But "Jazz Memories" is an extraordinary compilation from the great jazz masters including jazz divas Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald, with jazz legends "Satchmo" Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington, to name a few. These are all clean tracks of major hits from major labels—not muddied side B recordings. What's not to like?
(You can go to Amie Street News to read the review in situ. …Alas, Amie Street is no more—bought up by Amazon.)
Seeing the name Lennie Tristano on the track, "Judy" (perhaps named for Lennie's vocalist Judy Niemack?) startled me. My grade school classmate Steve Tristano's mom was named Judy too so the name Tristano took me down memory lane and I found myself enthusiastically recommending it on Amie Street despite the fact that I know nothing about jazz—which landed me a guest blog spot on Amie Street! I'm pretty jazzed by the whole thing. (Pardon the pun on oh so many levels!)
---------------------------------------------
Back to the Tristano memory lane: since my grade school classmate Adair Daley (Adair Lara) is off somewhere writing about her childhood days growing up in Lagunitas, and it looks like I'll have to wait for the next high school reunion in 2010 to see her as her SF Chronicle email bounces—by then, I know beyond the shadow of a doubt, that even more of our gray cells will be severely challenged—I thought I'd better contribute a few Lagunitas memories of my own to the great sphere of blogdada art now while I can still remember most of it.
In the late '50s, I went to Lagunitas School in the San Geronimo Valley out in the wilds of West Marin in Northern California with many interesting, if not downirght quirky characters—including Lennie Tristano's son, Steve.
During recess, after a jazz assembly performance by stride pianist Ralph Sutton (Pete's dad), we found ourselves alone in the classroom, and Steve went over to the piano to strut his stuff.
We weren't allowed to touch the old carved oak upright so this was pretty big deal. Steve opened the lid (we gasped at his audacity) and then he gave it an experimental trill. Soon Steve was honkeytonking tunes on that piano for us like "Tea for Two" and Scott Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag," and he played the rockingist "Boogie Woogie" you ever heard.
What was amazing (in retrospect) was that Steve played all these songs by ear. We'd certainly never heard it before. I thought it was perfectly normal that some kid could pound out music like that. What did I know? I wasn't even eight years old yet. The ivories trilled. Steve pounded it down. The ebonies remembered their tropical homeland.
We could literally see the cenozoic dust motes rising up and in the sun from the top of that old blond upright piano that never played anything racier than "America the Beautiful," or "The Star Spangled Banner."
Eight-year-old Steve, the jazz piano prodigy, was standing on the piano bench hammering out a series of his famous father's locked "hand progression chords" by ear—this was long before the other piano man Elton John even knew there was an Elvis. We were all dancing and rocking out in that classroom like American Bandstand—not that we had TV reception in The Valley. When Steve arpeggioed the keys, I thought for sure the floor was gonna open up and swallow us whole for sinnin' like that.
Classmate Taydie (Helen) Bostwick was a dyed in the wool Elvis fan‚ she even had her hair cut and greased back like Elvis so she haughtily sniffed at our gyrations, shoving her glasses up the bridge of her nose with her bird finger because there could be only one King and Elvis was it. Amen.
To be fair, we used to listen to Elvis records at Taye's grannie's house above the Lagunitas store after school. Taye's grannie talked kinda funny but she was from the South, maybe Memphis. Even we could see there was no love lost between Taye's grandmother and her son-in-law, Charles, who was quite the acculturated New England antique snob—replete with an accent.
But this boogie woogie that Steve played was visceral, electrifying. We were mesmerized. Come to think of it, Taye might have finked on us. Last I heard she was in an all cowgirl band in Vegas or Reno—in search of the Flying Elvises, I suppose.
When the recess bell rang, our 2nd grade teacher, the matronly, rotund Miss Burge stormed into the classroom and had a fit of absolute and anacreontic apoplexy—replete with vibrato shriek (she was also the school music teacher).
