Skies of America, or: How I Found Jazz
I'm always interested in the ways people become the people they are; you know, how some of the really interesting or strange folks you know can be so completely unlike their family members or any of the people they grew up with. How somebody can come from a town without a single record store and no real radio station to speak of (I was back in my hometown not long ago and on successive days heard "Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree" and "Do You Know the Way to San Jose" playing on the local AM station--just like old times, it's always just like old times) and still somehow grow up to be essentially a creature from another planet. I'm constantly asking people how they first found things, specifically the weird and wonderful culture that makes their lives worth living. We all know there's nature and nurture, but there are also clearly enough other equally important factors --stuff like curiosity, dumb luck, the company you keep, and miracles.
I think I can now pretty much trace any one of my many obsessions back down a tangled line of cross references, side roads, and wild diversions to the place where the seed was first planted, almost to the exact moment. I can remember, for instance, the first time I heard Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, in the basement of a friend's uncle's house. We sat there on the couch while the uncle tried to play along with the record on an electric bass. This guy's express mission in life was to "turn on the little dudes." He also played us Trout Mask Replica once upon a time, which for some reason convinced us that we were plenty incompetent enough to form a band and get booed off the stage at many a school talent show. The other great thing about this uncle was that he had a subscription to Cream, and would send us on our way with old back issues that we would pore over exactly as if we were looking at a magazine in another language. Which, in fact, we were.
We had no money, and even if we had money there was no place in town where we could have found any of the records we saw reviewed in Cream. I had curiosity, though, shitloads of that, and equal measures of boredom and desire. I'm not sure how old I was when I sort of figured out what jazz was, or at least jazz as I now understand it. There was a little Dixieland jazz band that would play special events around town, and my parents had a few Duke Ellington records. I remember picking up a cheap paperback of short stories at a garage sale, or maybe at the Book Exchange at the strip mall near my home. I bought the book because there was an indication on the cover that it had won some award, and there was effusive praise from something like the Saturday Review. I'm pretty sure now that the book was J.F. Powers' Prince of Darkness and Other Stories, but I do recall that there was a story in there about a jazz musician that included a wonderful description of the music. I started seeing references to jazz and jazz musicians in other stuff I read, and checked out a copy of Leonard Feather's Jazz Encyclopedia from the public library. Reading those biographies and descriptions couldn't really mean much to me, but the photo insert was endlessly fascinating. So many of the musicians looked like professional athletes to me, and they had extraordinary names: Coleman Hawkins, Ornette Coleman, Thelonious Monk, King Oliver.
One day I discovered that the public library actually had a room full of records tucked away upstairs, along with the automobile manuals and books on preganancy. Thankfully the record bins had helpful labels, and were broken up and segregated by type: Jazz, Rock, Folk, Classical, Showtunes. I think that was it at the time; blues and country were mixed in with folk. In hindsight that little library had a terrific selection, and I clearly remember the first three jazz records I ever checked out, which were, in effect, the first jazz records I ever heard. It was a confusing introduction. Those three records, chosen almost completely at random, or maybe because I'd seen entries for or photographs of the artists in Feather's book, were Louis Armstrong's Hot Fives, Monk's Underground, and Ornette Coleman's Skies of America. I suppose the experience of taking those records home and listening to them on my shitty little bedroom record player was disorienting; I knew I wanted to like this music, but I couldn't quite see how all three of those albums could be called jazz. All the same, I kept checking out records from the library and hauling them home. I went through pretty much the entire jazz section, and most of the folk --from stuff like George Shearing and Stan Kenton to Bobby Blue Bland, Robert Johnson, and Skip James. Completely by accident I checked out The Anthology of American Folk Music one day, and I checked it out again and again over the years. The notes were long gone, and the records were housed in a plain manilla binder with thick plastic sleeves. For years I had tapes of those records that moved with me everywhere I went; I loved the music but had no real idea what it was or that it was truly important, and I didn't know the story of its creation (or creator) until the whole package was released with such a splash a few years ago.
Anyway, it's strange and wonderful to me how this stuff happens, how Ornette Coleman can lead you to Don Cherry who can lead you to Peter Brotzmann who can lead you to Cecil Taylor who can lead you to Buell Neidlinger, and on and on, in every possible direction. I think of this only because last night I pulled out Skies of America for the first time in probably ten years (I'd later found a cut-out at the old Positively Fourth Street), and I sat there on the floor of my bunker at two o'clock in the morning listening to that record and it sounded and felt exactly --literally almost exactly-- as mysterious and thrilling and mind-boggling as it did when I first listened to it on my record player all those years ago.
7:38:16 PM 
|
|
