Resentment, fear, anger: these are locked in time; love knows no bounds. Love is jazz.
Where is love known? Who sings the song of the heart? What is the song? And whose heart is it, anyway?
My father was a fan of New Orleans Jazz and Dixieland Jazz, a raggedy music popularized in the early 20th century American South. It was—is—a music of joy, release, relief, grief, hidden mourning, mournfulness. It is music of the heart that expresses passion, ecstasy, sorrow, and bereavement. It does not require of its players technical proficiency; it rewards spirit, feeling, humor. It is the music of African-American subjugation—and joy. Sometimes the songs suggest there’s a better place than here; other times they create that better place, here.
Purists consider Dixieland Jazz, often played by white musicians, to be a commercialized bastardization of New Orleans Jazz. Dad, however, loved both. Dad was not a browbeaten African-American man. He was a white man, born in 1921, who was raised in privilege and attended eminent schools. He served in World War II and, like many in his generation, returned home to attend graduate school, marry, build a family, build a country.
After a stint as a lawyer, he became a land developer. In 1969 he began construction on the first of four buildings in an office park in Menlo Park, California. That park, and others he built in the area, housed the venture capital firms that funded, and continue to fund, Silicon Valley dotcom startups.
A transplant from Youngstown, Ohio, Dad believed in serving the San Francisco Peninsula community that had welcomed and nurtured him. In the 1980s he was a Stanford University trustee. He set up a charitable foundation that supported worthy causes. He raised money for politicians in whom he believed. (He was a moderate Republican, which today would probably make him a socialist.)
Yet as most fathers are to most sons, Dad was, to me, more than the sum of his worldly achievements. For nearly thirty years he played piano in an amateur Dixieland band. Its members were successful businessmen who shared a passion for the rollicking blues- and ragtime-influenced music. They played, for free, at all sorts of get-togethers. They self-produced two albums, which they gave as gifts.
I shared Dad’s musical enthusiasms. In that sense, my life came into focus on February 9, 1964. I was 7. My two brothers, my sister, Mom, and Dad and I had finished watching a television show on our black and white set when Dad asked Mom, “Are you going to stay for the bugs?” My older brother explained to me that a band called The Beatles would appear on The Ed Sullivan Show, which came on next.
We all stayed for “the bugs.” That made us six of seventy-three million people who saw the band’s first U.S. performance. (They played Sullivan the following two Sundays as well.) Cultural critics later reckoned it the moment The Sixties began, in spirit if not chronologically. The Beatles provided fresh hope and happy distraction to Americans shattered by the assassination of their president a little more than two months prior.
On that first night, the band tore through “All My Loving,” “Till There Was You,” “She Loves You” and, later in the show, “I Saw Her Standing There” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” which at the moment was Number One in the pop music charts. Some of the girls in the audience screamed for Paul McCartney, “the cute Beatle.” Others were drawn to George Harrison (the spiritual one) or John Lennon (the acid-tongued genius).
Me? I wanted to be Ringo. Drumming? Awesome. The shape of the set, the sound of the drums, the sight of the cymbals rocking up and down when Ringo walloped them–I wanted to live there.
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Within days I’d created a makeshift drum set from my mom’s Yuban coffee cans. The plastic lids became cymbals, pencils their stands. Other pencils served as drumsticks. I banged away to the Beatles album that Mom had recently bought me.
Subsequently I acquired each album as it was released, and collected and traded Beatles photo cards on the first-grade playground. I wanted a pair of Beatles boots. (Mom said no.) I wanted to grow my hair long. (No). I wanted to play drums. (Okay.)
Mom and Dad, bless them, encouraged my musical ambition. One Christmas, they bought me—whoops, I mean Santa brought me—a snare drum and a cymbal with a cowbell attached to its stand. A few years later I received a full drum set. I whacked and slammed it with total abandon in my room, no doubt to the disgruntlement of my family members. I had to turn up my Beatles records REALLY LOUD in order to hear them over my accompanying racket.
I didn’t take lessons; I was born, I suppose, with the instinctive aptitude for separately utilizing two hands (holding drum sticks) and two feet (operating the high-hat and bass drum pedals). I listened to records through headphones and copied what I heard. I learned fast and practiced hard.
Dad, on the other hand, was not a natural musician. He took piano lessons and studiously worked out carefully constructed solos for Dixieland songs, for which solos are customarily improvised. Perhaps it saddened him that musical talent was not, for him, inborn. Who does not wish to do something he cannot do? (In another life I am a third baseman with a wickedly accurate throwing arm.) Yet Dad’s lack of an innate gift for music only amplified his ardor for it.
Dad exposed us—me—to early Dixieland jazz and Big Band records. I fell in love with drummers such as Buddy Rich, Thad Jones, Gene Krupa. I saw Philly Jo Jones play drums with the Count Basie Orchestra at a Stanford University show. We also saw Ella Fitzgerald sing and Louis Armstrong blow his horn. During one mid-1960s vacation, the family stopped at Preservation Hall, in New Orleans, to see the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, an archetypal New Orleans Jazz group. (That night I was a child pilgrim in the holy land.)
A Dixieland band typically comprises a rhythm section—drums, standup bass (or gut-bucket), piano, maybe banjo and/or tuba—and some front line combination of trumpet, trombone, and clarinet. A group typically lurches into a song and one of the front-line instruments plays the main theme. The others improvise spiraling counter-melodies over the rhythm section’s pumping beat.
