Discoveries in Jazz/ Remembrances of the Dead

It is a bright summer morning and I'm listening to John Coltrane's Coltrane's Sound--a fantastic album that always seems to bring back memories of my college years, back when Jazz was a new discovery that we turned each other on to like it was some new amazing insight into the human capacity for creation. And for us, it was.

It was sometime during my freshman year that I wandered into a bookstore not far from my college (the only one for miles due to the fact that I went to a rural outpost of a university), and after aimlessly browsing around for about a half hour, discovered a tape rack (this was around 1994-1995) that contained a few Jazz and Blues cassettes. By this time in life, I had thankfully encountered the work of a few Bluesmen, but had yet to have any sort of real exposure to Jazz, other than knowing that it was a more or less improvisational music that tended to involve trumpets and saxophones. I casually turned the metal carousel, examining its contents for anything of interest. Vaguely recognizing the name of Miles Davis, I picked up a cassette entitled Kind of Blue. Seeing the word "blue" in the title, I assumed it must have some sort of relation to the Blues, and decided on the spot to give it a try, not having any sort of inkling as to how the recording I had in my hands would utterly change how I viewed Jazz, or music in general, for that matter.

Let me back-track here; I have to give credit where credit is due: Around the time of my sophomore year of High School, I had encountered the Grateful Dead. A fellow of Irish extraction named Joe Drennan, whom taught in the same school as my father and possessed a strange twinkle in his eye--as if to say, I know a secret, and if you are patient enough, you just might find out what it is--sent up a tape to me as a birthday present, of recordings he had personally culled from his own Grateful Dead collection, of them performing Bob Dylan tunes. I listened to the tape patiently and with care. And could not stand it. I think part of it had to do with an unfamiliarity with the quality of concert recordings. A lot of it had to do with growing up with studio performances and an expectation that everything had to be musically perfect. But mostly, I think it had to do with a basic ignorance of the Dead's music. Worst of all, I actually wanted to like what I was hearing, but just could not get myself to embrace it. Except for one notable exception: there was an acoustic performance on the tape of Jerry Garcia performing with the bassist John Kahn, doing a stripped down version of When I Paint My Masterpiece. There was something in the sparsity of the performance that somehow touched me deep down to the depths, almost in spite of myself. Here was a man armed only with an acoustic guitar and a rather tobacco-scarred voice, backed only by a stand-up bass, and I found myself becoming utterly entranced by his obviously heart-felt performance.

A few weeks later, I found myself up in Madison with my mother for some reason now lost to time. I remember being somewhere out in the suburbs. She is a real quilt enthusiast, and wanted to check out a quilt show that was going on in the area. I, being a male teenager, had no interest in the proceedings whatsoever, and informed her that I was going to walk over to a music shop I had seen a few blocks away as we drove in.

I had already formed my typical music store routine by this fairly early stage in my life, which was to meticulously go through the store tooth-comb, searching (forever searching!) for that album to unlock the secrets of the universe. On this day, I found at least part of that key.

Despite my overall negative impression of the Dead-Dylan tape Mr. D had dubbed for me, I found the Masterpiece rolling through my mind as if it was on a mental tape-loop. I could not get it out of my head, and so found myself pulled to the Grateful Dead bin, almost as if I were the Millennium Falcon caught in the Death Star's tractor beam.

I think I went through the entirety of the Dead bin's contents close to ten times, debating which cd I should get, or even if I should purchase any of them at all. I remember I even left the store at one point empty handed, only to be mysteriously pulled back inside by that wonderfully raspy voice of Garcia's, along with those guitar lines unlike any I had heard before.

I don't think I could have necessarily articulated it at this point in my life, but I knew that I had heard a guitarist who had managed to turn a major corner within the confines of popular music (as if the Dead ever acknowledged those "confines!"), and had broken completely free of the standard blues-based lead guitar. (I was to later learn that Coltrane had been a major influence on how the Dead in general, and Garcia in particular, viewed music).

I walked back into the store (under the bemused view of the store clerk, whom had been watching my silent deliberations for some time now), and made a bee line back to the Dead bin. Not having any reference to speak of, I had to rely more or less on the covers of the albums as a guide. Using this rather dubious method, I could tell that Axoamoxoa was probably a psychedelic album, while American Beauty was perhaps more traditional. I ended up with Beauty, in no small part due to the Masterpiece that was still playing in my head.

The entire ride home was filled with expectation (this was back in the day when most vehicles still had tape players as opposed to the cd variety). We finally arrived (it was a good hour's ride), and I immediately raced to my bedroom to put this cd on, not having any idea what would emanate from the speakers once I hit play. I settled back in my bean bag chair (yes, I admit it, I once owned a bean bag chair), and was instantaneously hit by the opening chords of Box of Rain. From the moment I heard "Look out of any window, any morning, any evening, any day," my heart welled up with joy--pure, naked, unabashed joy. I had never heard an album that seemed so utterly and completely RIGHT from the first note to the last. It was like finding on old friend that you had never known before.

I don't want to give the impression that I became on outright Deadhead in that golden instant, but the seed had now been firmly planted. I now had the incentive to follow the band out through those nebulous clouds of cosmic dust and see what lay out there beyond the outer reaches. But it took time. Mainly, I think my ears and mind had to become accustomed to that sort of travel, but once they did, whole new worlds opened up before me. What the Dead had done was loosen my ridged ideas and expectations of what music was and what it could be. Suddenly, anything was possible, and I found myself actually hoping to encounter the new and unknown rather than running from it in confusion and disgust. Simply put, I heard with new eyes and a new mind.

In many respects, the Dead had readied me for much of what was to come, for this new way of hearing was also a new way of seeing--a new way of looking at the world as a place of infinite possibility, where you could actually interact with that possibility to the point where life itself became an improvisational act and the outcome was often much more interesting than you could have possibly have imagined.

And so, when I brought back that cassette of Kind of Blue back to my dorm room and popped it in my tiny stereo, my ears had already been primed for Miles' genius. And again, I discovered another old friend who utterly amazed me from the first note to the last.

There might be some out there who puzzle at this correlation, but I honestly don't know how, for the same spirit that moved the Dead on stage night after ecstasy-inducing night (well, a good amount of them, at least) was the same spirit that guided Miles and 'Trane and the rest during those magical sessions that produced Kind of Blue--where the songbooks were thrown out and they just BLEW off a few bare-bones chord changes. And something unspeakably fragile and brilliant was born. Should every instant of life be any different?