About a year ago, I sat sunk in gloom, staring moodily at the far wall in my living room. Never mind why, multiple reasons, but at that moment I focused on a picture of an apple hanging on the wall. I'd taken it a couple of years before, liked it, and printed it out on a desktop printer. That night, I decided I wanted the damn thing properly printed and framed. I wanted it big, hanging on my wall, daily evidence that occasionally I did something worth doing.
When I got it framed, the gallery owner said I should put it out as a limited-edition print, and that I should do a similar series, and maybe it could be a show. That didn't seem quite real to me—as much as I've always liked photography and the visual arts in general, I've never even dreamed of doing things in the fine-arts world. But I was pleased and flattered, and flirted with the idea that I had some real artistic talent lurking untapped in me. And just for fun, at least in the beginning, I fooled around some more, and a picture of pears in particular turned out well, so I got that framed too. And the gallery owner said put together 10 or 20 like it and we'd do an exhibit in a year or so.
And the show is happening in two days. I still don't quite believe it. I just don't see myself as an artist, really. But I'd better learn how to, I think, or I'm going to be standing around at the reception smiling abstractedly to myself like a mental patient at how funny life can be. From that one evening a year ago, alone and depressed, what comes? An evening two days from now in which your honored servant will kinda sorta be the center of attention in a room full of light and warmth, people coming and going, wine and cheese, all that. Very, very strange, the way things happen, don't you think?
When I got it framed, the gallery owner said I should put it out as a limited-edition print, and that I should do a similar series, and maybe it could be a show. That didn't seem quite real to me—as much as I've always liked photography and the visual arts in general, I've never even dreamed of doing things in the fine-arts world. But I was pleased and flattered, and flirted with the idea that I had some real artistic talent lurking untapped in me. And just for fun, at least in the beginning, I fooled around some more, and a picture of pears in particular turned out well, so I got that framed too. And the gallery owner said put together 10 or 20 like it and we'd do an exhibit in a year or so.
And the show is happening in two days. I still don't quite believe it. I just don't see myself as an artist, really. But I'd better learn how to, I think, or I'm going to be standing around at the reception smiling abstractedly to myself like a mental patient at how funny life can be. From that one evening a year ago, alone and depressed, what comes? An evening two days from now in which your honored servant will kinda sorta be the center of attention in a room full of light and warmth, people coming and going, wine and cheese, all that. Very, very strange, the way things happen, don't you think?
First of all, I've always said that people's dreams are always boring to other people—"I dreamed I was in this gondola like in Venice, you know, going through this long cave, and I turned and looked and the gondolier was my grandfather and blah blah blah"—it just doesn't work. That said, let me tell you about this one dream I had the other night. I dreamed I was kind of witnessing the investigation of a brutal murder (life's been stressful lately, by the way) and at one point the murderer is at the police station under the mistaken impression that he's just being questioned. He's one of those brutal murderers who are also so stupid that it becomes a kind of touching innocence. In his case, he's too stupid to realize that the prosecutors have a slam-dunk circumstantial case against him. He's fidgeting in the chair he's handcuffed to, and he says, "I want to go home now." And this one prosecutor is shuffling through some papers and says, not even looking at him, "You are home." I thought that was actually a pretty good snippet of cop-show-style hard-bitten irony for a person to write when he was literally asleep. Sort of wish I could do it consistently while I was awake, and I imagine my creditors would be happy about that too, come to think of it.
