Five Oh

At some point for some Americans, visiting all 50 of the states that make up our nation becomes a thing. I'm one of those Americans. I guess it became a thing for me in about the mid-1990s when a trip to the upper Midwest had me traveling to and through Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin and Illinois in a single week. Now, I realize four of 50 in seven days or so might not seem like a lot of progress, but at that point, I thought the end goal of the whole half century was probably achievable if I set my mind to it. 

So I did. Not every year, necessarily. It came in fits and starts. I made a push in 2001 when I knocked off Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming and Nevada in two jaunts out west and really put the pedal to the metal on a cross-country drive in 2011 when I picked up Missouri, South Dakota, Montana, Idaho and Oregon. That gave me 40. Within spitting distance, as you might say.

It's been super tough since then. It took me 32 years to get to the first 40. 12 years after that east coast to west coast drive, I had only picked up eight more to get me to 48. Louisiana. Utah. Alabama. Hawaii. Alaska. North Dakota. Arkansas. Nebraska. All in the books. And if the age math doesn't make sense (since I'm 56 now), I didn't start this thing until I got to the United States in 1979 when I was 11.

And so at the beginning of this year, it was down to the last two: Kansas and Oklahoma. If there was a silver lining to those two being the last two, it was that they are next to one another.

The Outsiders House Museum, used in the filming of the movie of the same name, Tulsa.

With just two left, it was kind of time to end this thing. 

So last month, we hopped on a plane at National Airport in Arlington, Virginia, and landed in Kansas City, Missouri. The next day, we drove west to Lawrence and then Topeka in Kansas and then headed south for Tulsa. At 6 p.m. on Friday, May 24, we hit the border of Oklahoma. 50 states. Done!

I feel like I really accomplished something here. I mean, how many people really do this in their lives? I know maybe two or three people who have done this. It's definitely a club that not a lot of people will join. Most Americans will never get there. I made it at 55 years old (OK...almost 56), although (again) I didn't even get to this country until I was 11. There's no doubt that this is a marathon-type of task. I'm glad I did it because I've been chasing it for so, so long.

But honestly, this didn't feel like I thought it would feel. I wasn't super elated and I didn't really feel an amazing sense of completing something epic when I crossed into Oklahoma, although one could argue that's exactly what I have done. Maybe it's the fact that that 50th trigger was literally driving over an imaginary line and stopping at a pretty graphically uninspired-looking sign (see above). Maybe it's because it's been so long coming and had started to feel a little like a bit of a chore. Or maybe, it's because it was Oklahoma, and Kansas before it, and these two were clearly last for one reason and one reason alone: we really couldn't think what we'd be doing there if we ever visited.

I know that's unfair. And I now know it's a total misjudgment. At least of Oklahoma (sorry, Kansas) where we spent three days exploring after crossing the threshold.

Buck Atom, Route 66, Tulsa. One of the many repurposes muffler men out there in the West.

Let me say three things before I move on and/or forget to write these three things.

First, I tried to do this the right way. I didn't count fly throughs and I wouldn't count a state as visited unless I did something tangible and memorable when visiting. No just driving over the border for some lunch or driving through a state. Stopping and visiting something related to tourism or real life in the state was required. 

Second, all the "we" words in the narrative about getting to the border of Oklahoma is important because it wasn't me getting to 50 states. We've spent a lot of effort over the last couple of years getting my wife caught up to me so we could do this together. At the beginning of this year she had one more state than me left: the two I was missing and Missouri. Which is why we went to Kansas City first.

Third, this quest has been very much an immigrant's quest. I remember very distinctly our arrival to this country in Boston on July 25, 1979. Or maybe that's not quite right. Maybe it's that I remember three things very distinctly about our first moments in Massachusetts. These are (1) I'd never been anywhere so hot; I think the temperature and humidity were both north of 90 that day; (2) I'd never been in a car with air conditioning, which, you know, was appreciated that day; and (3) I'd never been anywhere so green. England is often referred to as green but I'd never seen forests like I saw alongside of I-90 that day. 