I guess Miss Burge could hear us down the hall. Miss Burge surveyed the scene and turned red, then spidery purple, her fleshy jowls trembling with rage as she closed the piano lid and she checked for damage.
The air resonated with a harmonic flock of hidden notes and they landed in her stiff beehive coifed blonde hair—gone all awry. We were even more mesmerized by the extraordinary sight of Miss Burge coming undone like that. Truly a memorable day all around.
The piano survived Steve's musical onslaught but the damage was already done deep inside all of us. We were Boogie Woogied by the blind piano man's son. We experienced a religious bop-tism by fire.
That moment we could never go back to who we were, amorphic, unformed and unsophisticated kids shoehorned into the adult nostalgia of an invented childhood a la Robert Lewis Stevenson's "A Child's Garden of Verses."
Sadly, Miss Burge did NOT see Steve's obvious inherited talent. She did not reward his gift. Punishment was her forte. And so she played her heavy hand at that. Steve was undaunted. He had his own music locked deep inside a fortress no one could penetrate.
Steve lived in Lagunitas near his grandmother's house. I lived with my grandmother on the border between Lagunitas and Forest Knolls. I used to get Steve's mother Judy all mixed up with Scott Weaver's mother. They looked so alike with their curly raven hair and they were both kindly women. At least to me.
Scott's mom made doughnuts from scratch...the most heavenly concoctions on earth. How she found the time to make doughnuts with all those kids running loose was a major miracle. One winter afternoon I was riding my horse through the hills and found myself trespassing in their back yard on the lower slopes of Mount Barnabe.
Mrs. Weaver invited me into the kitchen and I ate fresh doughnuts dusted with granules of sugar. I forgot that I was miles from home destined to riding the lonely tree caverned fire trails in pitch darkness with an overactive imagination. Luckily my sensible horse could see the way home. But that's another story.
It was a long walk home from the school too and cars were rare in The Valley, so if there was an event at the school, we sometimes hitched rides home with the Suttons and Tristanos. Pete's mom, Chuck (Charlene) Sutton who could sit on her long blonde hair, drove an old two-tone gray-green VW bus and countless kids could pile into it. It was handy when she lived on our road.
I used to visit the Suttons when I was young as there weren't many kids to play with on Arroyo Road and I was madly in love with Pete by age six. He was tall and blond, like a viking. I guess Chuck was seeing Grover Sales the art critic in those days because Pete's dad Ralph Sutton was a jazz musician in New York. I only found that out decades later 'coz Grover Sales had written a dedication to Chuck on a poetry book of Lew Welch's but that REALLY is another story.
The Suttons moved to Lagunitas up the hill near the Tristanos which meant for me, a longer walk home. I only went to that house on the hill a few times. It was dark and gloomy under the dank redwoods. I didn't like it. Then I got too shy to visit but I often rode by their place on my horse.
But I do remember meeting the blind piano man Lennie Tristano at the Lagunitas Store. In those days, I had a curious notion: I thought you had to be blind to play the piano as Scott Weaver's older brother, Kent, the Valley piano tuner, was also blind.
When a well-meaning neighbor offered us her old piano, I said No! and hastily took up the guitar in order to preserve my eyesight because I was going to be an artist when I grew up. We were wise enough to know that the adult world was full of contradictions. However, Steve had two perfectly good eyes to see with. So that theory was shot down. Fine eyes they were, he had his father's strong dark eyebrows. And he could play the piano like he was born to it.
We all lived charmed lives. Then the 60s happened... Steve found oblivion in a needle. Last time I saw him was at the Forest Knolls bus stop, really the old train depot. He boarded the magic bus, maybe he saw something on the horizon and like so many of our generation, he never came back.
I heard Steve went to the great beyond, others say he resurfaced somewhere in Oregon. Hard to sort out the truths from the half-truths but any which way you think it, he was a casualty of the drug wars.
Steve's best friend, Pete Sutton was in our grade too. They were thick as thieves with Johnny Kaufman and Scott Huntsman. No room there for girls. Just like their fathers.
