My childhood in the 1970s Part Six: Music

Apart from my adult friends, and the relatively few kids I knew like George, I would spent large blocks of time in complete isolation. If I wasn't doing work for the business or preparing a magic show I had lots of time spent away from other human beings. A lot of this time was spent listening to bands like Return To Forever, Herbie Hancock's Headhunters and the Crusaders. At the same time I was exploring Fusion I was also listening to what they called straight-ahead jazz music of which the most rigid purist would approve: Miles Davis in the sixties, Art Tatum's solo piano, Phil Woods in the 1970s, and earlier Freddie Hubbard in the Blue Note days. I also loved the oldest jazz styles of Bix Beiderbeck and Armstrong. I learned early on never to disregard a particular jazz style. To me it was all simply good music. I am sure this music literally saved me from some kind of insanity or nervous breakdown. Though I am not usually one to extol the social or psychological utility of art, great or otherwise, I know that one can never underestimate the healing power of art, especially for the young.

When people would come over they always wanted to know what music I was into. The only thing I listened to that was acceptable to others, because it was popular in terms of record sales, was Earth Wind and Fire. Even this, though, was suspect because it wasn't white and it wasn't rock. To these peers the whole musical world revolved around Aerosmith, Kiss and Zeppelin. Because FRAMPTON COMES ALIVE had recently been released, even my swim instructor took to calling me "Frampton", presumably because it rhymed with Hampton. While I don't think I looked or acted anything like Peter Frampton the same cannot be said for my swim instructor, especially with his long curly locks and his playing of "air guitar" while we swam. And as if that weren't enough, he took to blaring that ubiquitous recording while we were doing laps in the pool, much to the chagrin of the parents and neighbors.

But I had other musical interests and I wanted to impose them on anybody who came to the house. It took only a few cuts on any of these jazz or funk records to drive away my guests. They just didn't "get it".

Socially this was a step forward from when I was a younger child. At age eight or nine, when anybody came around, I started to lecture to them about Wagner and would do a "show and tell" using LOHENGRIN or TANNHAUSER. Now, I knew NOTHING about the dramatic content of any of these operas by Wagner. But you can be sure that when the subject was Wagner's music I had become an expert after a fashion and wanted to shared my enthusiasm for this newly discovered beauty with the whole world. I was "the Little Professor" and I would point out, for example, the effect of the brass writing, and the "majesty" (my word choice) of the music. This did not go over very well, and even the parents of these children complained about my taste for Wagner and my overall manner. Wagner! Earth Wind and Fire might be more socially acceptable than Wagner because it was a best selling band, but among the racist whites I encountered this too was a problem. My relatives on my father's Southern side always would criticize me in this manner: "Mitchell why don't you got no white faces on your record covers?" was their refrain.

The three girls next door hated jazz. But they loved THE CARPENTERS. On the subject of THE CARPENTERS, I cannot comment.

It was only many years later, when I actually began my initial piano lessons with a spinsterish fifty-something Italian woman, that I got an actual aesthetic and musical response to my "jazz preaching". Once I brought Francesca my new copy of Sarah Vaughn's HOW LONG HAS THIS BEEN GOING ON with Oscar Peterson and my piano teacher proceeded to go over to the piano and, after but a single initial hearing, copy Peterson's lines off of the record, (at least the ones she could execute technically). She called doing that having "perfect pitch" and, whatever that was, I knew then that I didn't have it, let alone relative pitch. It would take decades for me to develop my ears through arduous labyrinth and torturous travels on my part. (It didn't help that the music teachers around me, especially Francesca, were adamantly opposed to playing by ear. This struck me as the grossest hypocrisy because Francesca had this marvelous ability to play an Oscar Peterson line with little effort on the spot and I bet she enjoyed it too. However there was this dogma about sight reading and the sanctity of the written score, a kind of fetish in the classical music world in my particular environment.

Ms. Francesca frightened me because her nose was so imposing and she reminded me of Margaret Hamilton in the WIZARD OF OZ. She even had this long wart that would often distract me during lessons. Her face disturbed me and everything that everybody was telling me about how it was "what's inside that counts" seemed to me hallow and in its own way superficial.

