Another jazz project...

We’re supposed to love the music we grew up with. My mother loved opera and the classics. Her father was a voice teacher and one of the founders of the San Francisco Opera Company. My father loved jazz from the twenties and thirties, played drums, and put together a dance combo to play on the S.S. Yale, which steamed a passenger route on the Pacific Coast from Los Angeles to Seattle during the 1920s and early 1930s.

My ear never tuned into opera, though I like some classical music. My fondest memories are of my father carefully playing his 78’s on the flattop console Victrola. I really enjoyed evenings listening to Jelly Roll Morton, Will Bradley, and Benny Goodman’s jazz. Who couldn’t love the rhythms, the subtleties of Lionel Hampton and Teddy Wilson? Sure, I loved the rock and roll of the fifties and sixties, but I loved the swing/jazz of my father’s generation more.

Not surprising, then, that this is the sort of stuff I’m playing. And the old Victrola is in the garage, begging to be pulled out, oiled, polished, and allowed to make music again. I think I just found another project....