Alas, their fathers, Tristano & Sutton may have been great jazz legends, rightfully repatriated and posthumously inducted into the Big Band and Jazz Hall of Fame, but they were among the vast army of invisible fathers... I saw them maybe once or twice.
We children of the Beat Generation were all mostly fatherless living out so far from town. We grew strong like the women who raised us. We marched to our own drum. Some marched farther than others, and some never came back.
© 2007 Maureen Hurley
Note Bene: after the Amie Street article appeared, I heard from musician Guy Tristano—Steve's half-brother—from Lennie's 2nd family who lived back East, who filled me in on some of Steve's back story. Molto bene!
(You can go to Amie Street News to read the review in situ. …Alas, Amie Street is no more—bought up by Amazon.)
Seeing the name Lennie Tristano on the track, "Judy" (perhaps named for Lennie's vocalist Judy Niemack?) startled me. My grade school classmate Steve Tristano's mom was named Judy too so the name Tristano took me down memory lane and I found myself enthusiastically recommending it on Amie Street despite the fact that I know nothing about jazz—which landed me a guest blog spot on Amie Street! I'm pretty jazzed by the whole thing. (Pardon the pun on oh so many levels!)
---------------------------------------------
Back to the Tristano memory lane: since my grade school classmate Adair Daley (Adair Lara) is off somewhere writing about her childhood days growing up in Lagunitas, and it looks like I'll have to wait for the next high school reunion in 2010 to see her as her SF Chronicle email bounces—by then, I know beyond the shadow of a doubt, that even more of our gray cells will be severely challenged—I thought I'd better contribute a few Lagunitas memories of my own to the great sphere of blogdada art now while I can still remember most of it.
 |
| Steve, b. in 1952, died Nov. 21, 2015 |
In the late '50s, I went to Lagunitas School in the San Geronimo Valley out in the wilds of West Marin in Northern California with many interesting, if not downirght quirky characters—including Lennie Tristano's son, Steve.
During recess, after a jazz assembly performance by stride pianist Ralph Sutton (Pete's dad), we found ourselves alone in the classroom, and Steve went over to the piano to strut his stuff.
We weren't allowed to touch the old carved oak upright so this was pretty big deal. Steve opened the lid (we gasped at his audacity) and then he gave it an experimental trill. Soon Steve was honkeytonking tunes on that piano for us like "Tea for Two" and Scott Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag," and he played the rockingist "Boogie Woogie" you ever heard.
What was amazing (in retrospect) was that Steve played all these songs by ear. We'd certainly never heard it before. I thought it was perfectly normal that some kid could pound out music like that. What did I know? I wasn't even eight years old yet. The ivories trilled. Steve pounded it down. The ebonies remembered their tropical homeland.
We could literally see the cenozoic dust motes rising up and in the sun from the top of that old blond upright piano that never played anything racier than "America the Beautiful," or "The Star Spangled Banner."
Eight-year-old Steve, the jazz piano prodigy, was standing on the piano bench hammering out a series of his famous father's locked "hand progression chords" by ear—this was long before the other piano man Elton John even knew there was an Elvis. We were all dancing and rocking out in that classroom like American Bandstand—not that we had TV reception in The Valley. When Steve arpeggioed the keys, I thought for sure the floor was gonna open up and swallow us whole for sinnin' like that.
Classmate Taydie (Helen) Bostwick was a dyed in the wool Elvis fan‚ she even had her hair cut and greased back like Elvis so she haughtily sniffed at our gyrations, shoving her glasses up the bridge of her nose with her bird finger because there could be only one King and Elvis was it. Amen.
To be fair, we used to listen to Elvis records at Taye's grannie's house above the Lagunitas store after school. Taye's grannie talked kinda funny but she was from the South, maybe Memphis. Even we could see there was no love lost between Taye's grandmother and her son-in-law, Charles, who was quite the acculturated New England antique snob—replete with an accent.
