Tag Archives: Music is always a good choice

In a Music House: the parent talk

I laugh when I think about it now. She is thirty-four and single but wants to be married with a family. I am double her age and single and have been married and divorced twice. Never-the-less, we are both single, both female, and both roommates out of societal and financial necessity as we wait for the charming prince or, alternately, an apartment to come available in Rivendell.

So it happens that sometimes she brings men home. She meets them at various places – in the wilderness, at WFR training, at church, at the gym. She brings them home for dinner or for a shower between wilderness trips, or in a group of rangers for pizza and party, or to floor surf in sleeping bags somewhere along the journey. And she brings them home to meet me – the sixty-eight-year-old roommate – also her mother.

I’ve heard of those parents – those dads and moms – who have “the talk,” with young men arriving for a first date with their daughters. There is no need for me to be intrusive or meddlesome. I trust her as my roommate. And I have confidence in the wisdom of a 34-year-old daughter. I know her to have a heart motivated by love and a brain guided by wisdom.

But we live in a music house – always have whether with other roommates or as family. She has played in bands and lived with bands. I have played with bands and raised young musicians. Music and musical instruments are fabric and fiber of our lives and figure prominently in design and function of our living arrangements.

There were the two thirty-year-olds she hosted spontaneously after WFR training who were delighted to catch me playing guitar and turned out to be musicians. We enjoyed a fine jam session. There was the handsome and desirable lawyer who stopped by on an errand, saw the two pianos and promptly confessed his lack of musical investment. One item and one alone in the negative column, but huge in a music house. There are the two guys from the gym who haul in their guitars for regular band practice. There is a handful of best friends collected from church and gym who show up on days off and work on original tunes in the garage. She lives here musically. I go away from the house to work as a music administrator four days a week and on Saturday and Sunday mornings I gig as a pianist.

Last week she met someone new online. They corresponded via text. They chatted face to face by phone, mutually liked what they saw, made a hiking and dinner date. Between the hike and meal they showed up at the apartment to freshen up and change clothes. His attention was immediately captured by the musical instruments. I welcomed him to pick up and play anything he liked while she changed. He chose the acoustic guitar. It was a nice, knowledgeable riff. I moved to the keyboard, correctly guessed the key and supported his ramblings. She came from the other room, pulled up the cajon, seated herself and laid the rhythm. He began to sing. His was a pleasant voice. It was an original song. Well now, that’s a huge checkmark in the plus column.

You can text. You can talk. You can exchange bios and opinions online. You can take a hike to support your claims of affection for Nature and your wilderness prowess. You can boast about being a music lover. But beware when you visit a music house and Mom hands you a guitar. The truth about your musical background will surface immediately.

Wedding Band

The bride was beautiful, the groom amiable and attentive. She witnessed the solemn ceremony from a piano bench where she had just played a passel of tunes – some popular, some classic. There were tender moments to bring tears and proud moments for sitting up straighter. There was humor and understanding to bring smiles and laughter. And then, there was a reception. A reception with food and fun and cake and dancing and a live band. This time, she sat on a portable bench at an electronic 88-keys, properly positioned to the left and behind the lead guitarist and two vocalists and within eye-contact and the reach of the drummer and bassist – all seven on a postage stamp the size of an area rug.

The bride was beautiful, surrounded by life-long friends and family and having the time of her life. The groom was gregarious and hospitable. And the band? The band was the best she had ever played with. There were times over the past three weeks of preparation when she felt out of her league. But when the drummer gave the count off and the guests of every generation hit the dance floor, cares of life and inhibition left the courtyard. Life was bliss. Even the servers kept smiling. The venue owner and caterer paused in their hurry to film the band. Her heart was full, sitting there on the collapsible bench. And when it was all over and load-out begun, someone pointed out the band included three generations of the same family. True that! She was indeed a grande dame. Her son the drummer / band leader. Her grandson on synthesizer. Don’t quit on your music! You need it every day of your life. 

