I put a cheap new ’stereo’ unit in my pickup one night a few weeks back after the temperature had plummeted to just shy of 85 around 8:00 mosquito time because I’d become frustrated with the fm transmitter that plugged into the lighter supposedly to play my new ipod on an unoccupied fm station on the old stereo after the discovery that there are no unoccupied fm bands in Houston.  So I put in a unit already decked out for the ipod, relegating the fm gadget and the old stereo to the pile of useless electronic gear accumulated over the years in some closet.  Ah, technology:  an unending and expensive effort to stay usefully relevant.

Consider:  I have a bunch of 78 rpm ‘vinyls’ of 40’s-50′ jazz bands—which I remember playing as a kid—but have no way anymore to play.  I also have about a hundred 33(& 1/3) vinyls, for which my loving children bought me a turntable a couple years back that converts them into cd format, but upon trying it I discovered I could not abide the scratches and pops and scrapings also delivered by the needle vibrating in the grooves.  There are as well a bunch of cassettes stashed away somewhere from those days, though I have none of the reel-to-reel tapes left from when that was necessary.  And, natch, there are random stacks of cd’s currently sitting all around the place.

Then there are the various and necessary playback machines.  My brother had an under dash 45 rpm player in his car, which was the bitchinest thing around in the San Fernando Valley of the early ’60’s.  By the time I had a car it was eight-track players, but since I had a vw bug, which couldn’t be used to make out in, I didn’t bother getting one, though I eventually got a cassette player.  Things continued to progress, each time requiring new players and the transfer from one medium to another, ’til I finally gave up trying altogether.  Silence was better than the effort it took to listen to music.  Besides, I like silence.

But you can get too much of a good thing, ’specially when part of your soul’s been created in music.

So I asked Soccer Saul to find me an ipod and (house) player.  I asked him because he’s always had a more utilitarian approach to recorded music than Doc Boner the real musician, who would have me paying hundreds, if not thousands more for sound subtleties I’m incapable of hearing, especially with the pickup whizzing at 75.  Soccer Saul’s a bit more pragmatic when it comes to those things, so he brought it to me and showed me how to work it, and I started downloading cd’s like a fool and then discovered I could also get the vinyl recordings online for, natch, a fee, being about the same as I paid for the vinyl originally, and so got a bunch of them, too, until I decided I’d spent enough (this go around) and should take some time listening to them.

So for the last couple of weeks I’ve been motoring immersed in the big band excitement of Buddy Rich and his guys doing a West Side Story arrangement.  The album—’Swingin’ New Big Band’ (yep, they had titles like that, with the additional benefit of having been true at the time)—came out in ‘66, but I didn’t hear it until 1970 when I was stationed in Hawaii following Vietnam.  The first time I heard it I was at a lifers party at somebody’s military housing on the base at Ft. Shafter (Shafner—?) in Honolulu.

‘Lifers’ was what we called career military guys, though carefully when they were around, ’cause it usually wasn’t a term of affection, and normally carried a sort of unsavory adjective before it.  The lifers were of course a rather exclusive group both by choice and probably insistence from the draftees who, resenting their situation, wanted as little to do with them as possible.  I got invited for a while to their parties for a couple of reasons:  Joe and I had struck up a deep friendship in Vietnam in spite of his lifer status, and it continued in Hawaii.  The army band was allotted a whole lot of stuff, like a state-of-the-art recording/rehearsal studio, but they were never allotted a clerk’s position, that is, the secretary of the unit, the forms and records meister, the typist for the pricky c.o.  That required the work of someone volunteering to stay and do it after, say, rehearsal or performance hours when everybody else was done.  Normally those volunteers came from the lifers looking for rank advancement, though Joe, who was a staff sgt might have been required to do it, and he asked me to pick up a particular side of it.  So I did, thinking also of rank advancement (when I made spec 5 my income about doubled)—and as well, extra duty passes, and such, and I enjoyed working with Joe.

That’s why I got invited to lifers parties, ’cause they thought I wanted to be one of  ‘em, though the topic never came up until well into the bottle of the third or fourth party, when I responded—complete with a glissandoing tongue—’are you. . .out of your (hic). . .ffffffffffucking minds?’  After that I didn’t get invited anymore.