After the all-in opening, instrumentalists solo one by one, extemporizing fanciful musical dialogues. For the final chorus, the members once again play together, all in, often wildly, the front-line instruments weaving vine-like lines around the tree trunk of the rhythmic thump. Fast songs can sound like a derailed train crashing down a rock-strewn embankment, slow ones like the sobs of someone shuffling in the mournful gloom of a night-dark house.
I must have been 10 or 11 when the guys in Dad’s band first invited me to sit in with them. Soon it became a regular thing. I’d watch, itchy, antsy, as the band played song after song. Finally, the drummer would kindly hand me the sticks. I’d pound away as the song careened hither and yon. The band would hit that final chorus and the song would become more than a song; it would disappear into its own beat-heavy sonic boom, erasing time and space.
A close-mouthed grin would crease Dad’s face and his eyes would crinkle merrily as he poked the piano’s keys. He’d turn to me and shout, “Yeah, Dave!” And we’d bang that damn thing home like our lives depended on it—which, at that moment, they seemed to.
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Childhood gave way to adolescence, drums to guitar, the Beatles to the Rolling Stones. The Beatles had been the perfect trippy childhood soundtrack. The early-1970s Rolling Stones, by contrast, were hard, druggy, sleazy. They steeped their music in early 20th Century American gospel, country and blues— kissin’ cousins of Dixieland jazz. A shape-shifting musical amalgam: brutal rock and roll, heart-wrenching balladry; a mix of the tough, the anarchic and the tender. What better describes the emotional bedlam and hormonal upheaval of interior teenage life?
On stage back then the Stones were a dangerous and hard-charging band. Yet because they played to their mood—sometimes focused, sometimes chaotic—they were always at risk of careening into the wall. None of the musicians was a virtuoso save Mick Taylor, a member from 1969 to 1974. His shimmering lead guitar work brought an angel’s light to the Stones’ dark grit.
It was the band’s chemistry, not the individual players’ proficiency, which created the Stones’ unique sound. Keith Richards’ rhythm guitar playing was an extension of Charlie Watts’ drumming, and vice versa. (To this day, Watts cites jazz players as influences; like all great drummers, he knows how to play behind the beat.) The Stones’ style was all oddball accents, stumbling fills, off-kilter time.
The best description I’ve heard of this phenomenon came from the producer Don Was, who spoke to the New York Times in May about the Stones’ recent rerelease of Exile on Main Street, the landmark 1972 double album most purists consider their masterpiece. The new set has a second CD of outtakes and alternate song versions from the Exile sessions.
Talking about a wobbly alternative take of the Exile track “Loving Cup,” Was said, “…[T]his is the ultimate track of the style that characterizes ‘Exile.’ It’s not sloppiness; it’s width, in terms of where everyone feels the beat. You’ve got five individuals feeling the beat in a different place. At some point, the centrifugal force of the rhythm no longer holds the band together. That ‘Loving Cup’ is about the widest area you can have without the song falling apart.”
That’s a perfect description of jazz, too: a landscape shaped by improvisation, with a beat that’s not a meeting place but a reference point. In this way, jazz is not unlike life. Life is improv. The best musicians learn to listen so they have something to say. They roll with what presents itself and respond loosely. Sometimes songs take flight, sometimes they crash and burn. Always, somewhere, there is melody.
In high school I played in a band; we covered popular songs of the day. Our sole onstage experience was at a community-center dance. For reasons yet unclear, music became a guilty pleasure for me, emphasis on guilty. It somehow got twisted up with the shame and frustration attending my hidden and confused sexuality and other teenage trials: unrequited love, school failure, terrifying family and societal expectations.
In college I played in a punk/power-pop band, but nothing came of it. It was time to get, you know, serious. Dad began to press me about career goals. I discovered myself to be a writer and went on to a career in journalism. Dad continued his work, too, and we kept in close touch.
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Roughly ten years later, two things happened to change that. First, with the guidance of a therapist, I unearthed what appeared to be devastating family secrets. Out of respect for the privacy of living family members, I’ll not go into detail about what they were. But I will say the discovery splintered any sense of connection I felt toward Dad.
Second, in the late 1980s, my parents separated; they divorced a year or two later. My siblings and I were by then grown—the youngest in his late twenties—but the dissolution of Mom and Dad’s thirty-six year marriage had an agonizing emotional effect on us, as it does for most children of divorce. Dad remarried soon after the divorce was final. His second wife is a strong, talented, and kind woman, but the adjustment for my siblings and I took time and was fraught with confusion and pain.
In the whirlpool of that raw emotional environment I fired off a letter to the family telling the truths that I believed I’d uncovered in therapy. It was, in retrospect, a cruel thing to do, and it caused a further rupturing of family bonds. In a fit of self-righteousness, I severed contact with Dad. My siblings, for their own reasons, did the same. Each of us stayed away for different lengths of time. I was out of contact the longest; I didn’t speak to Dad for eight long years. (To my everlasting regret, I also severed contact with Mom at around the same time. I’m only relieved to note that our disconnection lasted two years—a terribly long time, to be sure, but at least one shorter that of my break with Dad.)
Dad turned 77 in 1998, the eighth year of my absence. My siblings, having admirably resolved their concerns about Dad, had by then reconciled with him. I began, way in the back of my mind, to toy with the idea of getting in touch with him, as well. (continued on page 2)