But this boogie woogie that Steve played was visceral, electrifying. We were mesmerized. Come to think of it, Taye might have finked on us. Last I heard she was in an all cowgirl band in Vegas or Reno—in search of the Flying Elvises, I suppose.
When the recess bell rang, our 2nd grade teacher, the matronly, rotund Miss Burge stormed into the classroom and had a fit of absolute and anacreontic apoplexy—replete with vibrato shriek (she was also the school music teacher).
I guess Miss Burge could hear us down the hall. Miss Burge surveyed the scene and turned red, then spidery purple, her fleshy jowls trembling with rage as she closed the piano lid and she checked for damage.
The air resonated with a harmonic flock of hidden notes and they landed in her stiff beehive coifed blonde hair—gone all awry. We were even more mesmerized by the extraordinary sight of Miss Burge coming undone like that. Truly a memorable day all around.
The piano survived Steve's musical onslaught but the damage was already done deep inside all of us. We were Boogie Woogied by the blind piano man's son. We experienced a religious bop-tism by fire.
That moment we could never go back to who we were, amorphic, unformed and unsophisticated kids shoehorned into the adult nostalgia of an invented childhood a la Robert Lewis Stevenson's "A Child's Garden of Verses."
Sadly, Miss Burge did NOT see Steve's obvious inherited talent. She did not reward his gift. Punishment was her forte. And so she played her heavy hand at that. Steve was undaunted. He had his own music locked deep inside a fortress no one could penetrate.
Steve lived in Lagunitas near his grandmother's house. I lived with my grandmother on the border between Lagunitas and Forest Knolls. I used to get Steve's mother Judy all mixed up with Scott Weaver's mother. They looked so alike with their curly raven hair and they were both kindly women. At least to me.
Scott's mom made doughnuts from scratch...the most heavenly concoctions on earth. How she found the time to make doughnuts with all those kids running loose was a major miracle. One winter afternoon I was riding my horse through the hills and found myself trespassing in their back yard on the lower slopes of Mount Barnabe.
Mrs. Weaver invited me into the kitchen and I ate fresh doughnuts dusted with granules of sugar. I forgot that I was miles from home destined to riding the lonely tree caverned fire trails in pitch darkness with an overactive imagination. Luckily my sensible horse could see the way home. But that's another story.
It was a long walk home from the school too and cars were rare in The Valley, so if there was an event at the school, we sometimes hitched rides home with the Suttons and Tristanos. Pete's mom, Chuck (Charlene) Sutton who could sit on her long blonde hair, drove an old two-tone gray-green VW bus and countless kids could pile into it. It was handy when she lived on our road.
I used to visit the Suttons when I was young as there weren't many kids to play with on Arroyo Road and I was madly in love with Pete by age six. He was tall and blond, like a viking. I guess Chuck was seeing Grover Sales the art critic in those days because Pete's dad Ralph Sutton was a jazz musician in New York. I only found that out decades later 'coz Grover Sales had written a dedication to Chuck on a poetry book of Lew Welch's but that REALLY is another story.
The Suttons moved to Lagunitas up the hill near the Tristanos which meant for me, a longer walk home. I only went to that house on the hill a few times. It was dark and gloomy under the dank redwoods. I didn't like it. Then I got too shy to visit but I often rode by their place on my horse.
But I do remember meeting the blind piano man Lennie Tristano at the Lagunitas Store. In those days, I had a curious notion: I thought you had to be blind to play the piano as Scott Weaver's older brother, Kent, the Valley piano tuner, was also blind.
When a well-meaning neighbor offered us her old piano, I said No! and hastily took up the guitar in order to preserve my eyesight because I was going to be an artist when I grew up. We were wise enough to know that the adult world was full of contradictions. However, Steve had two perfectly good eyes to see with. So that theory was shot down. Fine eyes they were, he had his father's strong dark eyebrows. And he could play the piano like he was born to it.