I love this country and I'm glad I've seen a bit of all of its 50 states.

The scissor-tailed flycatcher, Oklahoma's state bird. Somewhere near Pawhuska.

So about Oklahoma being awesome...I think I would have been way more excited to enter my state number 50 if I knew how much I'd get out of my time there. I mean it ended up being one of those places that astonished me. I connected so well with a lot of what we found and did there. 

It happens. Every so often we find someplace that we end up loving way more than we possibly could have imagined. I think the last place we felt this way about was Rapid City, South Dakota. If I had known everything we'd find in Oklahoma, I would have been elated to cross that border. Like most places we travel that we haven't visited before, we usually end up finding something that changes our perspective. That too was true of Oklahoma.

So why was Oklahoma amazing? How about music? How about birds? How about pop culture? 

We actually had a bird quest in Oklahoma. We were on a mission to find the state bird, the scissor-tailed flycatcher somewhere in the state. And we found one. Or more than one. Several actually, along with some eastern meadowlarks, a nighthawk, our first indigo buntings of the season and what is likely to be our new species obsession: the painted bunting. We've already earmarked a swamp in the Everglades where these birds, which look like they've been hit by a rainbow that stuck, spend the winter months. These trips keep popping up.

We found music in the Woody Guthrie Center. We skipped the Bob Dylan Center, but swung by the Church Studio where Leon Russell, Willie Nelson, Eric Clapton, Tom Petty, J.J. Cale (of course!) and others have recorded without going in (closed on Memorial Day). We also found a cool place to hear live music in the Mercury Lounge where we also appreciated their very loud and clear message of inclusiveness and not being a jerk. OK, so the Lounge used a different word.

And for pop culture fans (and for very different sorts of pop culture fans actually) we toured The Outsiders house in North Tulsa and spent a half day or so out in Pawhuska, which is the center of The Food Network's Pioneer Woman (a.k.a. Ree Drummond) empire. Both are very different kinds of pilgrimages. The Outsiders House is just a labor of love that's been embraced by about everyone who had about anything to do with the movie adaptation of Tulsa's own S.E. Hinton's novel which she started writing when she was 15. The staying power of that work and the movie Francis Ford Coppola made out of it is impressive.

The interior of Greenwood Rising, preserving the memory of Tulsa's Black Wall Street.

And if all that weren't enough, Route 66 goes right the way through the state, entering Oklahoma at the very northeast corner and extending all the way to the western border before passing into the Texas panhandle. And the eastern end of that road has what have to be some of the Mother Road's kitschiest and most classic attractions. 

Blue Whale of Catoosa? Visited! And let me say that attraction is the most amazing and most useless thing all at the same time. Why someone would build this thing in the first place is way beyond my ability to comprehend but I'm glad it's there. And I'm glad we visited to see beyond the one classic view of this place (which I have duplicated by my own hand below). Yes, it's silly and nonsensical and yes, it's totally worth visiting.

A little bit west of Catoosa in Tulsa (and a little bit off Route 66 to be honest) is the Golden Driller, a monument to Tulsa's original source of wealth. This one built in 1966 is actually the third golden driller and it's the largest free-standing statue in the world at 76 feet high. Yes, that's a real oil derrick his elbow is resting upon.

Then right in the middle of Tulsa on Route 66 there's a former muffler man turned space voyager outside Buck Atom's Cosmic Curios. One day, there's going to be a blog post from me about muffler men. These things are icons of the American west road trip. I just need to see enough to write something meaningful (right now I'm at two).

Look, I get that there's nothing to do with these things except just look at them or walk into them a little bit (Blue Whale) and then turn around and walk out again. But this stuff is part of American roadtripping history. Before videogames or iPads or GPSes and whatever else occupies our time when on the open road or tells us where to go, these side of the road attractions were landmarks when traveling between Point A and sometimes very distant Point B. They matter.