I hate to break my long blogging silence with criticism of the media and my family on this lovely late-summer day (temps in the low 70s in mid-morning, thank you whatever gods may be) but sheesh and double sheesh. I was at a family dinner and people start up about UFOs. These are not stupid people in raw IQ terms, but if they've won any prizes lately for critical thinking, logic, or skepticism I haven't been informed. The subject of UFOs came up, and to be perfectly frank, I take two letter grades off my estimate of a person's intellect if I hear any references made to this subject. I can't take seriously the idea that vehicles from other solar systems are flitting around the earth like fireflies and have done so for thousands of years, generally avoiding contact but somehow we manage to see them occasionally, to what I suppose must be their embarrassed surprise, the way you might accidentally barge in on an undressed person when you're staying with friends at a beach house. Presumably they don't want to talk to us, right? Because they would if they could, right? (Well, except the one time when they landed and helped the Egyptians build the pyramids. The Egyptians didn't mention it because they wanted the credit for building the pyramids themselves.) And yet these creatures who have the technology to cross the vast distances of interstellar space in vehicles that are regularly described as behaving in ways that are unrestricted by Newtonian physics are nevertheless bumblers who get spotted by us all the time. Saw you, space boy! Ha ha ha ha ha!!!!! You're it!
Let's just say this does not, to me, add up. And yet my own mother was nattering on about how the British government released documents about an encounter with a UFO that Churchill ordered covered up. This was all over the news. Well folks, I checked it out. What the documents reveal, if they reveal anything at all, is this:
I wish I could joke about this, but to be honest, it's not really very funny. It's the media equivalent of Chinese food products that are poisonous. Buyers shouldn't have to beware quite that much. My mom now believes that Churchill covered up a UFO incident. The conversation moved on from UFOs to the Big Bang theory—I should mention that none of my family, including and especially me, has any background in physics—and I'd like to tell you what was said but suddenly, on this bright and sunny day, I'm feeling very depressed.
Let's just say this does not, to me, add up. And yet my own mother was nattering on about how the British government released documents about an encounter with a UFO that Churchill ordered covered up. This was all over the news. Well folks, I checked it out. What the documents reveal, if they reveal anything at all, is this:
A letter claiming Winston Churchill ordered a 50 year cover-up of a wartime encounterI further found the letter was from a son of a pilot or something. People write letters and make claims about all kinds of fun stuff all the time. How did the media play it? Here's one fairly typical example: Headline: UFO files: Winston Churchill 'feared panic' over Second World War RAF incident. Subhead: Winston Churchill was accused of ordering a cover-up of a Second World War encounter between a UFO and a RAF bomber because he feared public "panic" and loss of faith in religion, newly released secret files disclose.
between a UFO and a RAF bomber over the English coastline in the later stages of The
Second World War was investigated by MoD in 1999. No written record of the incident
was found; papers can be found at DEFE 24/2013 (p205-209, p273-77)
I wish I could joke about this, but to be honest, it's not really very funny. It's the media equivalent of Chinese food products that are poisonous. Buyers shouldn't have to beware quite that much. My mom now believes that Churchill covered up a UFO incident. The conversation moved on from UFOs to the Big Bang theory—I should mention that none of my family, including and especially me, has any background in physics—and I'd like to tell you what was said but suddenly, on this bright and sunny day, I'm feeling very depressed.
So here's what happened—about a month ago I gave up on my liquid-damaged keyboard, got a new one, found I had to install the software to get certain keys to work, and as soon as I installed it boom—no computer. It crashed every time I started it, a form of crashing called a "kernel panic." In hundreds of starts I got to the desktop twice, and then all hope ended.
What's that? Was I backed up completely?
No.
Are you?
All right then.
Anyway, I yell at the keyboard manufacturer for a session or two and then take it into the shop. Young man pops the back off and points. Several of the capacitors had this beige cheesy substance coming of of them. They might as well have been brains oozing out, because it meant the logic board was gone. But why, I wailed, did the catastrophic failure happen exactly when I installed the new software?
The young guy looked straight at me. "Coincidence," he said. And with a sinking heart, I realized he was right. It just wasn't a stupid glitchy problem, like corrupted startup software, it was a serious hardware problem and my whole computing world, which is basically my career, was in jeopardy.