We all lived charmed lives. Then the 60s happened... Steve found oblivion in a needle. Last time I saw him was at the Forest Knolls bus stop, really the old train depot. He boarded the magic bus, maybe he saw something on the horizon and like so many of our generation, he never came back.
I heard Steve went to the great beyond, others say he resurfaced somewhere in Oregon. Hard to sort out the truths from the half-truths but any which way you think it, he was a casualty of the drug wars.
Steve's best friend, Pete Sutton was in our grade too. They were thick as thieves with Johnny Kaufman and Scott Huntsman. No room there for girls. Just like their fathers.
Alas, their fathers, Tristano & Sutton may have been great jazz legends, rightfully repatriated and posthumously inducted into the Big Band and Jazz Hall of Fame, but they were among the vast army of invisible fathers... I saw them maybe once or twice.
We children of the Beat Generation were all mostly fatherless living out so far from town. We grew strong like the women who raised us. We marched to our own drum. Some marched farther than others, and some never came back.
© 2007 Maureen Hurley
Note Bene: after the Amie Street article appeared, I heard from musician Guy Tristano—Steve's half-brother—from Lennie's 2nd family who lived back East, who filled me in on some of Steve's back story. Molto bene!
11 comments:
Maureen! It's Adair Lara. Boy, you write wonderfully. How do you remember all that? I wish Adrian and I had been math whizzes, alas.
I'm still in san franisco--left the Chron a couple years ago. She's in San Rafael. You know my brother shannon has a photographic memory--can remember every detail of those old days. funny.
I'm at adair.lara@gmail.com
Why thankyou 'Dare! Coming form you, that's a compliment, indeed! Long time, no see...let's swap some Lagunitas stories sometime soon...maybe bring Shannon along.
Damn nice writing. I may not have written much, but I do read quite a bit! I never guessed that "Taye" was an Elvis fan that far back-but hey, it had to be, she had such a startling collection of albums and trivia by the time I met her, in our first double-digit years...yes, there were a bunch of characters in the valley, not excluding present company! Some well-reknowned people transiently, too, but, other than Janis Joplin they probably could not drum up as much jumpin' joy and pithy misery as was locally grown.
Anyway, just to add a bit of extra info, Scott's older (oldest?) brother was Kent, who my friend Joan had a friendship with. Kent was blind, you saw him walking one hand on the shoulder of one of his many little brothers or sister, mostly, but sometimes on his own with a cane when everyone else was in school or busy. When I was into my teens, Joan and I went to meet some of the brothers one night to smoke or otherwise get something up to ease the tedium. We walked a mile and a half through the cold rain to Lagunitas, met Scott who joined us up with Kent and maybe another little brother or a freind were waiting. Scott told me to lead them to this abandoned shack which would be some shelter from the rain. It was a moonless night in the woods, pitch black, and I didn't know where the shack was, though I was standing at the head of the trail to it. I started down the path, but it wasn't long before I was slipping on the mud, couldn't feel the edge of the path, was it going right, left, straight ahead, over a bridge, under a cliff...??? so I said "I can't see". Who ended up leading us to the cabin? Kent, of course! I'm sure it was meant to be a lesson in "seeing" from the brothers.
We smoked a little weed, didn't talk much. It got cold and Kent and Joan wrapped up in an old army blanket and went to sleep. Scott came and he and the friend left. I listened to the rain dripping through all the trees, draining off the side of the tin roof. Thinking of the Indian ragas I had recently been listening to, and the Beatles song about the hole in the roof, but that I imagined to be a beautiful day, not like this northern damp cold jungle.
No one laughed aloud, about getting there - it was a little humiliating though. Not that I had any notion that just because someone couldn't see that he wouldn't be able to find his way, but many did, so it was a good lesson, just wasted on me.
so, another story...
Steve and I attended community college in the early- mid 90's. Talented dancer, guitarist, poet and drummer, I saw the unrealized potential in me, mirrored in Steve. BTW, he had been clean for 5 years when we met. I no longer live in that town, I hope he's he's well.
hello. my names ray.
when i saw that picture of steve i broke into tears.
the last time i saw steve was in eugene oregon around '99 or 2000.
