I don’t mean emotionally moving music. I mean physically moving music, songs I associate in my mind with moving from one house to another, that kind of experience.
Carl Orff: “O Fortuna,” Carmina Burana: Eugene Ormandy, cond., Philadelphia Pihl. Orch. (1960)
1964. Shortly before Esther and I married, at the tail end of 1964, I bought Columbia Record’s stunning release of Carmina Burana (1960), Carl Orff’s re-imagining of the medieval Goliards’ almost pagan, often bawdy, frequently sacrilegious songs. The orchestra was the Philadelphia Philharmonic, pretty much my orchestra of choice at the time, under the baton of Eugene Ormandy. That recording was one of the signature pieces of our new life in New York, far from Olmsted Falls, Ohio, where I had grown up and taught. Esther’s high school friend and former apartment mate Sherryn married soon after we did. We gave Sherryn and Jim (also from E.’s high school) a copy of Carmina Burana as a wedding present. Along with it, we gave them a Go set, not that they ever used it. Hey, it was the 60s and we were young!
Willie Nelson, “Stardust” (1977)
1978. I moved from Ithaca, NY, to take a job in Utica, NY. The first nine weeks, I stayed at the YMCA, commuting back to Ithaca on weekends while I waited for our apartment in New Hartford (next door to Utica) to become vacant. At last, we moved! Esther and Jeremy joined me. The new place was cramped, just a starter place on the second floor of a small office building. Our landlord, a lawyer, had his office below. We had two bedrooms, a living-dining room, a kitchenette and a bathroom-shower. None of the rooms was all that big and that was it.
The day we moved, we worked all day moving stuff up stairs and stowing it in place. We put Jeremy (who was barely eight) to bed, then climbed into bed ourselves. It was late at night when we turned out the lights. We lay there, didn’t talk, just soaked up the feeling of a new place, our ninth home in fourteen years. It was dark inside. We could hear street sounds through the open windows, barely discernible.
I’d bought a record the week before, Willie Nelson: Stardust, his first foray into ballad singing. I put it on the turntable and we lay there listening. It was the right song for the moment.
Shirley Horn: “It Had to Be You”, from You Won’t Forget Me (1991)
1991. Jeremy was in college by then. He’d been gone from the house for two years. The year before, we’d put down a deposit on a townhouse that seemed never to get finished but finally, we were able to move in. It was a beautiful place. The downstairs floors were all blond wood. The upstairs was carpeted. There was a lot of white –on the walls, the shelves and cupboards– and whitish gray carpeting on the stairs and upstairs.
At the end of a long first day putting things away in our new place, we settled down on the overstuffed sofa in the great room and looked out through the French doors at trees overlooking the ravine behind out house, the branches rising to the skies. The sun had fallen. It was dark. There was no sound, nothing, not even insects outside. We had some wine. Before we moved upstairs to bed, I put on a record I’d just bought. It was Shirley Horn: You Won’t Forget Me. Good choice, Dave!
Archie Shepp-Horace Parlan: “A Flower Is a Lonesome Thing” (1987)
1992. In 1992, I took a job as vice provost (a year later vice president) for student affairs at California State University, Stanislaus, in Turlock CA. I had to be there by the end of June –if I was late, they university lost some of the base funding they were using to pay me. I accepted the job on my birthday, April 30, and two months later, I was in Turlock.
Esther wasn’t. She was back in Utica, closing out our house, dealing with the realtor and movers. The first two months in California, it was just me and our cat, Chili. The furniture I had was on loan from the campus dorms –a worn out box springs and mattress, a falling down easy chair, a table-lamp combination that was ugly enough to shrivel a banana.
As was my wont, I brought along a new record to listen to when it got lonely at night: Archie Shepp (tenor sax) and Horace Parlan (piano), Duo Reunion. It’s a good record but not great.
2001. I retired as vice president at a California university to take a contract as the first dean of students at Zayed University, a public university for Emirati women, with campuses in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. The initial plan was that Esther would stay behind in California and I would come back on breaks to be with her. (That plan changed six months later, with 9/11. After that, living apart from each other was no longer acceptable and she moved to Dubai to be with me.)
I didn’t know what to expect in Dubai but if all went well, I’d be living there alone for three years in a 2800 square feet apartment in a high-rise building with restrictions as to what you could have as pets. “Alone” was the operative word. I’d need to find ways to live on my own between trips back to the States to see Esther.
I needed identifiers to comfort and anchor me. I took along with me four duffel bags, 64 pounds weight each, stuffed with books, also Zotty, a stuffed lion Esther had given me. And photos. Lots of photos.
I also brought music. I took along a travel case that would held two dozen CDs. The two CDs I remember were:
- Ken Vandermark, Designs in Time, a trio album by MacArthur Genius grant winner Vandermark, with him on tenor and clarinet and two drummers.
- Willie ‘the Lion” Smith: Echoes of Spring (early 1970s). (We had heard Smith at a piano concert at Hunter College in the mid-sixties.)
En route to Dubai, I picked up two CDs at a record store:
- a Nanci Griffith album, not one of her best, Poet in My Window (1992) and
- Remember Shakti, guitarist John McLaughlin’s raga-jazz fusion group, The Believer (2000), with Zakir Hussein on tablas and the phenomenal U. Srinivas on electric mandolin. (Two years later, when Remember Shakti played at Nas Al Sheba race track in Dubai, I went to hear him, about which more later.)
And when I got there, the first weekend I had off, I took a cab to a pet store and came back with a large yellow parakeet and two love birds, about which more in my next blog.
MUSIC & ME 