I promised to take Jeremy to a jazz club when he turned eighteen.
He turned eighteen in 1988. We lived in New Hartford, NY, then but always had a place to stay in New York with Esther’s cousin Ruth. I don’t know exactly when we visited but it was after Jeremy’s birthday in May and it wasn’t fall yet, so by a process of deduction I infer it was in the summer. Jeremy and I pored over club listings in the New Yorker and the Times. We were in luck.
. 
Bradley’s, the legendary Greenwich Village piano bar (it closed in 1996) was featuring pianist Tommy Flanagan and bassist Ron Carter in duet. Flanagan had been Ella Fitzgerald’s favorite accompanist and Carter came to fame in the legendary Miles Davis quintet of the early 60s. That would be our first stop. Nearby was a new club, Carlos I –it closed soon after– hosting avant garde saxophonist/composer Henry Threadgill, an artist I’d wanted to hear ever since hearing recordings of him in his collaborative trio, Air. He was playing at Carlos I with a sextet of actually players. (No, that’s not a typo.)
We’d hit Bradley’s first, then wrap up the evening at Carlos I.
We got to Bradley’s in time for the first set. It was jammed. We ended up standing halfway between the bar and the performance space. A waiter took our drink orders and returned with two glasses of wine. Jeremy turned to me and said: “This is so neat, Dad! They didn’t even ask for my driver’s license.” “You know why?” I said. (Pause.) “They think you’re my lover.”
We hung out for the set and moved to Carlos I –where, disappointingly, Threadgill had cancelled. 
Instead, Ellingtonian Harold Ashby, a tenor sax player in the Ben Webster mode –big tone, at ease with both ballads and up tunes– was on the stand, backed by piano, bass and drums. We sat at the bar –it was later and no longer crowded—and drank Sambucas with those little coffee beans floating on top of the dark strong coffee and liqueur. 
The quartet started with a sizzler, lots of heat, led by a honking sax. “This is great!” Jeremy shouted above the music. “I know!” I shouted back. “It’s called ‘Night Train’. They played it at all the record hops when I was in high school.” The set closed with a bossa nova. “I love that song!” said J. “It’s called ‘Girl from Ipanema’,” I responded. “I first got that on an album when Esther and I were dating.”
“Night Train” and “Girl from Ipanema” were iconic songs to me but new to our eighteen-year-old son!
Occasionally it hits you that you’re not as young as you once were.
I remember us walking home after the evening was over, two in the morning, sixty some blocks up town to Ruth’s place, talking away.
Some nights are perfect.
ADDITIONAL LISTENING
MUSIC & ME 