I miss my piano. For decades, a 1944 baby grand piano sat gloriously in the corner of my living room, and now that spot is taken up by a sofa bed, pull-out couch; whatever you call a piece of furniture where someone can sleep when the remedies are gone and stairs are no longer climbable.
I have been a musician of sorts over the years, but never a pianist. When I sat down on the ebony 1917 bench and began to play, it was by ear. In college, I wrote music for a choral group in which I sang, hanging out in a room filled with electronic keyboards, a big deal in the early 1970s. I’d put on headphones and noodle away on the keys, developing melodies and harmonies, having to remember what I’d played. Maybe we all had talent once, a long time ago. I don’t know.
Sometimes in my living room, I’d play something light, major chords only, just to see a smile on the woman sitting nearby, but now it’s just a dream, a pleasant memory that sneaks in every winter, and winter is coming. Now, on cold nights, I occasionally just sing to myself, maybe the Lennon/McCartney song “Let It Be,” a sweet song about a mom’s good advice, a tune requiring five major chords that I can easily handle. These days, the old piano lives on, in someone else’s home, and, for that, I am glad.
Recently, on a cold, dark night, I was driving the ridge toward home when Johnny Mathis came on the car radio, singing the Jerome Kern/Ira Gershwin song, “Long Ago and Far Away,” and it did, in fact, take me somewhere else. Mathis was followed by the never-in-doubt voice of Sarah Vaughan, then the sultry softness of Julie London, the velvet tones of Mel Torme, ending in my driveway with Bobby Darin singing some love song or other, after which I sat there longing for the days before cellular phones, days when you locked or unlocked a car with a key, days when film was threaded into a camera, followed by solitary hours in a quiet darkroom.
More music. We come by musical knowledge in sometimes unexpected ways. My father was a musician, and he had a good collection of jazz albums. There was one I used to put on the turntable often when I was a kid. It was an LP by a jazz group called the John Kirby Sextet, playing from the late 1930s into the early 1940s. I can’t even begin to explain why a kid in the 1960s would find that music fascinating, but I did. Listening to John Kirby led me to classical music. A song called “Beethoven Riffs On” introduced me to the exquisite Allegretto movement of Beethoven’s 7th Symphony, still my all-time favorite, and a song called “Anitra’s Dance” caused me to discover Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg and his extraordinary work “Peer Gynt,” from which the dance tune was borrowed.
The old music is everywhere. During a recent Chicago Bears game on television, the network would go to commercials playing songs by Thin Lizzy, Rush, Bruce Springsteen, and, of course, Chicago. And a big truck commercial featured the music of a brilliant band from the mid-1960s called Traffic, a band that included Dave Mason and Steve Winwood. The song selling trucks? “Dear Mr. Fantasy.” Not sure why songs from 60 years ago still resonate with us, and I very much doubt if any of today’s new music will still be out there in the ether, let alone in our collective consciousness 10 years hence, let alone in half a century.
Soon, snow will fall, and we’ll start singing Christmas songs, the old ones, and musical artists known for some other style will record the obligatory Christmas album, but I won’t be paying attention. No, I’m an old man, so I’ll be listening to those who got me here, Doris, Andy, Bing, Rosemary, Frank, Nat, Mel, and even old Burl. All gone now, even the woman who so kindly smiled when I played and sang. All gone.
Kurt Ullrich lives in rural Jackson County. His book “The Iowa State Fair” is available from the University of Iowa Press.
This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Chords and voices from youth still resonate decades later | Opinion
Reporting by Kurt Ullrich, Guest columnist / Des Moines Register
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