So admittedly not everything that we encountered in Oklahoma was wonderful. It never is when we travel. There's always something, it seems. Our something in Oklahoma had nothing to do with the people that we met or what happened to us while we were there. It had to do with the place's history. Tulsa is the site of one of the worst race riots in the history of the United States. And considering our country's history with race riots, that's saying a lot.

Oklahoma was settled effectively by sanctioned land grabbing. I'm dumbing this down a lot but the state was opened up to settlement on a first come, first served basis for anyone who wanted to plant a flag in a plot of land and farm it. There was literally a single start time where settlers lined up at a sort of starting line and rushed to get their land once the gun went off. Sure, some jumped the event by a day or so (the "Sooners") but the starting line thing is basically how it worked. Or at least that's how I understand it. I am sure I am way, way off.

Not all the land in what would become the State of Oklahoma (state number 46, in case you were wondering...) was desirable. So when it came time to welcome resettled native Americans and freed former slaves into the state, the leftover, less desirable land got given to those groups. Only it turned out to be not so undesirable because the powers that be had actually conveyed oil rich lands into the hands of those they meant to really not give anything valuable to. 

Oil led to wealth, and failing to find white businesses to take their money (every time we find out about segregation in this country, it's so disappointing, stupid and shortsighted), the black oil-rich landowners built their own business community which thrived better than most other places in the State of Oklahoma and really likely most places in the United States.

Then in 1921, a misunderstanding, a few lies and rumors and a whole lot of white jealousy and hate exploded into the wholesale destruction of the neighborhood that had been built in the Greenwood section of Tulsa, along with some out and out murders and really no consequences faced for those that started or participated in all the crimes committed against the city's black residents that day and night. It continues to amaze me how people can unleash this kind of violence on fellow people because their skin is a different color. 

The whole ordeal, including the events and conditions leading up to the riot and the completely unsatisfying aftermath, is documented in the pretty new Greenwood Rising Museum. Stroll around outside before or after your visit and read the plaques in the sidewalk detailing all of what used to be there and was never rebuilt. It's important we not forget these things.

And I thought there was nothing to do in Oklahoma. No reason to visit. Wrong! Wrong! And wrong! Oklahoma gave a good accounting for itself. It was worth saving until last, even if that wasn't my intention in any way.

The Blue Whale of Catoosa. A Route 66 classic since 1972.

But my most vivid memory of Oklahoma is also my worst memory of Oklahoma. 

On our first full day in the state, we took a drive from Tulsa to Pawhuska to do all things Pioneer Woman and maybe a couple of other things prairie-like for the day. Our route out there took us from Oklahoma State Routes 75 and 11, passing small town after small town on the way to a town about the same size as all those we passed. At one point on our drive, we encountered a detour that wasn't on Google Maps. No issue, it was simple enough to drive around. As we detoured, we rubbernecked a bit and tried to see what was going on. We ultimately passed by supposing that the center of town was off limits for some Memorial Day weekend event and we kept going to Pawhuska.

While in Pawhuska, we learned that a town named Barnsdall nearby had been hit by a tornado just the previous week. The stories sounded heartbreaking. An octogenarian who refused to leave town found 2-1/2 miles from the town courtesy of the tornado. A four year old who walked away without a scratch while both his parents were in the ICU and not yet conscious. Homes wiped out leaving survivors with nothing. We wondered if Barnsdall was the town with the detour and that it was not some celebration that was causing the re-routing of traffic, but the scene of a natural disaster. 

Sure enough, on our way back down Route 11, we passed by Barnsdall with an unexpected detour. From the west side of town you wouldn't have known anything was amiss and when we passed along the south perimeter, we could see a tree or two downed.

But when we came around the east side of town, we saw what had happened. We came across downed trees at first and seconds later noticed an entire swath of wooded area with trees that were stripped bare. There was not a single leaf or any small branch of these things, just trunks and substantial limbs completely denuded. Behind the trees, clearly visible, was a hill of shattered and shredded building materials. Anything and everything that can be used to make a house just in an untidy pile and not suitable for any sort of reuse. We had driven right by all this on the way to Pawhuska and hadn't noticed any of this.