It was at one of those parties that I first heard the album, because in spite of the fact that they were lifers, most of these guys knew what was happening musically, especially in jazz, ’cause most of ‘em had played in the major big bands along the way, then finally settled into a decent livelihood in the military.  The jazz band was easily the best of the numerous ensembles of the whole group because of this.  I got to play in that group with some of the finest musicians of their day.  One of them had in fact played with Buddy Rich, and that’s why the album was playing just a bit louder than the ice clinking in drink glasses to a listening audience and keene the undiscovered non-lifer kicked back in the corner of a golden couch wishin’ there was some—any—single woman around.

But even the glasses stopped clinking when the brass announced the fanfare to West Side Story and from then on we were each taken to private places within the living music, listening as musicians alone together, hearing our instruments, the tightness of the band, the beauty of the arrangement.  We listened reverentially.  And from nowhere came a trombone singing ’somewhere,’ with Jimmy Trimble blowing it and melting my guts with his soulfully hopeful lament into a nearly out of body experience of breathlessness.  No need for a single woman when Jimmy Trimble’s playin’.  We played it three more times that night, and the album has accompanied me ever since.  I don’t care whatever else Jimmy Trimble did with his life, because that one solo made it all worth it (from my perspective, anyway; never met the guy).

So I’ve been saturating myself with it like a returning lover and suddenly was given to think, ‘Jimmy Trimble, you prick.  Had I not heard your solo I might have continued to believe I could be a hot trombonist.’

There are these moments when there are subtle but seismic shifts in the foundation of the soul, sudden flashes of insight perhaps or a whispering of the spirit, sorry, Larry, this won’t be you.  The beauty of his playing condemned me as I listened.  I asked Bill, a really decent lifer and fine reed man who’d done the big band scene and now directed our jazz band if he thought I could ever play like that.  He mulled it over a bit then said, ‘I’m afraid not.’  So I crawled back to my corner and drank the fifth of tequila I’d brought alone, coming to the next morning, though remaining blind until the evening, which is why (as you can imagine) I no longer drink tequila.  The truth, as they say, hurts.

‘Course I still continued to do music (as did Salieri behind  Mozart).  It wasn’t until I headed out to seminary that I fully nixed it as a profession.  I continued to do as much as I could in church, but as the congregation grew my involvement with musical performance dwindled nearly to nothing.  I was aware of having to make those decisions at the time, and bummed by it—musical performance has been part of my spirit (say, spiritual health), but that was part of the price of buildin’ a church.

I’m not given to regretting things:  I play the best I can with the cards I’m holdin’.  Life—so far—has been deep and wide and full of the simple grace of being and love (as well as the other side).  I never wish that things had turned out differently ’cause it’s a waste of time and energy:  things turned out the way things turned out, you ain’t gonna change that.  Instead of judging what’s been, I choose to savor it.  That’s not to say I don’t sometimes lament the road not taken.  Nor do I mind reminding the Great History Being, ’see what I’ve given up for you.’

And that, of course, earns nothing but the ol’ cosmic incredulity:  ‘are you kiddin’ me?  Look at all I’ve given you in return, even to the extent, musically, of Doc Boner.  And you’re whinin’?  Why the very fact that you played well enough to recognize the unique beauty of Jimmy’s solo is a very special gift from me to you.’

Oh, yeah—that prick Jimmy Trimble showin’ me up again:  god’s gift, my jealousy.

And in spite of that I’m listening again and again he’s taking me somewhere.  I’m sitting in the band, with the bones, holdin’ my own in the second chair.  We’re in the middle of the sound, lifting horns, breathing together, exploding into chords, tonguing into phrases, listening to yourself and them all to be at one in music and spirit and then we melt away while Jimmy sings his solo.  And I hear the things deep in my soul.  I remember and savor.  I remember and grieve.  I remember and lament the road not taken.  I listen and am recalled into beauty and grace.  And I give thanks.

Especially for that magnificent prick, Jimmy Trimble.

Larry