He Never Knew His Love Was Heard

I didn’t discover Dave Brubeck and his jazz quartet until I was in the Army. That was in 1955-58. And then I fell for his music in a big way. I bought all his albums and still have two of his most famous 33 1/3 records: ‘Jazz Goes to College,’ from 1954, which was the group’s first album; and their third and most famous album, ‘Brubeck Time,’ from 1955.

(Columbia Records, for some reason, later reissued that 1955 album on its Odyssey label and renamed it, ‘A Place in Time – The Dave Brubeck Quartet.’ I have that Odyssey recording, as well.)

Over the years, I must have collected 10 of the Brubeck group’s 33 1/3 albums, but have given away or sold all of them, except the two I mentioned. I even had their second album — the hard-to-find 1954 Storyville album — on 45 rpm.

I feel I’m telling you about the Dead Sea Scrolls, when I mention all these old 33 1/3s and 45s. At one point, there were heated discussions among classical music critics about which sounded better: the 33 1/3s or the new, digital CDs.

In the end, it didn’t matter. In America, the new always wins, regardless of the quality. The mantra says that “New Is Better,” and that’s that — whether or not it’s true. There’s a bit of a movement back to 33’s. Even bookstores, like Barnes and Noble, have a small section of 33’s. And music stores that sell second-hand CDs always have a 33-record section.

But it mainly has to do with nostalgia. Most young people are streaming nowadays. They don’t buy records or CDs. They just plug tiny ear buds into their ears and log on to some invisible digital service and never think about the physical space where music begins and ends. They never think about placing a needle on wax or pushing a button on a tape recorder. For them, music just happens. It comes out of the ether, like angel dust. It has no beginning or end. Everything is on a loop of timeless sound.

The great thing about records is that you have to TURN THEM OVER and play Side B. You have to engage the process. You have to get physically involved or it won’t happen. The music depends on you doing your part. Nowadays, young people don’t even know where the music comes from. It just arrives on a digital stream of quantum nothingness.

My cousin Nancy is married to a man from New Zealand who has a sophisticated collection of 33 1/3 records and plays them on high-end turntables. He often goes into their basement room to play his records in the quiet of his private musical sanctum..

There was a time when I had hundreds — hundreds !– of mainly classical 33 1/3 albums. But for reasons of space, I have cut that number by two-thirds.

But I still have Brubeck and Paul Desmond on 33 1/3 and Sinatra and Chris Connor and June Christy and Stan Getz and Errol Garner and Miles Davis and Bob Dylan and Crosby, Stills and Nash, and others. And the sound has that warm, modulated nuance you get with records that gets washed out and sterilized by the digital clarity of compact discs.

The piece on Brubeck Time that has most charmed and bewitched me over the 66 years I’ve listened to it is the one that has bewitched millions of listeners over the decades.
That’s the piece called “Audrey,” written and exquisitely performed by the saxophonist, Paul Desmond — the musician who elevated the Brubeck Quartet into the region of the gods.

The New Yorker magazine two weeks ago told the story about how the melody, “Audrey,” came to be. In a serious of 12 illustrated panels, the magazine relayed the story of Desmond, a single man who never married, but who had a serious crush on the actress Audrey Hepburn.

Desmond wrote his famous piece, “Audrey,” trying to capture the essence, as he felt it, of the actress he loved from afar. They never met.

When the Brubeck Quartet was performing at Basin Street, a couple of blocks from where Hepburn was starring in a Broadway play, Desmond asked Brubeck to take a break in the musical set each evening at a certain time.

Desmond would then leave Basin Street and walk two blocks to watch Audrey Hepburn leave the theater each night after her performance and get into her limousine. Then Desmond would return to Basin Street and perform the second set with Brubeck and the group.

Desmond never knew whether Hepburn had ever heard “Audrey,” and if she did, whether she liked it or felt anything special about it. He remained single and died in 1977.

When Hepburn died 16 years later, her husband contacted Brubeck to ask if the quartet would perform “Audrey” at a memorial for Hepburn to be held at the United Nations. Of course, Desmond had been long dead by then.

Brubeck was surprised by the request. He didn’t know that the husband was even aware of Desmond’s “Audrey.”

Oh, yes, said the husband. “My wife listened to that song every night before she went to bed.”

Almost Country Music

There’s no logic to it. And why bother anyway? Why that term would appear now doesn’t make any sense. And yet, it’s there and has been there for the past two days.

Somehow or other, the small incident I remember — the small thought in and of itself — just showed up in my mind two days ago and keeps lingering there, even though it doesn’t seem attached to anything I recently did or thought about. Why hasn’t it just disappeared, the way most of my other thoughts do?

It’s true that I do hear Mozart a lot on the radio. I’m lucky to have two nearby classical music stations that I can listen to over the air. I don’t have to ‘stream’ anything on my computer.

