Thursday, October 2, 2008

Greensleeves: My Favorite Song


I attended one of the best concerts of my entire life this evening, though no famous rock bands were on the stage. Just a bunch of 7th and 8th grade kids, dressed in hep cat hats and shades, playing jazz in a way that made me want to pick up the old flugelhorn again and do my best Chuck Mangione.



Yeah, I said Chuck Mangione. I was certainly the only high school girl I ever met who even knew about this guy, let alone considered herself a fan. A big fan. Chuck, though, he was just the beginning, the gateway musician who introduced me to the chops of Clifford Brown:



Oh, I wanted to play like that guy. But only if I could have Dizzy Gillespie's horn. And his crazy cheeks.



Don't even get me started on Buddy Rich. That guy's style opened the door to my future in the drumline, wherein I found a.whole.new.level of geekdom.



Or, wow, when I heard Louis Armstrong for the first time? Swoon. Double Swoon. I actually cried when I found out that he had died a full five years before I was born, which meant that I would never have the chance to see him play live.



I've never heard another trumpeter play in such a way where the great time that they were obviously having actually came through the bell of their horn.

In junior high, we generally played the standards. Songs that everyone knew. Everyone. Even my grandpa, who seemed to know every song ever performed by Gene Autry but claimed that music died with him, would hum along in recognition as I would practice every night.

While I was first chair of the trumpet section, I was introduced to the single greatest piece of music ever written (or so I thought at the time): Stars and Stripes Forever. How did Sousa know how to do that? I connected Sousa the man to Sousa the musician and asked my parents to buy for me not only his entire discography for my birthday, but his biography, too, because I needed to know. I loved the way that I felt as I played those notes that he had written. Connected to the universe in a way that was heady and new and quite addicting. It was as though that music wasn't just processed by my ears -- my entire body felt those notes. I wanted more.

Playing music in junior high band made me wonder, for the first time, why most music that I heard on the radio didn't make me feel that way. Yet *that* music was often the impetus that prompted most kids to join school band -- they had big dreams that one day they would be able to play music like that. I wanted no part of it. Real music wasn't the synthesized junk food of the 1980's; it was to be found in the older compositions. The ones that most of my classmates, outside of the small circle of knowing hep cats in band, had never heard. Or if they had, found to be boring. Music for old people and nerds, they would say.



There was a moment, during this concert, in which I knew that the kids on stage were experiencing the exact same feeling of discovery. As some of the crowd so rudely got up to leave mid-performance, a quick game plan discussion was prompted between the students and the director about cutting out one or two songs. Several of the students excitedly stood their ground, 'But we HAVE to play 'A Train,' Sir, we.have.to!'

And, triumphantly, they played on.