But this time, he just opened the door to my room and stood there, a puzzled look on his face.
"That my album?" he asked.
I nodded. "We learned about this in class today."
"Ok," he said and walked away, shutting the door behind him. The only time he ever didn't ask me to turn it down.
Maybe that was the instant that our individual lives centered, like in the venn diagram of who we were, the two circles finally touching, over a moment that took place 50 years early, in the grooves of a scratchy hunk of vinyl owned by someone we both had loved and had both lost.
Music does that.
Love, too.
And memory late at night - it's all echoes, man, and singing ghosts and the thump of a foot pedal like a heartbeat.
Beautiful post. I lost my dad 39 years ago, more than half my lifetime ago. This post reminded me of the ways our Venn diagram merged. I needed that. Thank you.
A favorite old recording that I play often: Duke Ellington Seattle Concert 1952, I finally found it on CD after all these years. That show contained the finest solos from the horn section of his band that I ever heard...and the drummer was Louis Bellson, inventor of the double kick. His solo on "Skin Deep" a highlight...and he wrote it!!