In a Music House part 3, crashing a party

We crashed their party, and when I say we, I mean two genXers – both of them dads – and me, the gray-haired baby-boomer. “Let’s go down,” said my 47-year-old son, “And ask if we can jam with them.” He was talking to me, but mostly to a former bandmate who was visiting from out of town. Down we trooped, to the well-appointed basement studio. “Can we set in?” I called, feeling very much like a nuisance neighborhood kid. Now I ask you, how can two sixteen-year-olds, one seated on the throne and the other slapping a bass, refuse the dad who shelled out the lettuce for all the equipment? And how can they refuse grandma? Captain picked up a second bass (Tennille was upstairs chatting with the mom of the graduate). Kvon grabbed the guitar and started setting options on the pedal board. I flipped the switch on the keyboard stack and got…nothing – this is not my studio and the sound man is AWOL. So I moved to the Hammond which was live last time I was here, pulled a few tabs, disengaged some buttons and full-throttled the Leslies. We’ll play in “A” said the captain to the co-bassist. So I did. Played “A” for about ten minutes. Played A 440 on the upper manual and A 440 on the lower manual and A 880 and riffed the notes in between. Eventually, I slide off the bench and drifted away to greet cousins and walk the old homestead. The teenagers switched instruments and cross-trained. But for a moment there, it felt like old times. I’m even saddle-sore from dangling my legs off an organ bench. And what of the graduate, the person who precipitated this event?

He wasn’t manning the keyboards, instead, he was playing video games with his classmates. Are they wasting time? No. Think of it as research. He’ll design something someday, a game that integrates original music and video and creativity and it will be a hit. Because all this is what you do; all this is at your fingertips, when you were raised in a music and media house, with grandparents who were songwriters, engineers, and bandleaders in the 70s and great grands who knew how to raise the roof at gospel camp meetings. 

***

I returned to the music house today after a job interview of sorts. Like most interviews I have been to, this one included a fair amount of listening on my part – listening to the story of another and absorbing the information between the lines and applying it to my life, shaping an opinion and a proposal. Unlike most interviews I have ever been to, this one ended with me sitting on a piano bench playing a medley of popular tunes whilst the retiring piano man wandered off to talk to the restaurant owner. “I told him he should hire you,” he said. “When he asked me why, I said because you guessed the correct amount of money in the tip jar.” He laughed and played a few tunes for me. I thanked him and walked back home, declining a ride in his convertible. After all, it’s only a few blocks and the weekend weather is fine. Walking gives me a chance to soak in the neighborhood ambience and hear various kinds of music wafting out the doors of houses and food establishments. My own house is no exception. When I arrived home live music was filtering through the open screen. Laid back guitar riffs, a bit of funk, nice steady patterns on percussion, perfect for a lazy Saturday afternoon. Andrea sat on the cahon, hand-drumming snare and bass and adding tambourine fills with her foot. My guitar was in the hands of someone obviously more capable than I who was effortlessly picking and strumming. A mandolin and a bass lay in open cases nearby. They’ve gone to do some grocery shopping now, and I just spent another hour at the keyboard improvising old favorite tunes. It’s a fine thing to live in a music house, and an even finer thing to have a musical family.

Four generations worth of musical instruments in this studio
This is the Diamond Belle Saloon where four time Olde Tyme Piano champion, Adam Swanson, plays six nights a week
This is the Jean-Pierre French Bakery where Cherry Odelberg will supplement her retirement by busking for breakfast and brunch on the weekends

Humans of Hometown

I stopped in at the grocery market on 12th Street and purchased a couple food items. It was Tuesday so the store was filled with Tuesday discount shoppers. In one checkout line four or five group home residents were lined up with an assortment of express lane items. In the lane I chose an older couple (as in, older than me) was slowly shuffling through the mechanics of buying groceries. The checker, a middle-aged high functioning special needs man, was cheerily and patiently providing customer assistance. A bottle blond and hairspray grandma a little younger than me approached with her six year old grandson. He flopped the purchases up on the belt. I reached for the divider bar and inserted it between orders, whereupon grandma said, “Oh. Sorry.” (“no problem”). And the odor of alcohol wafted on the air. Not too whiny and not too impatient, the little boy began to while away the time by singing:

Boy: Baa Baa black sheep have you any wool…”

Checker (as he begins to scan my items): Well all I have to say to that is, ‘yes sir, yes, sir three bags full.’

Grandma: ‘One for my master and dum dem dum, how’s that go? Lives down the lane.

Checker: sings the lines again and gets stuck in the same phrase.

The line has now been joined by a white female of approximately 35 in a tank top and tattoo looking like a muscle builder who needs to loose 50 pounds fast.

Grandma and Boy: Baa Baa black sheep have you any wool, yes sir, yes sir, three bags full. One for my master and one ….????

Newcomer: One for my master and one……dum de dum…lives in the lane. How does that go?

Me (having completed payment): One for my master and one for my dame and one for the little boy that lives down the lane.

Where upon the pleased cashier spins and high fives me jubilantly.

We all slept well that night.