They spent three weeks trying to fix it, and in the end they couldn't. While that was going on, my laptop suddenly died. Hard drive on that one. No computers. Dead in the water. I had to go to the library to get my e-mail. I couldn't show clients the work I was doing for them or get the images printed for a fast-approaching art gallery show or do one damn thing to further my flagging fortunes. It was kinda depressing, if you really want to know.
But I got a new drive in the laptop, and put the hard drive from the desktop in a doohickey called an "external enclosure" that enabled the laptop to read it. I'm most of the way back (and totally backed up, it goes without saying) except for certain technical things I won't bore you with. Long story short, uh, hi! I'm back. This has been a pain to deal with. If there's an organization that goes around and lets backup slackers tell their sad stories, the way the Salvation Army has former drunks as speakers, I'd like to sign up.
What's that? Was I backed up completely?
No.
Are you?
All right then.
Anyway, I yell at the keyboard manufacturer for a session or two and then take it into the shop. Young man pops the back off and points. Several of the capacitors had this beige cheesy substance coming of of them. They might as well have been brains oozing out, because it meant the logic board was gone. But why, I wailed, did the catastrophic failure happen exactly when I installed the new software?
The young guy looked straight at me. "Coincidence," he said. And with a sinking heart, I realized he was right. It just wasn't a stupid glitchy problem, like corrupted startup software, it was a serious hardware problem and my whole computing world, which is basically my career, was in jeopardy.
They spent three weeks trying to fix it, and in the end they couldn't. While that was going on, my laptop suddenly died. Hard drive on that one. No computers. Dead in the water. I had to go to the library to get my e-mail. I couldn't show clients the work I was doing for them or get the images printed for a fast-approaching art gallery show or do one damn thing to further my flagging fortunes. It was kinda depressing, if you really want to know.
But I got a new drive in the laptop, and put the hard drive from the desktop in a doohickey called an "external enclosure" that enabled the laptop to read it. I'm most of the way back (and totally backed up, it goes without saying) except for certain technical things I won't bore you with. Long story short, uh, hi! I'm back. This has been a pain to deal with. If there's an organization that goes around and lets backup slackers tell their sad stories, the way the Salvation Army has former drunks as speakers, I'd like to sign up.
You can ask anyone—I'm not one of these people that talks about living your dreams or following your bliss or any of that. Many of the dreams we dream are stupid dreams that will never come true, and much of the bliss we follow is a butterfly bliss that will dance ahead of us, effortlessly eluding our childish grasp, until we wise up enough to realize that bliss comes when it comes and doesn't much like pursuit, actually.
And yet.
And yet.
A few decades ago, a friend came back from his freshperson year at college with a bunch of jazz records. We were both crazy about music, and this was a revelation. I listened and listened and listened, and by the time I was 20 I was convinced I had to learn jazz piano. And I put my best effort into it. I took lessons and listened and practiced and studied and when I got out of college I joined commercial bands so I could justify practicing more. The drummer in the first band was the friend who got me hooked in the first place. I did that for three years. But in the end I saw that I wasn't ever going to be the jazz pianist I wanted to be. And I didn't like the professional musician life, the Top 40, the clubs that smelled like stale beer and cigarettes when you took your gear in the afternoon before the job. Everyone wanted to believe that I loved it, because that's the mythology, but actually I didn't love it. "I play bad music for bad money for bad people," I would tell them. And at the end of three years in the business, I quit the whole thing.
I played with people every now and then, but after a while I discovered the newspaper business, and then magazines, and photography too, and that suited me better, really. I still had the piano, but I played only now and then, sometimes only once every couple of months. And that went on for, well, a few decades. The vinyl albums sunk further and further back in the closet, and music mattered less and less.
And then a few years ago I went to a party and ran into a guy I had worked for years before. We got friendly, and it turned out he had been a bass player with a successful rock band in the 80s, and he was interested in playing jazz now and then. Just casually, no big deal. So why not? We got together a couple of times, enjoyed it, made it a regular thing. We started playing for parties he and his wife had. We started thinking more seriously about it, researching tunes we wanted to play, talking about technique, inviting other musician friends to sit in.