The worst was beyond the naked trees: an entire section of town gone. That mountain of building materials? What used to be people's homes on what now were just empty lots. There was nothing except a masonry church. Everything else was gone. The devastation and precision with which this funnelcloud took from the families who used to live there was shocking and jarring. I've seen news footage of the type of destruction that can be caused by a tornado. It's way worse in real life. What are these survivors supposed to do? Mother Nature is still the boss, no matter how much we think we own this planet. It's a heck of a memory to leave Oklahoma with but at least I got to go home. My heart goes out to that town. Chilling.

No pictures of this one. Didn't think it was appropriate. But there is plenty of footage of the aftermath on the internet. I'll leave it to you to search for it. Tulsa and every part of Oklahoma we visited was amazing. Barnsdall is my most lasting memory. Sometimes when we travel we find things that we don't expect. It's all worth it, even if it's sometimes heartbreaking.

Foreshadowing. Not Oklahoma. Seen at the Kansas City airport.

New York Hot

This post is about visiting a couple of jazz clubs in New York City over the fourth of July weekend this year. 

Actually, that's not true. It's not really about that at all. Yes, this post appears to be about visiting a couple of jazz clubs in New York City over the fourth of July weekend this year, but it's not. It's really about my dad. And me chasing him.

For as long as I can remember, I've had jazz in my life. My dad was (and is) fanatical about jazz. It's one of his many life's passions and loves. I can remember on weekends when we were kids growing up in England, every time the record player was on in our living room, jazz was pouring out of the speakers. Sounds cool, right? Awesome to have such a hip dad? I mean how with it is my dad to have jazz playing all the time?

I didn't like it. I mean, I really, really didn't like it. It was loud, it was discordant (I would not have used that word as a kid) and there were no words. How could you listen to an entire record with no words? And then another. And another. This is what I grew up with. I didn't appreciate it. I didn't want it. But it was there. I spent time hearing it at home. My dad received magazines about jazz. I spent time in record stores with my dad in London and Birmingham as he looked through piles of albums for hours. It was always there. Jazz, jazz, jazz! I didn't get it. At. All.

Eventually, my dad's love of music made its way to me. But it wasn't jazz. My favorite artist when I was a pre-teen was Billy Joel, and that wasn't really cool at all back in those years. But I started getting into music a little more broadly in a semi-serious way when I was a freshman in high school. Then I started buying records (yes...records) in about 1983. Def Leppard's Pyromania started it for me, but I moved on pretty quickly to other things. Duran Duran. Spandau Ballet. INXS. Genesis. The Moody Blues. Marillion (so much Marillion; like a ton!). Pink Floyd. The Beatles. Bob Dylan. David Bowie. Linda Ronstadt. Motown. Cowboy Junkies. Mark Knopfler. Brandi Carlile. Taylor Swift. There were and are many more in there. Too many to list. 

I believe my dad is at least in large part responsible for my love of music. It is also one of my many life's passions and loves and I give huge credit to my dad here. I can't tell you how many dollar or two dollar used records my dad helped me out with at Integrity 'N Music in Wethersfield, CT.

I figured one day I'd meet my dad a little musically and get into jazz, but honestly it never really happened. Whatever rock or pop music or whatever you want to label it is, I love most or all of that. My interest in all sorts of that type of music has led me to the blues, which I also love. And I do mean LOVE! Classical? Country? Rap? Easy listening? A little bit (very little bit) of opera? Sure, sure, sure, sure and sure. All of it. Well, like old country. And only a little rap. But not jazz. Not on records. I've intentionally visited New Orleans and listened to jazz in clubs and liked it. But sitting down, putting on a record or CD and listening to it at home...that's different. I never got into it. I tried, I swear. Didn't happen. I knew one day I'd be inheriting an amazing jazz collection (which I'd already pledged to honor and take care of) but I just couldn't get into it.

