Stan Getz Night

It is Stan Getz night here at the Brawner International HQ, Evanston, IL.

It didn’t start out that way. I thought it might be Bill Evans night. My brother texted me today that he had fallen into the seductive gravitational pull of EXPLORATIONS, and I thought…yes. Let’s listen to Sir William. I had been listening to Sunday at the Vanguard earlier anyway. Let’s go ahead and make a day of it.

But no. Stan is here now. He’s looking swell. He’s sounding like only he can. Smooth, jagged, suave, broken, arrogant. He makes smoothness seem edgy. Like Steely Dan. Or Dan Bejar.

I start the festivities with my newly acquired very old copy of STAN GETZ WITH GUEST ARTIST LAURINDO ALMEIDA. I didn’t know this record existed until my dealer* showed it to me.

I was excited to see a Stan Getz record whose existence had been unknown to me, mostly because I believe there must be more records out there like SWEET RAIN, and, who knows, maybe this is the one. It is not, but it’s still a fine thing to listen to in the evening, even an evening in January in the land of Chicago. I point that out (“that” = January/Chicago) because this is hot sweaty music and the only thing hot or sweaty about my world right now is when the boiler stays on too long (as it often does in this 100-year-old house) and it’s suddenly like 78 degrees. So then you go outside to feel like you can breathe, but you can’t breathe out there either because the air is like inhaling frozen burlap. It is literally absolute zero outside. All life has ceased to exist on the cellular level. I’m sorry to inform you of this, but you may as well know the truth.  

Where was I. The liner notes for this one are alone worth the price of admission. Come for the “pulsing Latin beauty,” stay for the “They do not force their presence: no flaming Indian clubs…no mesmeric scaler tricks.” I somehow doubt that liner note man James T. Maher is around to explain what the Christ that could possibly mean, but I wish someone would fill me in. Just as the absolute zero thing brings an end to cellular motion, it halts, too, all sense of meaning, any hope of syntactical order.

After this fine enough record, I will listen to Stan Getz and Bill Evans/Previously Unreleased Recordings (nice title), as a nod to what this night might have been. Then I’ll close out the festivities with the great SWEET RAIN, maybe my favorite record of…well, ever. Greatest record of all records. There is nothing finer than Side A of Sweet Rain.   

As for this record though. The bossa thing—how do I say this diplomatically?—doesn’t sound as fresh today as it must have in 1963. For me, its structures, rhythmically and harmonically, don’t allow for a ton of emotional range. It kind of just has one feeling. It filters all feelings down to one feeling. It’s a nice feeling, but it doesn’t hold my attention for long.

Which is to say it’s the opposite of Sweet Rain, even though Sweet Rain has at least one bossa influenced tune (some would say the best song on the record, O Grande Amor).

Did you feel that? I just hit that point where this writing is starting to disgust me and I’m in great danger of not publishing. I don’t want that to happen, so I’m gonna sign off.  

But. I’ve been bad about writing on this blog. To make up for my badness, I’d like to offer some bonus content, written, it would seem, in November of last year. I found it buried in a random word document earlier today. Goodnight now.

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You better believe the ghosts are about tonight.

The air outside is cold and wet, and I have the window open to continue confirming that. I like feeling the cold air outside and knowing it’s warm in here.

I was 2 when the Edmund Fitzgerald went down. I’m 52 now. Fifty years ago Monday was the date of the wreck. The witch of November, et al.

I have candles and a beer. I’m not listening to music because I can’t decide what to listen to. Sometimes, on a haunted night like this, I’ll listen to Kenny Burrell/Midnight Blue or Oscar Peterson Meets Ben Webster. Those seem like random records with nothing in common, but they both have the advantage of feeling like they’re being broadcast to me by some distant radio station. They come from a desert somewhere, these radio waves, as far away in time as it is in miles. The sound is crackly, hanging by a thread, but it’s the purest sound I’ve ever heard. These are astral sounds, and I, for whatever reason, have access that most do not.

I have enough faults and flaws and weaknesses and regrets for a hundred people. But I have at least one thing going for me: I hear things most of you don’t. Music for me is a freight train loaded with goods; I receive the goods. I sift through them. I catalog them. Some forgotten jazz tune from 1959 is as alive as I am, and we will be good company for each other tonight, as the rain turns to snow and the 29 ghosts of the Edmund Fitzgerald prepare for their 50^–year reunion. I am happy to be near the Great Lakes. I wish it were Superior whose shores were within spitting distance, but I’ll settle for Michigan. Michigan is a good one, the next best one.

Twenty-five foot waves on Superior the night the Fitz went down. Fellas, it’s been good to know ya. This story has been inside of me for 50 years.

On a night like this, I turn to my copy of Maiden Voyage. Pure coincidence that this is nautical language. Then again, nothing is a coincidence, pure or otherwise. This record to me is a sacred text, a holy scripture. These melodies hold questions and answers. George Coleman’s entrance for his solo on the title track is maybe the art form’s most sublime moment, period, hard stop, etc.  

It’s just not working. It feels forced. Or I don’t feel up to forcing it enough to make it work.

My roommate died in Lake Superior. We were kids. He was an irritating type. After his death, I was afraid he’d haunt me for not having been nicer to him in life. I disappoint the living and the dead. It was 1993. Soundgarden and 40oz bottles of Bud Light got me through. My friend and teammate, Kyle David, would bring the 40s. He’d bring two to make sure I’d be able to get to sleep. That’s a good friend. I’d hide in my bedroom. I would never go upstairs because that would mean walking by his bedroom. I was afraid his bloated body would be lying bed, just as it was when he was alive. You see they showed me his dead body at the hospital. I’m still not exactly sure why. Anyway I’d drink my beer in my bedroom and pee out the back door in the shadows, hoping the patrons of Casa Calabria wouldn’t see me as they left the restaurant with their doggy bags of lasagna. I should have been more worried about being spotted by the girls who lived next door, out on their roof smoking. I didn’t really care what they saw though.

(it ends here.)       

(I’ve neither proofed nor edited the above. Sorry for all the sloppiness/inconsistencies/etc.)