Then a drummer came by to play with us, and we liked him and it seemed mutual, so that became a regular thing. The drummer started egging us on to play for the public, and we started considering the idea, not without some trepidation. And then the bass player sagely decided that the way to make jazz connect with the public was to have a singer. So he advertised on Craigslist, and got an answer, and this nice person who sang very well and was good at lining up jobs started singing with us.
And then she signed us up for a set at a little ad-hoc jazz festival in Philadelphia.
This set me off on months of feverish practice. It seemed far off when it first was arranged. Surely, I thought, I could bootstrap myself to the point where the one set would be no big deal. But we all have demons, don't we? I've discovered that. Every single person I've ever met is walking around with demons inside. My own demons said I wasn't good enough and would have stage fright that would make this a disaster and who did I think I was, anyway, wanting to play jazz in public.
I told the demons they could take a flying, basically. I practiced and practiced. I went to open-mike events and played. I was nearly hallucinating with nervousness the first time, somewhat better the next, a little better the next.
And then the big day.
Was I nervous, when the time came? Yes, folks, I was nervous. I played very tentatively, until the end, when we played the big rousing fast number. By then I knew it was in the bag, so I played aggressively for that one last tune. And that was as good as it could have been. I couldn't have played with masterful confidence this first time, it simply wasn't a realistic goal. But I kept it together, played pretty much the right chords at the right times, held my own. It wasn't a disaster. It was actually, at times, a lot of fun. I'd grin at the other players, making a point of enjoying the whole thing.I was making music, pretty good music, with my friends. Occasionally I would risk a glimpse at the audience, especially when they were clapping. It was like looking down when you're climbing a mountain, but looking down is where the thrill comes from.
So finally we hit the last big chord for the finish, and we were done. No humiliation, no disaster. Just a sense of jumping a big hurdle, and landing safely. "I'll take that," I said to the drummer, as I stood up. And then I packed up my gear, just like back in the day, and went and got a free beer that pretty much amounted to my pay for the occasion, and sat and listened to another band play. They were really good. I enjoyed their music. But I also enjoyed the idea that I'd taken a risk, but done the work beforehand and maintained the right attitudes and handled the fear well enough. I'd played piano in a jazz trio for the better part of an hour, in front of an audience, and lived to tell the tale. It wasn't perfect. But I hadn't let my friends down. And that matters, folks. That matters.
So we'll build on this. I'll play jazz in public more, and better. That youthful dream will get fulfilled, if it be Allah's will. Better late than never, no doubt about it.
I don't know what this means about dreams in general. But I know one thing—if you want to play an instrument, or learn to draw or paint, or do anything at all, if there's anything that you think you could care about, give it some effort. And give it some time. Maybe you'll only learn how hard it is to do that particular thing. At the very least, that makes you appreciate people who are accomplished in the field. But maybe you'll get somewhere yourself. You won't know if you don't try. I can tell you that it feels good, getting something accomplished. Getting the work done, playing your parts, not letting your friends down. Putting a little more good music out there. Brightening people's afternoon on a hot day in the city. I can remember, you know, the days so long ago when the conviction came on me more and more that I wanted to play jazz on the piano. And yesterday, I did. It was a long time coming, but it was worth the wait.
And yet.
And yet.
A few decades ago, a friend came back from his freshperson year at college with a bunch of jazz records. We were both crazy about music, and this was a revelation. I listened and listened and listened, and by the time I was 20 I was convinced I had to learn jazz piano. And I put my best effort into it. I took lessons and listened and practiced and studied and when I got out of college I joined commercial bands so I could justify practicing more. The drummer in the first band was the friend who got me hooked in the first place. I did that for three years. But in the end I saw that I wasn't ever going to be the jazz pianist I wanted to be. And I didn't like the professional musician life, the Top 40, the clubs that smelled like stale beer and cigarettes when you took your gear in the afternoon before the job. Everyone wanted to believe that I loved it, because that's the mythology, but actually I didn't love it. "I play bad music for bad money for bad people," I would tell them. And at the end of three years in the business, I quit the whole thing.
