I have a trunk-full of journals that I have only shared with friends and family. This blog is my crossing the line between private author to public author.

Jun 26, 2016

Growing, Cradled In The Notes Of Bop And Dixieland

A Reflection on how Jazz made me the man I am today

For my seven-year-old self, independence was not just about dressing myself or standing on top of a stool, brushing my own teeth.

It was about making significant decisions, such as stealing chocolate chips from the Tupperware container underneath the counter below the microwave, or lying in my top bunk bed with the wireless radio’s speaker pressed to my ear. This was where I made a friend in Louis Armstrong. This was where I fell in love with Billie Holiday.

From where I lay, facing the door, I could see the orange light from the hallway leak underneath the cracks in the floor like broken egg yolk into my dark bedroom. Every time a shadow would interrupt the light, I would turn the volume knob so low that I could only hear the tips of the horns, whisper through the speakers like rustling leaves.

In the twilight before sleep, these late night jazz sessions with my radio would have a profound effect on my imagination. For example, I would force myself to stay awake, puzzling together how these musicians, who I believed played live in the studio, could stampede out of the recording room with their trumpets, trombones, saxophones, clarinets, and bass fiddles with enough time during the two second gap between songs so that the next band could set up play.

“Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans? When that’s where you left your heart. And there’s one thing more I miss the one I care for more than I miss New Orleans.” — Louis Armstrong

There was something about the scratchy sound of Armstrong’s Hot Five that made me know What It Means To Miss New Orleans before I knew that New Orleans was a place on a map. There was something about Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit that sent shivers up my spine before I knew that the strange fruit were human beings.

As a boy, Jazz was a sensation best described as magic.

However, as I grew older, I came to find that Jazz was a breath of air, an exhalation of the spirit, uniquely textured by the human cry for freedom from convention, authority, boredom, and even suffering.

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck, for the rain to gather, for the wind to suck, for the sun to rot, for the trees to drop.
Here is a strange and bitter crop.” — Billie Holiday

This realization allowed me to become independent in my thinking and decision-making. It allowed me to feel that I could, with my life, do anything I wanted. Jazz brought me to want to express myself with writing, and to read books whose authors said things I could never put into words. Jazz helped identify who I would become.