Oozing Jazz

My friend Jason used to walk around Hope College's campus in the mid-90's with a portable tape cassette player in his coat pocket.  An aficionado of jazz, he would literally have jazz oozing from his being.  See, in that time, it was considered too rude to walk around campus with your ear buds plugged in to your ears and your mind unplugged from the world.  (Well, it would have been headphones at that time.)  Now, we are accustomed to that, but during those days, Jason greeted us with the beats and swings of jazz music.

I think this is where my love of jazz music began in so many different forms.  However, when I love something, I'm not a good lover like some people are.  I'm also a movie lover, yet I am not the kind of movie lover who can tell you the director and actors of every movie she has ever seen.  In fact, I don't think I even really have a favorite movie.  So many movies have made me cry, laugh, and even feel waves of appreciation through-out my being.  These experiences I'm constantly in search of repeating through the media of movies.  Sometimes, I wish; however, that I took the time to remember every Wes Anderson movie or that Magnolia films made this or that movie.  I think it's part of being the Renaissance Girl that I am.  I love many things and do many things, but I'm not sure I do any of them to any level of expertise.

Jazz is no different.  If you asked me to name a famous jazz musician, I would not be able to.  Still my love of jazz runs deeply within my soul for how it makes me feel when I experience it.  I think so much of this is wrapped up in my early memories of listening to jazz.  Jason is just one of those.  At Hope, I studied English and creative writing.  Our college hosted literary readings and often we were able to pull in some of the modern greats.  I remember listening to Chaim Potok, Billy Collins, and Jim Harrison.  Before any literary reading, the colleges jazz quartet entertained the waiting audience. 

Most of our college days in Michigan were spent bundled in wool pea coats, hats, gloves, and knitted scarves as we scuttled from one class to the next.  Night and dark came early.   On nights of literary readings, we would walk the few extra blocks from our campus housing to the theater downtown, freezing in a way that kept us from saying more than a few words as we made the trek, but then always as soon as the warmth of the theater greeted our rosy cheeks, we were filled with a happiness that melted the cold away.  I, personally, no longer felt that I was in a little suburb in Michigan, but instead in a small artsy theater some where in New York and probably in a time separate from the 90's.  I just felt damn sophisticated.  While, I listened to the jazz and learned from watching others clap for solos, I wrote poetry in a wrinkled and bent spiral bound notebook that I had stuffed in my pocket.

I wanted more and a college has a plethora of budding musicians, so I befriended music students and realized I was falling in love with watching one particular bassist's fingers strum the strings of his guitar.  I followed him and his band to every one of their performances.  I stopped writing poetry, just so I could watch those long fingers, particularly the way the top of each phallange seemed to have one extra joint that enabled such intricate movement.  I'm pretty sure in my head I had a love affair with those fingers and the music that they created.

But then I left to Ireland for a semester, and I left those fingers behind.  A new romance with jazz began that semester on Sunday afternoons, in the orange hues of oil lamps, at a pub, in downtown Galway.  By the time my friends and I made it downtown to the King's Head Pub, we had already slept off our hangovers from the night before.  If one of us was flush with funds, we had had a full Irish breakfast somewhere greasy and warm by 1 pm.  If money was more dear, we ate Cheerios or I whipped together scrambled eggs for all my non-cooking friends: a spoiled rich girl from Boston, another rich girl from Italy, and a very fresh, still a child girl from the center of Ireland.  Not quite ready to drink heavy Guiness by the time the afternoon had rolled around, but now clear of mind and with some sort of sustenance in our bodies, we found Bulmer's cider on ice to be particularly delicious.  We sat more quietly than the night before, which often ended in drunken dancing at a disco, and just let the jazz of the live band wash over us.  These moments, partially saved me from my homesickness.  Right before I had left home, I had finally found a group of friends at school that stimulated both my mind and spirit.  I missed those friends I had left behind and on lonely walks to nearby villages, I questioned my decision to leave the United States behind for the first semester of my senior year.

Thankfully, the homesickness didn't last.  My cure came in the form of a tall Irish man from Cork who soon began to join me for the afternoons of Sunday jazz.  He didn't dance, but our nights were still often spent up late with me just listening to him spout philosophy in his wonderful Irish accent.  I idolized him and he became my world while I was in Ireland.  He taught me to drink warm port and as the days grew cooler, we sat huddled together in any pub with the kind of music that acted like a knitted afghan for the attraction we had between us.

Later, after that relationship had already ended, I still associated jazz with romance and future boyfriends learned to use this to their advantage.  Jazz  always turned my mood toward affection.

My Pandora station this Christmas is Holiday Jazz and it's amazing how content I've been.  Perhaps I identify with the way the music is arranged:  a true showcase of individuality wrapped together with the uniqueness of others' to create a beat of music that brings out the individual and makes it something even greater.