. . .
that's how i started the story of how i met steve and how he came to live my wife and i for a while many years ago.
but the story was too long and exceeded the character limit for posting here.
so i shortened it, and had to shorten it again, and finally gave up.
then i decided to try putting it in google docs and would post the link to the twice shortened version here.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WUQW1RanjqPlgH2vM6OktHSMd9w4VcBOGN1EhcC7BQI/edit?usp=sharing
thank you.
thank you very much for this page with comments about a very dear friend of mine that i have not seen and decades, and sometimes wonder how he is doing these days.
REPOST FROM RAY'S STORY 1
hello. my names ray.
when i saw that picture of steve i broke into tears.
the last time i saw steve was in eugene oregon around '99 or 2000.
i don't remember when exactly, i was not too well connected to reality at that time.
steve had lived with my wife violet and i for a while.
i met steve back in '78 and did not like him for several months that i knew him.
but one day i saw him helping someone with their car and being a mechanic myself i knew he was going to make things worse so i stepped in to rescue the people at hand.
to my surprise, he knew what he was doing and had the folks car running very quickly.
i looked him up and down and thought that he was not only willing to help strangers, but actually did.
so i decided to explore just what kind of person this was that i had such a dislike for.
well to make a long story short, we became good friends, and as time went one we got to be better friends.
after a while we went our separate ways, and didn't see each other.
during that time i met my wife and things progressed down a new road of life for me.
one day i got a call from steve, the fist time we had spoke for a year or more.
his van was broke down and he was in samuel p. taylor park and wanted me to come down from eugene and help him.
my wife said she was impressed with my immediate comment of "sure. tell me how to get there".
at this point was had left the world of working on cars and was into , deeply into computers.
i had refused to work on friends cars, and didn't like working on ours.
a big change from the guy she first met that had loved working on machinery so much that my hands were permanently stained for the oils and solvents involved.
so she and i threw a few things in our Volkswagen van and were on our way to help steve with his Volkswagen van.
well while helping steve my vans engine blew up.
i don't mean it just quit working i mean that there were chunks of it scattered all over the road on that hill going west towards the park.
steve knew someone with a tow truck and we towed my van up to the park and parked it next to his.
then i rebuilt steves engine on the park bench, and someone he knew gave us an engine that was broken, but just needed a rebuild and i rebuilt that one on the bench next to us for my van.
some parts weren't fitting correctly so we had to cut up pop cans from the garbage to make shims for the main bearings on the crank shaft.
once in a while i would take a break and juggle my short handled sledge hammer.
i had an eight pound [about 3 and a half kilo] hammer head on a short hatchet handle.
It was good for mental focus because if you missed and that handle hit on the end of your fingers it was i quick reminder to dump all that other stuff out of your mind and regain focus on the task at hand.
Steve has some mechanism in him that he uses to regain focus also.
i don’t know what it is exactly, but i ‘ll bet it has something to do with music, or some aspect of music.
He once told me that there was a direct correlation between the frequency of musical cords, and the distances of the orbits of the planets from the sun.
So i know that those mental waters of his run deep, but they flow in a different way than mine.
That comment was one of those moments when my love and respect for steve was greatly deepened.
REPOST FROM RAY'S STORY 2
But i digress from the tale of two vans.
So we worked on the two vans, and i was glad that steve knew far more than he let on about vehicles.
i did the delicate work, and he did the heavy lifting. Literally.
He pulled the engines out, put them on the bench.
Then when i had cast my magic spells on them [home made shims included] he put the engines back in the vans.
He had the hands of a mechanic as well as a musician. Amazingly versatile man.
Renaissance man would seem appropriate.
Somewhere along the line of those times of rejuvenation of the vans in the park we discussed steve coming to live with us since we had an extra bedroom and all.
