Chemical Eye on Saving Jazz
 Jazzy students from Middle Tennessee State University. Pictured: The Great Barrier Reefs and Tony http://www.thegreatbarrierreefsandtony.com/ Credit: P. J. MacDougall |
“A Time of Gifts” is also the name of the first installment of the artfully told adventure of an English teenager named Patrick Leigh Fermor. In 1933, after being dismissed from a boarding school in Canterbury--for being caught holding hands with the local grocer’s daughter--this high-spirited son of a distinguished British geologist decided to complete his education via “Independent Study”.
You could say that he took the matter into his own feet, since he made extensive plans to walk across Europe--“from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople”. The fact that the great Byzantine capital has been called Istanbul since 1453 is a hint to the reader that you are not about to begin a conventional travel guide.
In addition to his frequent, and characteristic, departures from his pre-set geographic curriculum, such as his climb into the castled Carpathian Uplands, Fermor takes us back and forth through European military, linguistic and social history at the sight of Roman fortification ruins, mutations of place spellings, and bits of unusual hand-made traditional clothing that had never seen a price tag.
The Nazis were gaining political strength as Fermor trekked through Bavaria. And he would later distinguish himself in the British military fighting against them during World War II. But I had never heard of him until I read an absolutely spellbinding personal interview in the May 22, 2006, issue of The New Yorker .
Fathers Day came soon afterward, and “A Time of Gifts” was a well-timed gift from my son Byron, the classicist. It swept me along in time and from a few familiar to mostly unfamiliar places, and when I got to the “TO BE CONTINUED” on the last page, it could mean only one thing: a trip to the bookstore for the second installment of Fermor’s saga. This time it was a gift to myself.
“Between the Woods and the Water” begins at a bridge over the Danube that will take him into Hungary from Slovakia (so-named then and now, but Czechoslovakia when he actually wrote the book in 1977). It ends, when he descends down the valley of the Cerna River into Orsova, where it pours into the Danube just beyond its Iron Gate . From there he will follow the Blue Danube into the Black Sea. But before he tells us of his final approach to Istanbul, we must wait at the gate of TO BE CONTINUED.
The third installment is yet to be published, as far as I know, but I suspect (at least I hope) that it has been written. Fermor turned 19 between the woods and the water, and if his excellent health holds up, he will turn 100 in 2015.
A slightly younger adventurer, who also found inspiration from a trip to Istanbul, was at the center of another gift that I was most fortunate to receive. My wife and I bought each other tickets to a special concert in the historic Ryman Auditorium: the Dave Brubeck Quarter in collaboration with the Nashville Symphony Orchestra.
This was in 2004, and Brubeck was almost 84 at the time. When he played “Three to Get Ready” and “Blue Rondo á la Turk”, I could tell that many in the audience were swept back in time to 1959 when he released his pioneering “Take Five” album. I wouldn’t enter the world until over a year later, but my father wore out his vinyl copy of that recording, so perhaps I was a sparkle.
In any case, Brubeck was absolutely sparkling in Nashville, and didn’t need his piano seat when the tempo required an upright attitude. At the end of the concert, and after a much appreciated encore, when the audience had been applauding for at least ten minutes, with our own upright attitude, Brubeck left the stage gracefully. He said he would love to play longer, but he had to leave to catch a flight to Germany--that night--for a concert tour in Europe!
In the “Take Five” liner notes, I learned that the fascinating blend of rhythms in “Blue Rondo á la Turk” came from a synthesis of a rondo from his (Western) classical training, with African-inspired blues that swept up young musicians in the 50s. These two musical forms were bonded by a Turkish 9/8 pattern that caught his ear on the streets of Istanbul during a tour of gigs in the Middle East and India 50 years ago.
After the intermission, in the second installment, the quartet teamed up with the symphony to play some of Brubeck’s new “classical jazz” compositions. They closed with “Take Five”, and just like with Fermor’s books, the story is not over but TO BE CONTINUED.
If you would like to save the jazz music at 89.5 MHz on the radio dial in Middle Tennessee, but also at WMOT.org in cyberspace, then make this a time of gifts, including vocal support, to our jazz-format NPR station. After all, the most important thing about great literature, great music, and great radio stations that do double-time as experiential learning opportunities for college students, is that they are…
TO BE CONTINUED.
Preston MacDougall is a chemistry professor at Middle Tennessee State University. His "Chemical Eye" commentaries are featured in the Arts and Public Affairs portion of the Murfreesboro/Nashville NPR station WMOT (www.wmot.org).
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