Then one day last fall, I got to a tipping point. My mom told me she and my dad had decided to sell my dad's jazz record collection. Not the CDs. Just the records. 

Hold on! Hold on just one second.

I wanted some. 

This music is an important part of my childhood, even though the irony of my complete rejection of this music is front and center with my objection here. So, while I was over at my parents' place one weekend a couple of weeks after my mother's pronouncement, I asked my dad if he would pull out a curated assortment of the very best jazz records ever made from his collection. He couldn't do it. Couldn't recall enough about individual works to pass along the best in his collection to me. My dad's memory is failing. It's a problem. It's frustrating for him and it breaks my heart. And not just because he couldn't pull out his favorite jazz of all time.

Lacking my dad's input, I sort of tried to do it for myself that weekend. I did a quick search on the internet for the best jazz albums ever made, found some (like honestly just five or six) in his collection and came home and started playing them. John Coltrane. Charles Mingus. Art Blakey. Miles Davis. One or two from each plus a Howlin' Wolf record. And while I played them, I continued to look online and make a list so that the next time I visited my parents, I could look properly and find what I was sure would be an instant legit classic jazz collection.

Some of what used to be in my dad's record collection.

The names on that list I made...Duke Ellington. Charlie Parker. Sonny Rollins. Grant Green. Kenny Burrell. Wayne Shorter. Eric Dolphy. Freddie Hubbard. Herbie Hancock. Dexter Gordon. Thelonious Monk. Count Basie. Lee Morgan. Django Reinhart. Cannonball Adderly. More Art Blakey. More John Coltrane. More Miles Davis. These were all names from my childhood. I knew them all. I just didn't know anything about any of them and I never listened to their music. 

The next time I visited my parents, I found most of what I was looking for in one single spot in my dad's bedroom closet. Most everything on the list I had made was recorded on Blue Note Records and my dad had all of them together in one giant treasure trove of a find. Now is not the time and place to talk extensively about my dad's record filing habits but he used to organize his music collection by label, not artist. He's mostly changed that now but it makes sense given his history that I would find all the classics in one location. They were all on the same label (Blue Note).

Since I found that stash, I've been slowly working my way through that collection. It's difficult to get used to a sizeable collection of music that is totally new but I've been doing it one by one. I definitely have favorites and some that I love. I also haven't even gotten to some of it and I also can't stand some of it and I swear it's not scars from my childhood. 

It helps that they are vinyl. There's something about dropping that needle down onto the wax and hearing the same pops and clicks sometimes that my dad used to hear. I feel like vinyl's the right medium for this music. It just feels appropriate.

Photos on the wall of The Village Vanguard.

As far as I was concerned when I was a young kid, my dad's love of jazz was confined to our home. I'm sure that's the limit of my childhood memory kicking in. I'm sure he went to listen to jazz live in England and I know he had a jazz club he used to go to every so often in Connecticut near where we lived. But eventually, he started to travel to listen to jazz in the places where men and women made it famous. I remember him taking a couple of trips to New Orleans with my mom, including one where they drove to the Crescent City all the way down from Memphis. On that trip, they visited Sun Studio where my mom literally bumped into Carl Perkins and stepped on his shoes.

The other jazz trips I remember my dad taking were to New York City. He had a lifelong friend and fellow jazz fan who used to visit us here in the States and the two of them used to head down to the City for a long weekend for what seemed to me like several years in a row but was likely really just two or three. They'd grab a hotel room, spend each night jazz club hopping until 2 a.m. or whatever in the morning, crash until late the next morning and then do the same thing over and over again. Birdland. Blue Note. The Village Vanguard. Some others probably that I don't even know about and which my dad cannot remember.