And, of course, Mozart gets played a lot on classical music stations. He wrote a lot of music — wonderful music — and orchestras have been recording his music for nearly a century.

So it’s not a novelty. It’s not that I heard a Mozart piece a couple of days ago that triggered this persistent memory.

And I haven’t been thinking of Joan, who’s been dead for decades or of her brother Paul or his wife Kit, who had the hots for me, or of Romano, who Joan married after she and I separated in Geneva after our being together for three years. They’re all dead and have been dead for a long time. And I could mention other people who were part of that group who are also dead. Everyone from that time is dead, except for me.

But I’m thinking of Joan now, because we were together when I heard what it is I’ve been recalling for the past two days.

It was 56 years ago. I’d been in Zagreb for three weeks visiting my Croatian relatives, and then I took the train to Vienna, where I met Joan, who had flown to Wolfsburg to buy a new Volkswagen ‘Beetle’ and then driven to Vienna to wait for me.

We stayed in Vienna for a couple of days and then began our three month tour through Europe. It was after that long and slow and intimate tour through Austria and Italy and Greece and Yugoslavia and Switzerland that she and I finally called it quits.

But it was at the beginning of the trip, when we left Vienna and stopped for a couple of days in Salzburg, that we encountered the thing that has lodged itself in my mind.

Salzburg was Mozart’s birthplace, and the city has made the most of that. Back in 1965, when we were there, spring was in the air, the tree buds were bursting, every other music hall was featuring some musical event featuring its favorite local son.

We attended a puppet show by the famous Marionetten von Salzburg, the most carefully and precisely and beautifully crafted marionettes in the world. Each figure is a precious work of art, rendered with such exquisite detail that you half believe it is at least half-alive. We saw Mozart’s “The Magic Flute.”

But it was on the next day — May 14th — that we attended a chamber music concert in the Salzurger Schloss Konzerte at which I overheard a brief conversation that has lodged in my brain.

It was a concert of Mozart’s lesser work, his so-called volksmusik — folk music or country music. No music by Mozart — no matter how minor — would go unplayed in Salzburg.

We arrived a few minutes early. It was still mid-May, not quite the shank of the tourist season. The hordes of tourists wouldn’t arrive for another month.

Our travel would be slow and casual and intimate. There was no place we had to be at any particular time. Joan had cut her ties to her previous life and was ready to begin something new in Rome. I, seven years younger than her, had quit my job at the agricultural experiment station and was prepared to remain in Europe for as long as my money held out. In the end, I would spend seven months traveling and staying put, from my beginning passage on a Yugoslav freighter until my final month and a half happily hunkered down in Cornwall, England.

In between, there was Mozart and Greek plays and Shakespeare in Dubrovnik and all the ordinary stuff that comes with living day to day, . It was the trip of a lifetime, with few boundaries and no regrets.

Joan and I took our seats in the small chamber music hall. Before the concert began, we could hear an Austrian woman sitting behind us explain in English to her American visitor what to expect from the Mozart program.

“It’s music that Mozart wrote about the country,” she said in her German accent. “It’s like what you Americans call ‘Hilly-Billy music.’ “

Hilly-Billy music.

Good god. That’s the phrase that has bounced around in my brain for the past two days.

Hilly-Billy.

After 56 years, that comically-erroneous term has come back to relive its private past inside my brain, like a homing pigeon flung free of a cosmic vortex and looking for some handy landing place inside a brain distracted by an eye that’s gone bad.

Hilly-Billy. A melancholy tune about a baby that does not get thrown off the Tallahatchie Bridge, but grows up, instead, to play third base for the Texas Rangers.

No More Stories

No one tells me stories anymore. No one tells me a narrative about what they’ve done or what someone they know has done or about what they remember or about what they did when they were 10 years old or 35 or what their uncle or grandmother did on a certain day or what the dog did on the afternoon after the funeral or what happened when the grocer refused to take back the stale bread or where they went after the train arrived too late to make a connection or what the first mate said when he looked through the binoculars and saw a ship heading straight toward him.

No one tells me anything like that anymore.

They used to tell me stories like that in the old days. In the days before the Internet, before wi-fi, before Streaming and Facebook and Twitter and before television took over the national imagination.

People used to have interesting and individual stories to tell — sometimes just little anecdotes — about what they’ve done or what they heard the guy down the street did or about what happened when their cousin tried to get a block of ice from the ice house in the middle of August or what their aunt did when she got a letter from a cousin she thought was long dead.

Things like that.

I never hear any stories from people I know or strangers I meet . . . unless they’re in their seventies and eighties and remember how it used to be when people talked to each other face to face and told each other about the events in their lives that had small plots and concrete details.

But we live life so fast nowadays that people say they don’t have time to tell such stories or to listen to them. ‘Time means money,” they say. Efficiency is what makes America Great Again.