Much could be said, but at this point i am wondering if there is a limit to the size of documents in this blog.
i ‘ll continue, however more briefly and if i ‘m over the limit for posting here, i ‘ll figure something out.
So eventually my wife began dabbling in computer graphics, became world famous and we moved to the bay area and steve stayed in eugene.
my wife died of cancer in '95 and i dropped off the earth for a decade or more.
Anyway years later, after my wife died i was visiting a friend in eugene and i saw steve riding a bicycle across the street in front of the van i was driving.
Yes it was a volkswagen, but it was a eurovan when they were still new in this country.
i jumped out and hugged him, much to the dismay of the people lined up behind my rig sitting in the street.
We didn’t speak long as each of us were on errands with time critical parts of those errands.
But i did go to his house and talk a bit with him later and then i was off to somewhere else far away.
And that was the last time i saw him.
i do sometimes wonder where is is now, and how he’s doing.
So i ‘ll end here and say thank you for this page you have discussing a dear friend that i have not seen in decades.
That picture is so very “swamp beast” that i could not help but cry when i saw it.
Thank you.
ray
Ray,
Your story had me in tears too. Thank you for sharing your memory.
"He once told me that there was a direct correlation between the frequency of musical cords, and the distances of the orbits of the planets from the sun." That's so Steve. Music was his whole world. I don't think he ever stopped hearing the music in his head, like a synesthete.
I'm sorry to report that Steve died on this day, Nov 21, in 2015. I only just found out from KayAnne Pickens in August. See her comment below the poem, Siren Call.
I've reposted your GoogleDocs story above. Hope that's OK. Thanks, again. You can search his name in my blog for more on Steve. But do read MMWs comments above yours. She knew Steve well.
Maureen
SIREN CALL
We were in 2nd grade, Mrs Burge had left the room,
Lennie's son, Steve Tristano climbed up
onto the piano bench to bang out a boogie woogie,
we were all rocking out—until she returned.
Busted. Instead of praising him, she raged
and let out an anachronic scream
that ripped open the fabric of the universe.
The planets cowered as Steve took the brunt of her anger.
In that way, we knew jazz was bad, very bad.
A siren call, a farewell to arms. An addiction.
And with that, Steve slipped off his moorings a bit—
the descent into darkness had begun.
https://mohurley.blogspot.com/2017/08/siren-call.html
See also:
Sutton & Tristano
Blogger does not like URLs in the Comments section at all. (I tried to make a hyperlink). So you will need to copy and paste.
https://mohurley.blogspot.com/2011/05/sutton-tristano.html
thank you for feeling that my story was worth the effort you took to get it into the blog.
i wish i had proof read it a bit better, but i feel that my feelings about steve came through.
i'm glad to see that people are telling their on stories about this tremendous person.
i type now with tears, and i thank you for letting me know about his passing.
not news i wanted to hear, but thank you for letting me know.
i wanted to keep the story of the time that i had a shop for repairing cars as a business and steve and i were living in the back room of the place quite comfortably.
i was teaching him about working on vehicles, he was learning it very quickly, and i was discovering that i was one of those people that has absolutely no musical ability other than listening.
he had set up three one gallon pickle jars filled with jalapenos and was pickling them.
they came out quite tasty.
so we bought a couple of cases of beer and sat and watched TV and enjoyed the beer and peppers.
before too long the beer had all been consumed.
and somehow all three gallons of peppers had also been enjoyed.
all three gallons.
we didn't have guests helping us with either the beer or the peppers.
looking back i still have very VERY warm memories of the next couple of days after the pepper feast.
we had many good adventures together, and i do and will treasure my memories of him.
thanks again for this blog and thank you to all the people that have posted their stories here.
we have been lucky to have known this man, with all his flaws i still think of him as a perfect friend.
Ray,
If you want to rewrite it, that's fine. I can take down the old posts and put the new version up. Only caveat is that it won't be in the same place, but below this comment. You can also send me you email the comment section and I won't post the comment, then we can do some of this offline.
Maureen
Post a Comment