One day I thought it would be great if I could have taken my dad back to some of those places but I know enough to know that he's never going to be jazz club hopping in New York ever again. But I thought now that I have a portion of his old jazz record collection, I could do it without him. I've followed the memory of Gerry Rafferty to a pub in London and visited a hotel in Alabama where The Rolling Stones once stayed and had a late night snack in one of Ernest Hemingway's favorite restaurants in Madrid. Why shouldn't I now do the same thing and follow in my dad's footsteps to one or two jazz clubs? He's had way more influence on the person that I am today than Hemingway, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards or Gerry Rafferty. A three night trip to NYC seemed to be the perfect time to start following my dad to jazz clubs.

The Ravi Coltrane Quartet. Birdland. New York City.

I focused my jazz club search in New York on six places: Birdland, Blue Note, Dizzy's Club, Smalls, The Village Vanguard and Zinc Bar. From there, we picked where we were going mostly, but not entirely, based on who was playing, although our choices turned out to be somewhat limited on Monday night, July 3, when most were closed.

There is some real jazz history in some of these places and some of these names. Sure, Smalls has only been open since 1994 and Dizzy's Club is even younger (despite borrowing jazz legend Dizzy Gillespie's name) and Blue Note was opened in the early 1980s. But Zinc Bar is in the same space that used to be called Club Cinderella where Thelonious Monk worked as the house pianist in the 1940s and the Birdland club is one of the most legendary jazz spots named after Charlie Parker and opened way back in 1949 (although admittedly, the current location is the third iteration of the club and there was no Birdland at all from 1964 to 1986). Of all the places on my list, The Village Vanguard is the boss; it's been in the same location since 1934. And pretty much everyone who is anyone in jazz has a live album recorded at the Vanguard.

We picked Birdland and The Village Vanguard. For the artists. For the history. And because I know my dad has sat in both spots listening to jazz and being happy. 

Before we get into my very brief synopsis of our experience at each place, let me just say what an amazing place that New York is. I've said this many a time but if I could afford to live in Manhattan and maintain my current lifestyle that I enjoy living here in northern Virginia, I'd do it in a heartbeat. I love this city. I was very selective with my choice of clubs to visit but where else on this planet can you find the number of jazz clubs that there are in New York. I've listened to jazz in other cities in the world including New Orleans, Paris and Brussels but for the amount of top quality music every night, New York is the best. This doesn't just apply to jazz clubs. Like everything about New York is the best. LOVE it.

We ended up seeing the early show of the Ravi Coltrane Quartet at Birdland on Saturday night and the late show of the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra at The Village Vanguard on Monday night. From a music perspective, I enjoyed Ravi Coltrane (who yes, is the son of John Coltrane) way more than the VJO. Coltrane is leading a band of professional musicians who are making a living playing jazz and making records that are creative and original. They are also (from my limited jazz knowledge acquired in the last nine months or so) playing music pretty close to the 1950s and 1960s stuff I've been predominantly listening to since I pillaged my dad's record collection. The VJO is a big band and the big band era is long gone. That's not to say there's no value in that kind of music or that it wasn't entertaining; just that given a choice one night to see one or the other, I'm picking the quartet.

Venue-wise, they both had their own appeal. When you step off 44th Street and into Birdland, it's like you are a million miles away from the New York City sidewalk with just one step while still very definitely being in New York. There is no doubt you are in an historic jazz club. I'd go back to Birdland any time, particularly if we could get seated in the front row like we were last month (it's first come, first served seating and you know I was early).

The Vanguard Jazz Orchestra, just before they started playing (no pics once the music starts).

But it is difficult to replicate the atmosphere of the Vanguard. It's a basement space which you access through a pair of doors probably 4' or maybe 4'-6" wide between the two doors and down a staircase which I feel fairly certain doesn't meet today's building codes. But it's a magical space. It's dark. It's old without being smelly. And the triangular floor plan focuses all the attention on the small stage and the south end of the joint. We were packed in there like some kind of puzzle pieces making up some kind of larger, glorious bigger picture. You can feel the history in that place, even without the faces in the pictures on the wall looking back at you (Birdland has similar walls-full of pictures). I’d go to either club again, but the Vanguard is the space with the legit history. The music that place has heard over the years. Just legends upon legends who have played there. It's tangible.