I played with people every now and then, but after a while I discovered the newspaper business, and then magazines, and photography too, and that suited me better, really. I still had the piano, but I played only now and then, sometimes only once every couple of months. And that went on for, well, a few decades. The vinyl albums sunk further and further back in the closet, and music mattered less and less.
And then a few years ago I went to a party and ran into a guy I had worked for years before. We got friendly, and it turned out he had been a bass player with a successful rock band in the 80s, and he was interested in playing jazz now and then. Just casually, no big deal. So why not? We got together a couple of times, enjoyed it, made it a regular thing. We started playing for parties he and his wife had. We started thinking more seriously about it, researching tunes we wanted to play, talking about technique, inviting other musician friends to sit in.
Then a drummer came by to play with us, and we liked him and it seemed mutual, so that became a regular thing. The drummer started egging us on to play for the public, and we started considering the idea, not without some trepidation. And then the bass player sagely decided that the way to make jazz connect with the public was to have a singer. So he advertised on Craigslist, and got an answer, and this nice person who sang very well and was good at lining up jobs started singing with us.
And then she signed us up for a set at a little ad-hoc jazz festival in Philadelphia.
This set me off on months of feverish practice. It seemed far off when it first was arranged. Surely, I thought, I could bootstrap myself to the point where the one set would be no big deal. But we all have demons, don't we? I've discovered that. Every single person I've ever met is walking around with demons inside. My own demons said I wasn't good enough and would have stage fright that would make this a disaster and who did I think I was, anyway, wanting to play jazz in public.
I told the demons they could take a flying, basically. I practiced and practiced. I went to open-mike events and played. I was nearly hallucinating with nervousness the first time, somewhat better the next, a little better the next.
And then the big day.
Was I nervous, when the time came? Yes, folks, I was nervous. I played very tentatively, until the end, when we played the big rousing fast number. By then I knew it was in the bag, so I played aggressively for that one last tune. And that was as good as it could have been. I couldn't have played with masterful confidence this first time, it simply wasn't a realistic goal. But I kept it together, played pretty much the right chords at the right times, held my own. It wasn't a disaster. It was actually, at times, a lot of fun. I'd grin at the other players, making a point of enjoying the whole thing.I was making music, pretty good music, with my friends. Occasionally I would risk a glimpse at the audience, especially when they were clapping. It was like looking down when you're climbing a mountain, but looking down is where the thrill comes from.
So finally we hit the last big chord for the finish, and we were done. No humiliation, no disaster. Just a sense of jumping a big hurdle, and landing safely. "I'll take that," I said to the drummer, as I stood up. And then I packed up my gear, just like back in the day, and went and got a free beer that pretty much amounted to my pay for the occasion, and sat and listened to another band play. They were really good. I enjoyed their music. But I also enjoyed the idea that I'd taken a risk, but done the work beforehand and maintained the right attitudes and handled the fear well enough. I'd played piano in a jazz trio for the better part of an hour, in front of an audience, and lived to tell the tale. It wasn't perfect. But I hadn't let my friends down. And that matters, folks. That matters.
So we'll build on this. I'll play jazz in public more, and better. That youthful dream will get fulfilled, if it be Allah's will. Better late than never, no doubt about it.
I don't know what this means about dreams in general. But I know one thing—if you want to play an instrument, or learn to draw or paint, or do anything at all, if there's anything that you think you could care about, give it some effort. And give it some time. Maybe you'll only learn how hard it is to do that particular thing. At the very least, that makes you appreciate people who are accomplished in the field. But maybe you'll get somewhere yourself. You won't know if you don't try. I can tell you that it feels good, getting something accomplished. Getting the work done, playing your parts, not letting your friends down. Putting a little more good music out there. Brightening people's afternoon on a hot day in the city. I can remember, you know, the days so long ago when the conviction came on me more and more that I wanted to play jazz on the piano. And yesterday, I did. It was a long time coming, but it was worth the wait.
