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Listening Through Touch to the Oh So Soft and Vibrant Radio Speaker
Somewhere amid the lonely wilds of the late-1950′s, the lone listener of all things jazz begins a solo quest to find the music of musics…
I am lying abed on my left side late at night carefully turning the tuning dial of the cast-off family radio, hoping to hear tonight’s episode of MOONGLOW WITH MARTIN.
Some evenings, the signal is clear and dramatic and rounded, so that I can lie on my back and listen through both ears to things I have never heard before. Sometimes, the signal drifts here and there, crackles into muffles, snaps solidly, then fades again. During those moments, it is acceptable to listen with only my right ear, since there’s really nothing of substance to be absorbed.
But on a clear night I can hear forever.
Tonight is one of those nights.
MOONGLOW WITH MARTIN is broadcast from the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans, and host Dick Martin smoothly introduces me to Miles Davis playing flugelhorn, pianist Oscar Peterson challenging bassist Ray Brown to a romp through some unfamiliarly familiar tune, Ella Fitzgerald scatting through Gershwin, pianist Errol Garner grunting and giggling through his own riffs, baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan inviting you deep within his mood piece, singers Mel Torme and Frank Sinatra and Billly Eckstine and Bobby Troup pulling you into the stories behind the lyrics, leaders Stan Kenton and Gil Evans standing above it all to show you the classy part of jazz.
And so on.
There are so many composers, voices, instrumentalists, arrangers, personalities to experience that it takes another fifty years to truly appreciate their art, their craft, their focus, their playfulness.
I am enchanted by Zen keyboardist Ahmad Jamal, insurrectionist saxist John Coltrane, improvising pianist Thelonius Monk, and all those sidemen and sidewomen who remain nameless till later, when I get to read their liner notes.
Often, I drift off to sleep with my left hand touching the smoothed burlap-textured radio speaker, becoming one with the soft vibrations the music injects into the cloth, feeling the slight warmth of the glowing radio tubes, remembering years back, when I imagined the jazz combos actually playing in tiny versions of themselves inside the wooden console.
MOONGLOW WITH MARTIN introduced me to the world of one-on-one listening, a world where there is only the Listener and the Sound, a world cleansed of all human interaction and temporal conflict, a world where peace and harmony and harmonics meld into some quirky but pure idea of how good the world could be if only we could learn to behave toward each with only the best parts showing
© Jim Reed 2014 A.D.