I'll say a couple of more things about this experience. 

First of all, I'm amazed at how well the bass playing comes through in these small clubs. Listening to records at home, I seem to get everything except the bass. Horns, drums, piano, whatever. But I miss the bass. It comes through magnificently in person. I have no idea how they get a bass down into the Vanguard but we did ask bassist Dezron Douglas at Birdland how he gets his bass moved around the city. Apparently he can get it in a big cab (I can see that) and on the Subway (I can't imagine how but I trust him).

Second, one of the things my dad liked best about his jazz club visits to New York was the fact that he got to talk to the musicians between or after sets. I remember him talking about his conversations with pianist Marian McPartland in some club while he was on his visits. And sure enough after the Coltrane set, all the musicians were available for conversation, pictures or whatever. It's a completely different post-show vibe that you get at a rock or pop show. Most musicians (but admittedly not all) disappear after the shows. It was cool to see that sort of thing still gong on that my dad remembered so fondly. 

I am pretty sure that my jazz collection is going to get bigger (I just got a new record for my birthday...) and I am also pretty sure I have not visited my last jazz club (already started looking at shows at Blues Alley in DC...). These couple of visits were about getting closer to the music that I've been exploring over the last few months but they were also a conscious gesture to honor and respect and get closer to something my dad loved and loves. I have very few regrets in life but not engaging with this music earlier is one of those. I'll just have to do the best I can with what my dad has intentionally or unintentionally passed to me here. I promise I'll do the best I can.

Birdland: Show over!

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Coda

A couple of final notes about my dad's love for jazz and my own jazz journey to date. I'll take those two in the opposite order I just wrote them because my thoughts on this type of music are clearly less important than my dad's thoughts. At least from my perspective. 

I have not spent much of my life listening to jazz but I will say that as an art form, it was far, far more sophisticated in the 1950s and early 1960s than anything labeled rock and roll or something like that. I guess I'm also surprised based on my toe-dip in the last nine months or so at how contemporaneous this music is with the emergence of rock music. Put another way, I had no idea that the music my dad was listening to when I was growing up was just 10 or 20 years old at the time. 

I will say that I appreciate incredibly the following six albums that I've discovered since this time last year. I'm picking six for a specific reason, and not because beer comes in six packs. At least not this time.

• Cannonball Adderly: Somethin' Else.
• Art Blakey and The Jazz Messengers: Moanin'.
• Kenny Burrell: Midnight Blue.
• John Coltrane: Blue Train.
• Dexter Gordon: Our Man In Paris.
• Grant Green: Idle Moments.

In 2022, I was not able to get a list of essential jazz albums out of my dad. However, I did ask him in the early 1990s for a list of his must-have or essential or desert island disks or whatever you want to call them top jazz albums of all time. And I still have that hand-written list 30 years or so after he wrote it down.

Here's my dad's list of essential jazz albums which he called Foot Tapping List #1. Do with this what you will. Unfortunately, there will never be a List #2.

• Count Basie and His Orchestra: The Atomic Mr. Basie.
• Miles Davis: Ballads OR Greatest Hits.
• Duke Ellington and Johnny Hodges: Back to Back.
• Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong: Ella and Louis Again OR The Best of Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong.
• George Lewis: Jazz Funeral In New Orleans.
• Big Joe Turner: The Boss of The Blues.

My dad's list is way different than my list. And I think that's OK. It might reflect the fact that I like different things from my dad or it might reflect the fact that I don't know anything about jazz. I've tried my dad's list. I even asked him for copies of his CDs of his list about 15 or 20 years after I asked him for the list which he made me (mostly; he made a couple of substitutions because I think he didn't have all six on CD and easily copy-able when I asked him). The Atomic Mr. Basie is some good stuff. I'll keep going back to the rest. Maybe when I know a little bit more and can appreciate the nuance and subtlety a little better.

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