I've gone past this sign numerous times and tried to figure out what the rationale for it is, and in the end I've just decided that the sign is doing what I've done myself on countless occasions—it announced its name, got nervous because it didn't know what to say next, and just blurted out something absurdly obvious. It has a certain awkward charm, actually, for a laundromat sign.
I know, I know, when the marketing jackals sink their fangs into a word it instantly becomes overused by definition. But all of the sudden I'm seeing all sorts of things described hopefully as "vibrant," the hope being, of course, that rather than think about what the word really means, you'll read it as "very very good and worth spending money on." I noticed a long time ago that careful writers are at least mildly interested in what the word they're using means—its denotation. But marketing people are almost exclusively interested in the connotation—the things we associate with the word, and especially the emotions it evokes. People can be vibrant, and often we like such people. Cities can be vibrant, and often we enjoy visiting them. But this?
Vibrant Technologies buys and sells used IT equipment including servers, storage and networking equipment. A top reseller for used server and refurbished ...Some people are vibrant, as we've noted, and some places. But I can't imagine how a refurbished server or a person likely to be selling one could possibly be described as vibrant. Anyway, connotation and denotation, OK? Thanks.
Sufficient to the day are the stressors thereof, like usual. But Venus has been unusually bright lately, which is something to be grateful for. I'll come out of a township government meeting, my head buzzing with the various workaday matters discussed there, and look up, and there it will be, blazing away like a lantern in the humid night sky. It takes you out of yourself for a moment, if you let it, and that's rather nice.
Years ago I spent a week at Cape Cod, just wandering around the various towns there, and noticed something: People would get lunch from a takeout place and then pull up facing the ocean. You'd see some working guy in a the cab of a pickup truck, taking a bite from his turkey hoagie with one hand, taking a pull from his bottle of Sprite with the other, the whole time looking out over the ocean with a faraway gaze, for all the world like a Zen monk deep in meditation.
I live a hundred miles from the ocean, so it's not available for lunchtime contemplation. But I live directly beneath the night sky, and it's always handy. Last night I was listening to some people play jazz in a coffee shop and wondering when I'd feel confident enough in my own piano-playing abilities to sit in with them. I was thinking about that driving home, that and everything else, all the things going on, and then I made a right turn and saw the crescent moon with Venus above it.
I won't say all the stressful things suddenly melted away and didn't matter, But it was like the ocean was for that guy in the pickup—it shifts your perspective just a bit, it soothes and refreshes. There's something in us that wants to look out over the ocean, just stand there and look, and something in us that can't help gazing at those lights in the sky, floating over us, so lovely, so impossibly far away. It's one of those deep-down things that just about everyone responds to in some fashion.
So it was hardly surprising that when I got home and got out of the car, I saw that my neighbors were sitting on their back porch, looking out to the west. I said hello and then turned and looked with them, and we all were quiet for a moment, watching Venus, shining away over the treetops.
Years ago I spent a week at Cape Cod, just wandering around the various towns there, and noticed something: People would get lunch from a takeout place and then pull up facing the ocean. You'd see some working guy in a the cab of a pickup truck, taking a bite from his turkey hoagie with one hand, taking a pull from his bottle of Sprite with the other, the whole time looking out over the ocean with a faraway gaze, for all the world like a Zen monk deep in meditation.
I live a hundred miles from the ocean, so it's not available for lunchtime contemplation. But I live directly beneath the night sky, and it's always handy. Last night I was listening to some people play jazz in a coffee shop and wondering when I'd feel confident enough in my own piano-playing abilities to sit in with them. I was thinking about that driving home, that and everything else, all the things going on, and then I made a right turn and saw the crescent moon with Venus above it.
