I was hoping my next entry would be about the joys and details of the 2024 Jazz Cruise. Until….
Up until this point, Ann and I had avoided coming down with Covid. Mostly everyone we know has had the virus in spite of, like us, having the full arsenal of seven shots. Feeling invincible, we boldly resumed our normal social lives, wearing no masks, although we were about to go on the one cruise we treasure above all, The Jazz Cruise. We went to the theater several times before departure and Ann participated in not one but two Mah Jongg tournaments. It was inevitable I suppose but the timing couldn’t have been worse, Ann coming down with Covid exactly one week before our departure.
We had a devil of a time getting Paxlovid which was unavailable at the nearest two drug stores and then getting a voucher (for Medicare recipients) from Pfizer to cover the new $1,300 price tag on the prescription. So within two days she was on medication but still it was a bad bout, the worst being three days of an extremely painful sore throat. Yet, naively we still waited to pull the trigger on canceling the cruise, hoping, hoping, but two days before departure we had to throw in the towel. Another experience lost to this pandemic, although luckily, never feeling her life was in danger.
Our first Jazz Cruise was right before Covid hit in 2020. One wasn’t even planned for 2021 as we were all in the nadir of the pandemic. We booked the 2022 cruise as it looked feasible with certain precautions, but then the CDC suddenly advised against cruises because of a new Covid surge at the time. We patiently, no anxiously, awaited 2023 and by then it was considered safe and we had the time of our lives.
So we were looking forward to this year’s festivities until Covid came to visit. Not living in NYC any longer, and now being only an infrequent visitor, the Jazz Cruise is our only opportunity to see some of our favorite jazz performers live. My other entries in the links above mention the names of some of the jazz artists we closely follow. Most are on the present cruise, with the exception of Bill Charlap (he will be on the 2025 Cruise which we have already booked).
Still another experience missed, three years out of five, not a very good grade, 40%. At our age, how many more opportunities? Besides not seeing family, Covid also canceled our 50th wedding anniversary, one we expected to celebrate, possibly, in the presence of the great man himself, Stephen Sondheim.
Being marooned at home again, gave me more time for my own piano. Bill Mays, a great jazz pianist who I met a few months ago when I was playing for a Christmas party (talk about being outside one’s comfort zone, playing with one of the greats listening), was nice enough to send me some lead sheets of his music and one by Johnny Mandel who he worked with and we mutually admire although he recently passed. I thought I had most of Mandel’s music but I did not have the one he sent, “The Shining Sea,” such a plaintive, Mandel signature song. I love it and will eventually try to record it.
Mays’ own “Gemma’s Eyes” is challenging for me, both rhythmically and harmonically and I’ve been practicing it. I like challenges such as that as it helps one keep moving forward.
He also sent me Quincy Jones’ “Pawnbroker,” again a song I had never heard before, the theme from the film of the same title, which more easily fits into in my playing style and is a haunting melody. From our brief encounter, Mays certainly put his finger on what I would respond to and I’m grateful to him, especially this week as I feel cut loose in a space we had reserved for non-stop jazz.
This leads me another musical observation, a very unlikely one for me. I just “discovered” Taylor Swift. I’m not sure what led me to her other than having this void of a week of great music lost. Whenever I’ve seen her it’s been in the context of her world tour concert, with music blasting, back up bands, strobe lights pulsating, hoards of screaming fans, and, well, essentially the way popular music is presented now, everything geared to overwhelm the senses (“deadening” might be a better word). Maybe that’s what we need in this chaotic world but I’ve always avoided that scene. But I’ve also seen her briefly televised at Kansas City football games, cheering on her man, the outstanding tight end, Travis Kelce. Except for her exclusive seats in the owner’s suite, she seems like just another football fan.
As I never really heard her sing, I tried to find her in a more intimate setting without all the over the top fireworks of her concerts and I came across Taylor Swift’s NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert. It is 28 minutes of her performing four of her well-known (well, not to me) songs "The Man", "Lover", "Death by a Thousand Cuts" and "All Too Well" at the Tiny Desk, indeed an intimate setting where it’s just her and the guitar or piano and a handful, maybe a hundred, standing, adoring fans. It was so enjoyable to hear her singing solo.
It's as if Paul Simon was reincarnated more than 50 plus years after I first heard him. There are eerie comparisons. I can see the attraction of today's youth to what she has to say. (I first heard Paul Simon -- who lived in my neighborhood --in 1957 when he performed “Hey Schoolgirl” with his partner Art Garfunkel. They were then known as “Tom and Jerry,” that recording making it to the national charts at the time.)
Swift is a cross over country and folk, a little rock and a lot of pop. Yet every generation has its troubadour (or in this case a “trobairitz” -- in my generation there were Carole King and Joan Baez). My generation also had Bob Dylan as our troubadour, singing his songs of despair and political activism. But most of all, Paul Simon is more relevant to Swift’s music, with his songs of lost love, sadness, nostalgia and of course, loss in general (“hello darkness my old friend” “and we walked off to look for America”). When I was going through my divorce in the 1960s, his songs spoke directly to me the way Taylor Swift’s speak to her generation now magnified by social media.
Just listen to her sing “All Too Well.” I was touched by her ability to evoke a certain kind of emotion like Paul Simon did with a guitar (or in this NPR concert, her playing the chords on the piano as she sang). It’s a song about autumn and lost love, a sense of the same emotion in Simon’s “Leaves That Are Green” (albeit, different rhythm, styles, one contemporary and the other vintage 1960’s).
In “All Too Well” she writes about a boy who was her love. She sings:
Autumn leaves falling down like pieces into place
And I can picture it after all these days
And I know it's long gone and that magic's not here no more
And I might be okay but I'm not fine at all
Some of the lyrics from Simon’s “Leaves That Are Green” could be that boy answering:
Once my heart was filled with the love of a girl
I held her close, but she faded in the night
Like a poem I meant to write
And the leaves that are green turn to brown
And they wither with the wind
And they crumble in your hand
She's the real deal and this intimate NPR setting helped me to fully understand her popularity. Maybe in these Covid infested times I’ll become a Swifty! I certainly respect her values, encouraging her generation to vote. So many of those in their 20s and even 30s haven’t the slightest interest in voting, not caring (or even being conscious of) that my generation is handing off a world where the existential threats are far greater than when I was of that generation. Shame on my generation, but shame on them to eschew the only possible route to change. Maybe she will continue to be a force to set that right.
So we beat on.