Because of my lifelong perceptual nature and sensitivity to appearances in general I never got used to Ms Francesca, though to this day people tell me she was the best teacher in town. I did like her for teaching the fundamentals of piano and, moreover, I liked her for her sense of musical taste and versatility. She conducted school choirs and I would always complain to her that the scores and charts they performed weren't hip enough. I wanted her to do the Hi Lo's while she preferred.... Barry Manilow.

Francesca also taught me the value of consistency in practice. Though I had worked hard on my magic shows and on the children's theater, playing the piano was the first time I was doing something where reason and emotion seemed linked, where my efforts were linked to something I valued, from within, rather than to something merely imposed on me from without.


Francesca and I embarked on a real cultural exchange. I would bring her these "fusion" records, and she would lend me her complete collection of Italian opera records.

I LOVED these operas, especially the ones by Verdi. I can't say I understood the Librettos in them but I listened mainly for the music: the "emotion and meaning in music" as Leanord Meyer would aptly put it. It was the passion and movement in the music that I listened for rather than the specificity of the plot.

I have two particular memories of early concerts. The first concert was a Bach Brandenburg Concerto by Bach and I was taken by my first crush and blonde nanny "Debbys", always clad in her perfect mini skirt. The hippies with which she surrounded herself were a bit too loud for my taste during the Brandenburg Concerto and since it was Bach which I loved, and since I knew the proper etiquette of theater attendance, I turned and gave her boyfriends (yes, plural) an angry "SHHHHHH". The rest of the concert I was able to enjoy in peace.

The second concert was THE JACKSON 5 at Madison Square Garden in New York with my best friend George's family. This too I loved, and their fiery rhythm and approach to song was doubtless an initial influence on my later tastes in American popular music.

I remember that when I was very young I would listen to Bessie Smith and rock back and forth like an autistic child, probably for an hour. I would replay the cut over and over until the record was worn , my little hands learning how to manipulate the needle with dexterity. The sound and feeling of the blues was like mother's milk for me.

My parents told me that I loved Ravel's BOLERO so much that I could tell which record it was because I had "memorized" the visual patterns in the groove of the record. If they showed me the grooves of LET IT BE and the grooves of BOLERO I could always tell the Beatles from Ravel.

The greatest musical experience of my life in childhood would have to have been when I met my idol and hero trumpeter Freddie Hubbard who died last year. Not only did I get to hear a great band in the 1970s - the one with George Cables on electric piano - but Hubbard shook hands with me and talked about his boyhood in Indianapolis with my father who also had some family who were "Hoosiers".

Knowing that I was in awe of him, Freddie put me at ease and let me look at his trumpet while he demonstrated how he made the sound with his "embouchure". One moment during the concert that most memorable was when he took a solo on the Fender Rhodes electric piano. Cables stepped aside and Hubbard simply sat down and took the longest solo on the Rhodes. This must have been during one of those marvelous and long funk tunes that they would play at that time. (I think it might have been KEEP YOUR SOUL TOGETHER). While Hubbard's playing on piano wasn't of the perfection or proficiency of George Cables, it was astonishing to me that he would do that in the middle of the concert.

He had a beautiful speech he gave me that I will never forget. He began his speech by telling me to "Keep Growing", which is how he signed the CTI recording I brought to the concert. It now hangs framed on my wall. He also added this:

"I say this to all children who appreciate music like this: just because you are all grown and big like me, you know big in size, and an adult man, that doesn't mean you stop growing. All your life there is more to learn everyday. So in a sense I'm never done growing. I'm still learning how to always play better every night and if I feel like playing a little piano on a gig it is because I've learned a little piano too and want to express that. So keep growing because that is something that never ends".

A Very Brief (and Partial) Defense Of Shallowness

We live in a world of appearances. This is not only a matter of habit or choice in culture. Perceptual relations make up a great deal of human life, whatever the beliefs of the society concerning appearance. The Republic of Iran may have felt they were banning the hairstyle dubbed "the mullet" for complex spiritual and cultural reasons, but you can be sure there was something visually unappealing in the extreme about that particular hairstyle to warrant such litigation. However much we may speculate about the most interior, intimate contents about others' brain, however accurate our channelers and mystics may claim to be on the content of the brains, or rather, souls of the deceased, and however people may claim to be so clairvoyant as to know others in some privileged manner - in some exotic concoction of non- verbal and body language reading, or in energy and mind reading - we can never be totally sure about other's mental states.

