11/20/14

MORNING SPIN





another record that`s enjoyed a lot of play over the years.  i realized the other day that i`m a jazz baby.  i`m like ten, fifteen years old at best.  when i was in college some musician-people i knew were listening to coltrane and miles, while i was struggling with the basic jazz hanon in my piano class and sifting through the music library`s stacks upon stacks of albums trying to make sense of it all.  the first jazz i started listening to was probably the berkeley school of jazz disks that i found in that old library.  i studied classical music but resented it deeply, and preferred to spend my time trying to learn blues chords from a more advanced classmate and reading up on john cage since my teacher slipped a few of his prepared piano works into my repertoire.  i still have trouble playing jazz rhythm.    i saw a copy of that same old jazz hanon in the used bookstore downtown here in kyoto, and i think i should go back and pick it up and give it another shot.   when i finished school and got a full time job as a mail clerk i used to listen to jazz fm in the evenings on my way home on my transistor radio and it made a hard days work in the big city melt away.  a decade and a half later, thanks largely to excellent jazz record shopping in japan over the last eight years, jazz is a major part of my routine.  and thanks to the net, it`s so easy to research musician bios compared to all those years ago.   but i`m still a jazz baby.  i`m so fine with that, there is so much to learn and enjoy, and i can take my time. i like being a jazz baby, i sit back and think, when i`m fifty, or sixty, or seventy - what a head full of music i`m going to have!