I won't say all the stressful things suddenly melted away and didn't matter, But it was like the ocean was for that guy in the pickup—it shifts your perspective just a bit, it soothes and refreshes. There's something in us that wants to look out over the ocean, just stand there and look, and something in us that can't help gazing at those lights in the sky, floating over us, so lovely, so impossibly far away. It's one of those deep-down things that just about everyone responds to in some fashion.
So it was hardly surprising that when I got home and got out of the car, I saw that my neighbors were sitting on their back porch, looking out to the west. I said hello and then turned and looked with them, and we all were quiet for a moment, watching Venus, shining away over the treetops.
It must be nice to sleep the sleep of the just, to lay your head down at 10 and sleep uninterruptedly for eight hours and wake refreshed. I can't remember the last time I did that myself—it must have happened a couple times in my life, I suppose, but not lately.
But it's not so bad, actually. I woke up in the small hours the other night, wondered if I would be able to fall back asleep and eventually decided that I wouldn't. So I got up to see what was going on, because if you're a light sleeper you know that night is not just a boring nothing-happening time. The moon was full, for one thing, setting through a cloudy sky. I couldn't get a decent image of that, and I also failed to get a nice one of the moon framed by the tree branches. But I got one of the moon by itself, and that felt good.
By the time dawn arrived, there were several bats circling around out front, obviously chasing an invisible swarm of insects. I tried to shoot them too, but they kept dancing around out of reach, but it was an interesting exercise. I did manage to get an image of a bird against the cloudy sky that I liked. Just me and the cat, a cup of coffee, and the world waking up. Last night I did actually sleep soundly, and this morning I woke to the rising sun painting the clouds. But that spooky, otherworldly stuff? Slept right through it. Once in a while, it's worth it, not sleeping well.
I'd been aware of the name all my life, but that was all; it hovered on the edge of my known world, since the name itself is distinctive. And the name suggested a singer who has some sort of schtick, like HIldegarde's gloves. But that was it, for all my life until now.
And then two people I play music with had a brief conversation, just a couple of sentences, about Blossom Dearie, so I began checking her out. She's often described in very misleading ways, I can tell you. They call her voice "girlish," "wispy," "small" even verging on squeaky, they say. The former New Yorker jazz critic Whitney Balliett once said that "without a microphone it would not reach the second floor of a doll's house"—clever enough, I will admit, but not a statement that tells you what Blossom Dearie would sound like if you were on the first floor, listening to her.
Most damningly, her voice is often called an "acquired taste." Well, I listened to her and acquired the taste instantly, deeply—I fell in love, if you want to know the truth. The clip below is from the early Sixties, by the way, not the Fifties, but it's pretty representative of what she was doing in the early part of her career. Maybe you'll fall in love too:
Well? Was that magical? Are you in love yourself? She was born in the Twenties in a small town in the Catskills, and she said in interviews that she took "Surrey" at a more relaxed pace than was typical because she remembered seeing buggies going by in her youth. Not that rural roots impaired her hipness much: She studied classical piano but was drawn to jazz in her teens, and went to New York, where she made a name for herself playing piano and singing. Then she went to France after the war and made a name for herself there too, then came back and was invited to make albums by Norman Granz, who ran one of the leading jazz labels. She sang the fast songs with a carefree verve that would give Ella a run for her money, and the ballads—well, I've never heard anyone so affecting, so real, so full of feeling. No other singer. Ever. That's just how I feel. And it must also be said that she comps—accompanies herself—brilliantly, and takes a hell of an intelligent, well-crafted solo now and then. And the other thing that comes through is how smart and fun and deeply cool she is. Well—was, actually. She died last year. But she performed to adoring crowds in supper clubs and concerts into 2006, and she did songs on Schoolhouse Rock, and she did a lot of recording all her life. I could have heard her live, if I'd known. I feel bad about that. But I know about her now. My favorite stuff is from the Fifties. Check it out; you may acquire the taste yourself.
