Music in one’s brain is always a permanent fixture of memory much like scent.
The word bossa nova will immediately take me to that little sound corner dated sometime in 1962 and I will listen to it silently within me, Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd’s Jazz Samba.
Mozart’s - Flute and Harp Concerto in C, K. 299 will connect me to my mother who loved this concerto.
Mungo Jerry’s In the Summertime I can now listen to with a bit of a rosy nostalgia. In 1970 when the song was released it was played in the dance hall where Rosemary and I were taking dance lessons. I was hopeless! Now I would assert that it is “our song”.
Astor Piazzolla’s Milonga del Angel connects me to one of my first real girlfriends whom I fell in love while listening to it live. She died a few years ago and somehow my youngest daughter Hilary now likes to listen to it when she feel melancholic.
Frédéric Chopin's Piano Sonata No. 2 in B-flat minor, Op. 35 (Marche funèbre) instantly takes me to a few days after the death of Eva Perón on July 26 1952 when radio stations played funeral music with Chopin’s being the most salient.
But it was in the late 70s when I was shooting everything for Vancouver Magazine that I was dispatched to Burnaby for what was then called City Scene, a section of the magazine with small paragraphs of type with large photographs. I was to photograph a fitness class for pregnant women.
How could I possibly forget that the song they jumped up and down to was The Ramones’s I Wanna be sedated?