Miles, Me, and the Farmgirl Epiphany
What were the odds?
I came to appreciate jazz – or at least I came to the path to learn how to appreciate it, because it’s a road you never get off of if you’re doing it right, and I’m still relatively new to it – late and accidentally. But it’s probably no exaggeration to say one sentence in Miles Davis’s autobiography changed my life; the extent to which I am still not sure, though I can guarantee 8495Jazz wouldn’t exist otherwise.
As it was to many people in my late Baby Boomer cohort, jazz for me was an afterthought to the behemoth of rock. My mother remained a big band fan all her life. Though the depth of her consideration was that something that sounded “nice” was good, she liked Al Hirt and Herb Alpert, and one of her most prized possessions was a letter from Glenn Miller she received two years before he died. But I found no juice in her preferred music.
And my musical education, such as it was, consisted wholly in learning to read and play notes on a page with no context supplied – like learning how to read by only reciting individual letters without ever being taught how those letters connected into words. Anyway, after six years of playing naught but faux-classical, Sousa-derived band music, and with no effort made to connect Mozart to Memphis or Muscle Shoals for me by my instructors, I opted out. I didn’t pick a horn up for almost 40 years, compelled by my son’s French horn practice to want to make music again. Though I still leaned heavily toward the blues and considered starting from scratch with a Telecaster, in the end I bought a trumpet because I remembered the technical parts of playing and wanted to get up to an acceptable level of performance fairly quickly.
At first, I had no goals loftier than playing “Jingle Bells” at Christmas, “Auld Lang Syne” on New Year’s Eve, and “Taps” on Memorial Day at high noon on the front porch. But I also thought that, as a dedicated autodidact, I should dig into the culture of the instrument this time around – and of course, all roads led to Miles. So I bought his autobiography and dove in.
Miles had a pretty well-worn image in pop culture – genius, angry, arrogant with fans, didn’t like white people. So when I arrived at this passage in the book about the scene at Gil Evans’s apartment in the late 1940s and early 1950s, it was as if I were struck by lightning:
“Gil's basement apartment over on 55th Street was where a lot of musicians hung out. Gil's place was so dark you didn't know whether it was night or day. Max, Diz, Bird, Gerry Mulligan, George Russell, Blossom Dearie, John Lewis, Lee Konitz, and Johnny Carisi used to be at Gil's all the time.”
Blossom Dearie – darling of the Manhattan (and London and Paris) cocktail set, the wise-way-beyond-her voice coquette, and maybe (or maybe not) the woman whom Miles called “the only white woman with soul.”
The Farmgirl Epiphany
But here’s where the thunderbolt hit – Blossom was also my mother’s best friend in the small farm town high school in Cairo, N.Y., from which they graduated in 1942. My Mom, who was the class valedictorian at 16, had to cool her heels for two years on the hardscrabble farm she’d been born on. And when she left, her destiny took her no further than 50 miles downriver to Poughkeepsie, an admin job for IBM’s top executives in the research lab, and a small brick ranch house she bought herself in 1953, in which she and my Dad lived the rest of their lives.
I have a very hazy recall of whether Blossom and Mom saw each other after high school. As my memory recalls it from my early childhood, they made it to Blossom’s New York apartment at some point but “some weirdo” made her feel uncomfortable. My Dad said he thought he remembered my Mom calling Blossom only to have the “weirdo” give her the brush-off on the phone, so they never made the trip. Either way, they did not stay in touch. And I never got a chance to interview Blossom during my music writing days and tell her who I was; she never played a gig in our coverage area.
But that passage sparked me. It completely changed my perceptions of Miles. It also inspired me to look, as an interested layman with a horn in his hand, for connections between musicians and between songs themselves that bridged where I had been as a music lover to where I might go. Cases in point for folks raised on rock; the first four notes of the melody in Little Feat’s “Dixie Chicken” are also the first four notes of “When The Saints Go Marching in.” And there’s not much of a leap between two songs hardly any of us put together, Glenn Miller’s “Moonlight Serenade” and The Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction;” just some minor tweaking and stretching of the 1-2-3b major key blues gives you the relationship between the two songs.
