*****
We made love. It was like the way we made music, only there was no way of knowing who was singing and who was accompanying. It was more of a duet: sonata for singer and pianist. Afterwards, still not tired, we talked until dawn. She kept coming back to why I sang, why I knew so many jazz standards, when I’d first heard Billie Holliday.
So I told her the whole story. To my amazement (and pleasure) it didn’t bore her.
Lots of men say they love jazz, I told her, but I really do love it. I love it the way some persons love opera, the way some love the poetry of Matthew Arnold or Robert Frost. From my first exposure I was imbued with jazz from the top of my head to the soles of my feet.
I didn’t grow up in a musical family. There was no piano in the living room, no guitar leaning against a wall in the den. My mother, Emily, was an elementary school teacher, but we lived in a school district rich enough she didn’t have to teach music, there was a full-time music teacher. And she was perfectly content with that.
My father was a melon farmer. We lived just outside Riverside, California, and Father had a hundred and sixty acres in melons, which, given only one son and otherwise no help (except, of course, at harvest time, when the Mexicans came in and picked his melons) was a crop that guaranteed hard work for everyone. There wasn’t any time in his life for music.
Omer—my father—was a good farmer who’d never been in the right place at the right time and so was a tenant farmer all his life. He couldn’t afford one of those fancy, enclosed tractors with a sound system, he rode on his ancient Ford tractor out in the elements spring, summer and fall.
In the winter, the fields idle, Omer caught up on bookwork and mending chores, and never took Emily square dancing or night clubbing. Omer’s big thing, year after year, was to go over to the coast after the blossoms on his vines had withered, and do the amusement piers and jump in the ocean.
I discovered jazz one night when I heard a live broadcast of Stan Kenton and his orchestra from the Balboa Ballroom. I owned a crystal set I made myself, and never quite knew what I was going to get. So I listened indiscriminately to preachers preaching and “I Love a Mystery,” and “One Man’s Family,” but also to ranchero style music from Mexico and Texas Swing from Austin, and crop reports and instructional programs on glanders and other diseases of farm animals, each more horrible than the next.
When I heard the big brass section of Kenton’s band, and the solos by the saxophonists, and even Kenton’s piano solos, which never matched his composing or arranging, I wanted to hear more. I’d lie in bed with the lights out, teasing the cat whisker over the surface of the crystal and picking up gibberish from Denver and static from El Paso, but I also heard a live broadcast of Duke Ellington from, of all places, Fargo, South Dakota. It was like the gods were collecting the radio waves from the sky and sending them down to me, for my dad told me you weren’t supposed to pick up distant stations on a crystal set.
One rainy day after school, no work in the fields, I lay teasing the whisker and heard a jazz program from Santa Monica, broadcast by Joe Adams, a disc jockey who called himself, in a sophisticated accent, “Your Mayor of Melody.” I told my mother and father that evening (I was eleven) that I would start saving for a real radio. My father was against it (“We got that expensive set in the living room, the Ansley Dynaphone, why not use that?”) but my mother said it was good that I was saving my money for something, it would teach me thrift and patience. Father grumbled, but it was settled.
I studied radios. I walked down the street from school—I was in the same school district as my mother taught in but a different school—and looked at radios at Sears and at Andrews’ Television and Radio and also at the Salvation Army thrift store. Mr. Andrews explained about how the number of tubes and the size of the speaker determined how good the radio sounded, but that things like the quality of the tuner and the transformer determined how long the radio would last. He told me to decide how much I could spend (the range of possibilities went from a Japanese miniature radio for five-fifty, up to a multi-band Blaupundt, big as a Jubilee watermelon, that sold for a hundred and twenty-five bucks). He promised to give me the best deal possible. “Maybe I’ll have something in the twelve-fifty range with a ding or a scratch; sell it to you at ten percent off.”
“Gee, thanks, Mr. Andrews,” I said as I departed on cloud nine.
When I got my radio, a spiffy GE portable which cost me exactly eleven and a quarter, I soon found all sorts of programs that featured jazz, like “Harlem Matinee,” from South Central Avenue, and, late at night, “Lucky Lager Dance Time,” which came from Los Angeles, or maybe it was Balboa—I liked to think Balboa. Once in a while, if I had my homework done early, I had a change of pace, listening to “Peter Potter’s Platter Parade,” which led in with a jazzy version of “Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater” and signed-off with a piece about loving a parade, a platter parade, performed by Slim Gaylord and Slam Stewart. Peter Potter did popular music, like ballads and novelty songs by Doris Day or Patti Page, with an occasional swing band piece thrown in, or a song by Jo Stafford.
“I was in love with Jo Stafford,” I told Annie. “Her voice was like diving into the surf on a hot summer’s day.”
“Goodness. I was in love with Gene Krupa,” she said, “but it was because he looked so wild. I wanted to smoke Mary Jane just to be old enough to date Gene Krupa.”
Thank God it was Friday and we could sleep in, because it was getting towards dawn when she told me about her life’s story.