However, we can be very sure about their state of hygiene, and we can never escape the raiment in which they have chosen to clad themselves: such raiment never stops talking to (or more likely yelling at) us, however verbally silent the wearer. Every mind numbing and repetitive article of cheap sportswear will dwarf the little bit of eyes and ears left of their human frames.

And, increasingly, if the scientists are to be believed, there is so much more of them for us to have to accomodate, both in terms of bodily weight and in terms of population density. The world can be a noisome, overwhelming place when we act as if we don't occupy a world of three dimensions, of volume and mass. Whatever we may think, we are are NOT disembodied brains floating in the ethers. The world is nothing like the Internet, however much we may think we can make the world over in that most recent of images.

And the buildings in which we inhabit seem permanently here. We cannot escape their shadows as we navigate from one interior to the next. The 21st century is littered with reminders of architectural decisions made remotely in the past: these are buildings by planners and architects with the most inhuman and obtuse of theories, and buildings from which we ought to, in many cases, recoil in embarassment and even depression. Our buildings, whether commercial or cannot so easily be escaped unless we opt out of modernity altogether and decide to live as anarcho-primitivists claim we should live.

I mention these remarks at a most crucial moment in human history. The world appears to be ending, at least as we know it, especially if Jim Kunstler's peak oil theory is accurate, and, also given the dire geographical trauma that will follow from warmer temparatures. Oh the earth will most likely go on, of course, but life on it will more likely resemble something out of Cormac McCarthy's THE ROAD than anything that humans have acclimated themselves to for at least over a century.

Since we are living in a kind of end of sorts it would be most prudent to ask ourselves why we have laid waste to the visible surface of our lives, our environment. (It is too intemperate and indelicate to ask why we increasingly dress as we do, or why we try and achieve a monotonous sameness in our gym manufactured bodies)

All of us are taught from the beginning that it is what is inside that counts. We are taught to be suspicious about our world of appearances. This has deep roots in monotheistic faiths and other general doctrines that have circulated for millennia. It is fairly clear that two things will follow from such advice. One consequence is that our surface lives can become increasingly unattractive and ugly since we have deemed such things as appearance as unimportant.

The second consequence is a kind of reverse of the first one. We will pursue our surfaces in a compulsive and manic way as if mania and excess were the revenge of Aphrodite herself upon us for taking too seriously all of this talk about our invisible interiors. We will become absorbed in plastic surgery and modes of existence in which the surface or our lives is an obsessive and above all CONFORMIST project. (In, for example, some narrow and Platonic ideal of thinness).

But one doesn't have to be a Freudian to see that we are insiting on the importance of something precisely because we never fully respected it to begin with. That is, we insist upon most dogmatically that which we don't truly or fully possess. We commit plastic surgery, we value others solely for their visual appearance, and we wear ugly clothes and live and work in ugly buildings because our heart was never in the surface to begin with. We remain unconsciously guilt ridden that we are not paying adequate attention to this all important interior we possess, as if some secret would be revealed there that would tell us finally who and what we are all.

If we were more, rather than less, shallow, by satisfying the claims made upon us of our external world, we would find we have a deepened life.

We often conceive of individual, human life as like an onion. In peel after peel, and layer after layer we feel we are that much more special, important, and intimate. This is a spatial metaphor.

Yet I would argue that we are more temporal, rather than spatial creatures. Our depths, if we want to call it that, can reveal themselves in the fullness of time.

What if the Jungians are correct and Aphrodite is a real entity and she is exacting revenge upon us for not taking her seriously enough, for ignoring Her needs, both in the form of sick and false forms of beauty and in plain ugliness?

Of course one doesn't have to be a Jungian, let alone a Pagan pantheist, to understand that beauty is its own value, with its own place in our lives.

As Oscar Wilde remarked:

"It is only superficial people who do not judge by appearances. The mystery of the world is in the visible, not the invisible".