Making progress as a student of music depends on making these connections and trying to decipher what’s universal and what’s inside baseball. There’s no distinct line, of course, it’s a tug of war that never ends. Just this week, Herb Alpert said this to a New York Times reporter doing a story on his 50th album: “There are lots of artists who try to impress other musicians with their playing,” he said. “They’ll play these dizzying things, and you say, ‘Wow that’s fabulous!’ But is it touching anyone?” (So maybe Mom had a point with liking Herb)
And the best way to touch people is, of course, to make them feel connected somehow without making it feel like a chore to them. That’s not to say they should not make an effort, but that the spark of reward has to be there somewhere. In 2019, Wallace Roney, whom most jazz historians consider to be Miles’s one true protege on the trumpet, played The Side Door in Old Lyme. And I had to know if he had ever met my mother’s old best friend. At the break, I introduced myself and asked him.
“No,” he said. “I never did. But Miles loved her. He really loved her.” I thanked him for coming up to Old Lyme and then we talked horns a little bit.
I am grateful we got to see Wallace when we did. He died in March 2020, one of the earliest casualties of the Covid-19 pandemic. But to the extent possible, I had closed the loop.
Two legends, Blossom and Billy Taylor, do one of her witty classics
Out and about in SNE with 8495Jazz
Upcoming club and concert highlights (all information is current at press time, please confirm by contacting the venue):
8495Jazz Wild Card Gig of the Week
Taft School instrumental music director T.J. Thompson is ubiquitous in the northwestern Connecticut music scene. From club gigs to summer shows at town parks and Make Music Day venues every summer solstice, T.J. brings it big: his trio won the IMEA Jazz Artist of the Year for their recent album Take Two: The Sound of Playing. T.J. and his band play a combination of originals along with the soul, blues, and jazz of New Orleans, Memphis, and beyond. He’ll be at The Buttonwood in Middletown, CT, Friday night (Sept. 27) with Sarah Uyar, trumpet; Jamie Berlyn, clarinet and bari sax; Nathan Davis Jr., trombone; Charlie Mann, tuba; and James Allen on drums. Catch him if you can! Show starts at 8, $20 cover.
VFW Post 399, Westport, CT
Phil Bowler and Friends (bass), Thur., Sept. 26, 7:30 pm. $15.76-$20.76
Palace Theater, Waterbury, CT
Jim Royle’s (drums) Caribbean Connection, Fri., Sept. 27, sets at 7 and 9 pm. $40.
Firehouse 12, New Haven, CT
Taylor Ho Bynum/Alexander Hawkins Duo (cornet/piano), Fri., Sept. 27, sets at 8:30 and 10. $20 first set, $15 second set.
Elicit Brewery, Manchester, CT
Hartford Jazz Orchestra w/ Chris Morrison (guitar), Mon., Sept. 23, 7 pm. Free.
Worth The (short!) Road Trip
Northampton Jazz Festival, Sept. 27-28, Northampton, MA
Yeah, formally a little north of the 8495 by an hour, but Northampton is a GREAT music town. Jazz Strut at various venues Friday night (music is free), free shows indoors and out throughout town Saturday from 11 am – 6:30 pm, and ticketed show (Anat Cohen Quartetinho) at Academy of Music at 7:30.
Jams
Cafe Nine, New Haven CT
New Haven Jazz Underground jam, usually 2nd and 4th Tuesday of every month: Highlights include Ed Cherry (guitar), Tue., Oct. 8 7 pm, session at 8, free admission
Jazz Societies and Organizations (great info on events, festivals, and more)
Jazz Society of Fairfield County
You can help make 8495Jazz better. Share it with your music-loving friends. Share gig information and story suggestions to 8495jazz@gmail.com