#89 - Driving to Work with Doris Day

Driving to Work with Doris Day

6/14/06 (#89)

While my years of musical history (read: obsessive/compulsiveness) have made me a reasonable choice for anyone assembling a pop music competition trivia team, my value to the team would plummet if the categories included jazz. While I have a few seminal jazz albums in my collection (and I like several of them very much), they are mere samplings of a massive genre, and by no means a solid knowledge base anymore than you could understand the wide array of flavors available within the category "fruits" by process of eating a couple of grapes.

Jazz has simply never spoken to me. Miles Davis' Kind of Blue is a phenomenal album, but when I saw Cecil Taylor in concert, I thought it was a joke---the audience being the brunt of the punchline. (Midway through, my date leaned over and whispered, "This is the music they would use to torture my mother." True---her mother, and her boyfriend.) Some of John Coltrane's riffs catch my ear when they approach me via the retail store's background music (at least I think it's Coltrane---might be Sonny Rollins, or Charlie Parker, or anyone, for that matter), but my exploration of Charles Mingus (recommended by Joni Mitchell) led me to wonder how I could love Joni Mitchell so much when she had such inexplicable taste in music. I am a novice with the form, I have no understanding of the motivations, and I don't pretend otherwise.

That type of pretension is one of my biggest pet peeves---a mindset I refer to as "The Jazz Tourist." You know the type---the kind of person who reads a brochure about Montezuma while riding the "Aztec Nation" tour bus and by dinner time opines about the 15th century Mexicas culture as though he were a learned scholar---the whole time incorrectly referring to the Mexicas (the historical name for the peoples of that region) as "the Mexicans". This type of person is likely to close their eyes and utter passionately, "I love jazz", and when asked about favorite artists, say, "Anything on Blue Note. First and foremost, Norah Jones." (For the record, Norah Jones isn't jazz. She's "jazzy". She's perfectly fine (to steal a phrase from Dorothy Parker), but she's decidedly more Kind of Pastel. As a guitar instructor once told me when I asked if I could learn some jazz, "It is not something you learn that way---jazz is simply an advanced form of melody and time signature, and you have to know the fundamentals completely before you can 'play jazz.' But I can show you some chords that sound jazzy." I was 15---that was good enough for me.)

Jazz is like calculus---you can't learn a few simple postulates and expect to be able to contribute to a discussion on how best to measure the volume of air contained within a balloon. The jazz tourist is one who jumps at any opportunity to talk about it, then throws in esoteric misunderstandings that not only fail to contribute, but actually detract from the quality of the conversation. When subject comes up, my friend Nick can get involved with the discourse, be it big band, bop, free jazz, latin, and a dozen other sub-genres that I do not know. For me, it signals the perfect opportunity to freshen my drink.

I say all this to explain the oddity of me stopping the radio on a jazz station as I drove to work last week. I was borrowing my boss' truck for the commute, and his radio presets were different than mine (an understatement of comic proportion), so I was punching the scan button like I had a tic, relentlessly searching for something other than morning show inanity and refried political posturing. Eventually the dial came to rest on KMHD, Portland's Jazz Station (I know the tagline from a sticker on a jazz tourist's office door at my last job, a self-appointed hep cat who counted Rickie Lee Jones among his favorite jazz artists---see previous reference to Norah Jones), and since it was, at least, actual music, I gave my index finger a few seconds off to see if it would hold my attention.

I have no idea how to classify the music I was hearing---it had the rolling beat and easy melodicism of Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller, but delivered by a small, energetic combo like those that became popular after the big band era. Yet despite my inability to name it, I knew the style fairly well---not from records, but from cinema: This was the soundtrack to Rock Hudson suavely stumbling to woo that year's blonde bombshell; this was the music that accompanied Tony Randall's futile efforts to spruce up his apartment for a soon-to-be-failed romance; these were the strains heard in every late-50's reel that featured a visit to a late night club that was described by the stylish stars as "really swinging" or "totally now". It was buoyant without being cheery, urgent without being manic. I was suddenly driving to work in a campy romantic comedy.

What surprised me most was that the world seemed to be listening to the same radio station. Stop lights turned green on the downbeat, cars changed lanes with seamless, syncopated grace, traffic glided to the pace of the high-hat. My commute is usually a non-event, an ennui between a happy home and the hectic mayhem of the job. But today, the world seemed to vibrate with the music. It felt like 1959, and Doris Day was sitting in the passenger seat, arms folded and brow furrowed, lamenting that while men in general were a scurrilous lot, that arrogant Brad Allen was first among them. (Even in my daydreams, I am the Tony Randall character, never Rock Hudson.)

The music made for a wonderful few miles of travel, and an important perspective-changing experience: we inevitably respond to the various stimuli to which we are exposed, and it is within our power to control much of that external bombardment. Several minutes of brushes on a snare accompanying a perky piano groove and my day was uplifted.

At least until the tune ended, and KMHD opted to follow this lively number with a schmaltzy power ballad that sounded like the bastard child of Muzak and Kenny G. (If you aren't familiar with one of those sources, let me assure that the kid was a spitting image of both parents.) My finger made an involuntary movement toward the scan button, and there I was back in present time, trying to find something other than self-righteous pontificating and so-called morning humorists. Doris Day was nowhere to be found.

©2006 wpreagan