Summer Blues
Sunday, July 28, 2013
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| Hydgrangea macrophylla 'Blaumeise' Hydrangea macrophylla 'Lanarth White' Hydrangea macrophylla 'Blue Wave' July 28, 2013 |
While I feel very American in many ways there is one element of American tradition that I do not understand all that well. This is the concept of the blues as music.
The blues entered my life when I was 16. Even though I was, at best a lackluster alto saxophone player (I did get a lovely soft sound out of it) Brother Edwin Reggio, C.S.C. who was our school band leader at St. Edward’s High School in Austin, Texas asked me to be in the smaller jazz band. I learned to play Basin Street Blues. Because we played this during the football season, in late fall when it was very hot in Austin, I have always associated the blues with summer, damp heat.
While I might enjoy our local Jim Byrnes sing his brand of blues in the summer I would feel alienated from his music in the deep of winter. It would be no different from listening to Vaughan Williams “Symphonia Antarctica” (Symphony Number 7). But the latter which is as cold and depressing as music can be can, would be a respite from the heat on a hot summer’s day.
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| Hydrangea serrata 'Acuminata' & Gentiana asclepiadea July 28, 2013 |
It was when I was 16 when I bought my first jazz album (which I still have and is quite playable and which must have been used as on it says Dennis Bogue, De Paul Dorm, St. Edward’s High) The Magic Flute of Herbie Mann. In this album I heard my first not Dixie Land or Louis Armstrong, version of St. Louis Blues. Playing are Herbie Mann on alto flute, Jimmy Rowles, piano, Buddy Clarke, bass and Mel Lewis, drums. Mann’s first Verve album of which this one was is now seen as an early cool jazz. Somehow the blues as hot stuff from the Deep South passed my by.
Interesting, too is that this album has a very early version of Bossa Nova, Baia arranged by guitarist Laurindo Almeida who plays along with Tony Rizzi, also on guitar, Milt Holland on drums , Tony Reyes, bass, and Frank “Chico” Guerrero on percussion.
My next album (I never did buy Elvis or any rock of any kind since I was a late 50s version of an uncool nerd) was Time Out with the Dave Brubeck Quartet. I could not get enough of this jazz until I discovered Miles Davis. I liked the idea of a muted horn close to a microphone as opposed to open trumpets like Armstrong or Harry James. I liked cool. I did not really like the blues. My first Miles Davis Album, Kind of Blue I bought in 1959 and a couple of years later Miles Davis Live at Carnegie Hall.
I have never been able to escape my liking for a more restrained, cool type of jazz. While I now enjoy classic Argentine Tango I was first attracted to Piazzolla’s brand. To this day Piazzolla’s music transports me nostalgically to frigid and damp Buenos Aires winters.
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| Gentiana asclepiadea, July 28, 2013 |
But the blues, and in particular All Blues in Davis’s Kind of Blue, and Solea (solitude) in his Sketches of Spain I associate with the depressing goodbye to a girlfriend at the dock in Buenos Aires as she shoved off for London. I went home and immediately listened to Davis, not to cheer me up, but to take me into a deep melancholy that somehow made my loss bearable.
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| Hydrangea serrata 'Blue Bird' , Hydrangea macrophylla 'Ayesha' Gentiana asclepidea & Hydrangea serrata 'Acuminata' July 28, 2013 |
The paradox is that whenever I listen to any of my jazz records, tapes and CDs I feel mostly blue. I feel sad because so many of those performers are dead and the friends I would have listened to the music with. A counter paradox is that of late, since I listen to this music alone I almost feel like I am hearing the music for the first time. There is a thrill that can only happen when one falls in love for the first time or discovers Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd playing Desafinado (and Baia) as I did in 1962.
My Rosemary’s concept of the blues is specifically about the colour. Until most recently she did not allow hot colours (red, orange, pink and yellows) in our garden. She wanted a garden that had strictly blue or white colours.
I have a theory about this. I believe that the further you move north from the equator, or south the less inclined you will be to like hot and warm colours. The Swedes, the Brits, and the New Englanders like sober colours. These grays, blues, silvers, blacks and whites are seen as sophisticated. I like the Spanish word sobrio. While a person who is not drunk is sobrio, it also has a strong additional meaning of low-key liking for stuff that does not stand out.
I remember teaching English to some marketing executives at Palmolive in Mexico City. They were complaining that their product Ultra-Brite (which in 1973 had real excitingly cool-in-the-mouth ether) was not selling as well as Procter & Gamble’s Crest. I performed an experiment on the blackboard with colour chalk. On one end I made streaks of dark blue, light blue, white and black. On the other I drew with pink, orange and red. I asked the executives what colours they liked more. They chose the hot colours which were the colours of Crest while the ones they disdained were of their own more sophisticated in northern regions (certainly not Mexico) toothpaste.
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| Last year's Summer Blues |
With globalization this theory of mine is blurring. Vancouver streets are almost as loud in colour with cars that rival those of and Mexico City.
My compatriots, men in particular, in Buenos Aires now wear loud colours when at one time they would have dressed in gray flannels, blue sport coats, and blue shirts with subdued ties and brown penny loafers.
In our July garden the roses are resting before they come back in earnest later on. The hydrangeas, mostly blue are in control of colour. Many of the species hydrangeas like Hydrangea sargentiana are not really blue but a slightly hotter deep purple.
My favourite blue flowers in the garden are those of the very easy to grow Gentiana asclepiadea. Soon Rosemary’s own favourite blue flowered Aconitums will be out. Both Rosemary and I know that their blue is not only cool and sophisticated but deadly, too.
Thinking about my neutrality towards the American Blues, I may disdain them simply because I hold no nostalgia for them. They were no part of my youth and Austin at the St. Edward’s Hilltop was as far removed from the idea of the Mississippi River, Memphis and New Orleans.
One Christmas Eve in 1966, the Argentine Merchant Marine ship, Rio Aguapey had docked in New Orleans. I walked through almost empty Bourbon Street. I entered a strip parlour (I had never been in one) and watched a robotic stripper, as cold as the Mississippi River must be in December while sipping a bourbon. I did not like my bourbon or the stripper. I went back to my ship and alone and far away from my family I turned on my little record player and played Miles Davis’s All Blues.
We Latins opt for sad nostalgia as much as Brazilians have their saudade. We might not understand depression but it certainly is better than the blues.