And how can you complete with all the movies on TV that tell more dramatic stories with handsome men and good-looking women? Fictional stories that don’t take place in the real world with real people? Stories that aren’t lived by the people watching them?

We have turned over everything personal and creative to the entertainment industry. Our lives aren’t worth stories anymore.

Or if we think we may have a story to tell, it has to fit within certain technological boundaries. We measure our narratives by the character-count of the keyboard. We talk in virtual diction. We seek an audience in nano-seconds.

We treat a story by someone we know as time-wasted. “Get to the punch line!”

If Mark Twain were to reappear today and start telling his made-up stories about people living in the world the rest of us live in, someone in the audience would stand up and demand that he hurry up and stop wasting everybody’s time with small details and pointless asides.

“Get to the point,” the audience would shout. “Who cares about a jumping frog of Calaverus County?”

“Tell us about Lady Gaga!”

What I miss is the kind of story that an old man named Fred told me a long time ago in Boston about the time he was living on a boat in Boston harbor and a woman showed up he hadn’t seen in since childhood in Canada and she asked Fred to sleep with her because her husband was infertile and they wanted a child and that as a young girl, she had always loved Fred and would want him to father her a child. And Fred did it. He slept with the woman. And afterwards she left his boat and walked down the dock to where her husband waited for her at the corner.

“I heard that she had a child,” Fred told me. “A daughter. That was my daughter” he said.

That’s the kind of story I miss, the kind I never hear anymore.

Snow Closings on the Radio

It was snowing too hard this morning for my newspapers to be delivered. So I didn’t get my daily New York Times and New Haven Register. The front porch is thick with snow, 4 or 5 inches. Out in the street and on the cars, it’s more like 8 to 9 inches. And it’s still snowing and doesn’t look as if it’s in the mood to stop anytime soon.

I used to like snow, back when I was a kid. I liked riding a sled and throwing snowballs and just looking at the snow, as the trees and bushes hunched over from the weight of the white blanket.

And I liked it when school was cancelled. My family would turn on the radio at breakfast and listen to the local news and wait until the man read the list of school-closings. And when we’d hear my school mentioned, my heart would leap with happiness and I would take off my school clothes and put on my dungarees and sweat shirt and go to my room and think that today would be one of the real good ones in my unfolding life.

But today, with computers and the internet and Zoom and all the other digital rat traps, kids don’t get as many ‘snow days’ as they used to. Now they have ‘distance learning,’ which means they no longer can take a break from school and steal some unexpected vacation time.

So much of what used to be is still better than what is now. Listening to the radio, for instance. I have always been a dedicated radio listener and I still am. I have a radio in every room, including the bathroom. And not just some cheap transistor type, but well-made portable AM/FM/Shortwave radios with good speakers. I have 8 radios, all either plugged in or running on batteries.

I love the one-to-one intimacy of it. A voice coming out of a box and speaking directly to me. No pictures, no graphics, no fluffy hair or slick tans. No makeup, no digital flashcards, no forced smiles, no charts, no text running at the bottom of the picture, no showbiz. Just a voice calmly speaking to me, playing classical music that fills my room, telling me the news on NPR or the BBC directed at my brain, not trying to dazzle my eye.

A conversation, an interlude, not a whiz-bang, over-hyped, hell’s-a-poppin’ spectacle.

The radio has been my close friend all my life, way before there was such a thing as television, let alone internet streaming. I grew up on radio — on the popular music of the day, the radio dramas, baseball games, comedy shows, the news at six o‘clock. You got to use your imagination. You had to figure things out, just by listening to the words. That’s how the radio got inside you, how you made it personal. The person was speaking directly to you, not to some camera, but to you at home in your chair, in your bed, on your porch, in your car.

Nowadays, people walk around with a thin, plastic device hooked into earphones that feeds them music or talk shows but in a dehydrated form. Those aren’t radios. They’re hearing devices, something a deaf person could make good use of. But there’s no sound in a room, no open-air camaraderie, no sharing with someone else.

How great it used to be when my brother and I would sit in our cottage and listen to the Red Sox on the radio, with Ned Martin and Jim Woods doing the play-by-play. You can’t do that with a thin sliver of plastic stuck in your pocket.

This isn’t nostalgia. This is a cultural lament. The waving of farewell to a life that used to take its time to make sense. A life that encouraged you to take pleasure in the small things, the slow, impractical, personal things, before life became too fast and too slick and too jumpy and too categorical and too insistent, and too complicated and too hysterical.

The internet and its Facebooks and Twitters and digital cults have plunged the world into an endless loop of lies and madness.

People are no longer happy. But you can bet that 90 percent of them are plugged in and on-line.

They have embraced the Devil and he has escorted them to Hell in the guise of ‘Choice and Speed.’

As for me: thanks for asking, but I think I’ll just listen to the radio . . . until the batteries run down or the electricity is short-circuited by a Russian hack.