So the Queen wrote a music entry inspired by my whiney plea for new music. I liked hers better than mine. So here’s a more personal background of the family I’m from and the family I raised.
My elementary school was among the first in America to try the Yamaha method of violin, where they teach little kids violin on three quarter sized fiddles. I was really bad. I had piano lessons before that. I was really bad. In middle school on the first day of band the teacher put a saxophone in my hand. Love at first sight, and I was really really good.
There was always music in this house and in a much more liberal way than in my own house. The basement was all jazz, 78’s my dad had collected, swing mostly. The living room for some reason that has never been explained to me was folk records and the music book on the baby grand most often was folk standards. On the beat to shit upright in the basement it was old Jazz, the kind where the publishers name was prominent.
Upstairs in the kids room was what ever the hell we wanted, which, for my brother and I, was mostly rock from back in the day that I consider the peak of rock and roll; the 1960’s. I don’t recall my sisters having albums, though they would sit in our rooms often and listen to what we were playing; Cream, The Doors, Canned Heat, Early Pink Floyd, 13th floor elevators, Blind Faith, stuff like that.
My brother could pick out tunes on a guitar, harmonica, and sort of on a sax. My older sister was very serious about the cello though I don’t recall her ever playing at home. My little sister never quite got the hang of an instrument.
I’m not sure why Rock features guitars and guitar solos mostly. A guitar isn’t really a sexy instrument. I know, in your head you are thinking of some guitarist you like thrusting his hip out, leaning back with eyes closed and riffing and it looked sexy. But the sound; not so much. I mean it’s sexier than an oboe, a kazoo, a triangle.
A tenor saxophone grabs your primary sex organs and secondary sex characteristics and rubs up against them like a housecat late for a meal. It growls and croons and seduces, when it hits the lower register it hits below the belt and lingers.
A cello is sexy in a more sophisticated way, most cello music isn’t written to seduce. I’m pretty sure my sister did not play it in a sexy way. But a long bow, slow and easy in the lower register creeps up your leg and tickles your inner thigh. It pulls moisture from your skirt or coaxs blood and tumescence from your BVD’s. Hell, a French horn is sexy in a lonesome kind of way. But an electric guitar? Not so much. In the right hands it can make you cry or laugh or even blush a bit, but it stops shy of that happy ending. A sax or Cello doesn’t need foreplay, in the right hands you’ll be counting baseball stats just to make it through the tune without embarrassment.
My house, the home of the family I raised, was not so democratic. You either listened to what I played or you used the headphones your dad gave you. My daughter was fine with that, her taste leans towards folk and indie and I played plenty. My son, well, his teens years were spent with baggy jeans sagging to his butt crack and a wife beater listening to gansta hip hop. What’s the non pc word? Oh, yeah, wigger. His wife gently coaxed his tastes towards rock.
My second ex wife tried teaching them both guitar. It didn’t take. But they both have a soundtrack to their lives, listening to stuff that moves them. My first ex wife went through a phase of woman singer song writers, but you know, like Holly Near, short haired army boot wearing militant women singer song writers. Oh, and the albums I left behind when I moved out.
When I came out here I spent a year trying to talk my dad into playing the clarinet. At the risk of sounding maudlin, it’s the one thing I knew for certain brought him joy. He’d been semi professional since he was kid, gigging in after hour clubs in Atlantic City. My guess is he was too proud to play less than perfect. The dementia made it hard for him to improvise and his hands shook a bit too much to play the way he knew how. I never got him to crack the case.
We used to play old jazz standard together in the basement. The sheet music was for my benefit, 1) I didn’t know the songs and 2) they were written for a large band and I couldn’t transpose fast enough to keep up. It’s a circle of fifths, but it still means doing math while trying to play like it was coming from your heart and loins and not your head. He was impatient; he didn’t play with the other kids.
Also he took me to MSU concerts once a week. It was sort of a mandatory assignment from the band teacher, but I think most of the other kids didn’t do it. Except for the big names (jazz, my dad wouldn’t take me to a rock concert) it was classical; orchestras doing full symphonies, quartets doing fugues, motets and the like, choral music.
I don’t listen to much jazz or classical, but I can recognize most popular pieces. My GF’s parents always played classical at dinner. Classy. They bought her her first modern record for her eighth birthday; Concert for Bangladesh. Because she made fun of that or at least how out of touch she thought that made her parents, I helped with the teasing, but, um, that was a cool album, one of the few you could get in the states with Ali Akbar Kahn playing back sitar with Ravi Chancre Sore (sorry, Ravi Shankar).
Wow I think I lost me at ‘So the Queen …’ (that’d be wysiwyg not Elizabeth). Ok, go back to what you were doing.
Loading comments...