Review of My Typewriter (or Keys on Ice)

Today the two-tone blue Smith-Corona portable sits on a high shelf. I've owned it since I left for college, a young man with stories filling his head.

About thirty years ago something came between us and it changed our relationship.

It was like a comet colliding with Planet Earth. Wham! The world shook. A puff of dust obscured reality. Then the dust settled. I'm talking about the arrival of a new technology. We shook our heads in wonder. Then we began using this enticing thing that had come into our midst and offered so many advantages.

This was in the 1980s. The computer age had arrived. My typewriter, essentially, died right where it stood...

When the Mode Becomes the Muse...
As everyone knows, the computer easily won the allegiance of 99% of writers, including Van Winkle. How could it not? It offers an easy way to correct everything from misspellings to an infelicitous phrasing.

Let me take a second to type out the computer's chief competitive advantage for everyone to see:

A computer = Free do-over

But I think there's a way in which my old hunk-of-steel typewriter remains the forgotten king of the technology heap. It's true. The typewriter is the original all-in-one device.

The typewriter is also the printer.

The practical implication is that a typewriter has always required a high degree of commitment to whatever one is writing. Think a thought and communicate it to your fingertips and it will appear a second later on a piece of paper in black ink.

Think, hit, print.

It's going to require a lot of erasing or some stern swipes of Wite-Out to take the words back.

For this reason, tentativeness and hesitation and endless backspacing, highlighting, deleting, and paragraph moving have no place in the typing-writing process.

Instead, it's like standing in a corner at a party and spotting an attractive person.

Without rehearsing over and over in the mind a pickup line and the proper je ne sais pas quoi inflection, you get your fingers in the right position, walk up to that person, and you smile. And then you lean forward and start "typing" what you have to say and every word had better count...

Hello. You look like someone interesting.

I'd like to get to know you if you'll let me...

Exploding Typewriter
It must be recognized that typewriters are not without their drawbacks. In fact, I know of some writers who have had major problems.

In The Writing Life Annie Dillard tells of the time she was upstairs in her house and she heard a rumbling from below. She found the source of the ruckus downstairs in her study where her typewriter was glowing and smoking. Before her eyes it grew worse:

I saw at once that the typewriter was erupting. The old green Smith-Corona typewriter on the table was exploding with fire and ash. Showers of sparks shot out of its caldera—the dark hollow in in which the keys lie. Smoke and cinders poured out, noises exploded and spattered, black dense smoke rose up and a wild, deep fire lighted the whole thing. It shot sparks.

This all too absurd fantasy ends the next day when Dillard cleans the typewriter and announces, "I have had no trouble since." Then she adds an amusing note of frisson in the final sentence of the chapter:

Of course, now I know it can happen.

Getting Hammered
In 2002 Judy Blunt published a memoir entitled Breaking Free. In it she told of her depressing life as a young wife on a Wyoming ranch, which led to her fleeing said ranch. The book caused some controversy.

The problem was a scene in the first chapter of the book in which Ms. Blunt dramatized how her father-in-law, angry because she was late bringing lunch to the table, came into her room where she had her typewriter. He took the machine outside into the yard and beat on it with a sledgehammer.

Please don't destroy this typewriter from the 1930s.
It's gorgeous and I bought it as a collectible!

When the book appeared, the father-in-law, highly irate and perhaps feeling a bit litigious, said this event never happened.

A red-faced Ms. Blunt had to admit that she had exaggerated the facts to heighten the conflict.

In truth the incident involved the old man pulling the plug on her electric typewriter and shouting at her. No sledgehammers were involved.

I'm glad the author made a public correction in an interview. Because, you see, I was having trouble understanding why anyone out West would try to kill a typewriter with any kind of hammer.

The man was a rancher! He should have run over the typewriter with a tractor or a pickup truck until it resembled shiny roadkill.

Or he should have taken it down to the river and thrown it in into the deepest whirlpool.

Jack Kerouac's typewriter

As I see it, typewriters deserve respect. Even when you're killing them. You're not executing some knave but veritable royalty.
Just think of Jack Kerouac typing On the Road on a 120-foot long "scroll" of paper he continuously fed through his typewriter.

Such a BIG and WORTHY machine should die a notable death.

With a bang, not a clang!

Typing Posture
In the days of yesteryear I drafted all my fiction by hand on either notebook paper or within the pages of ruled notebooks. After that I turned to the two-tone blue Smith-Corona typewriter to produce the final product. I wrote a collection of short stories and a novel with that typewriter, both of which were published, but I didn't connect this success to the typewriter. The computer came along and whisked me away for the remainder of my writing life.

Still, I remember well how those early works required the hard labor of typing multiple drafts until I got the words right. When I add it up, I realize several thousand pages rolled through the typewriter just to produce the sum total of two books. The work was so physical that my back began to hurt.

So I learned to type standing up.

This was about the same time Elton John became famous for kicking over piano benches and acrobatically banging the ivories from an upright position. Crocodile Rock! Bennie and the Jets! The crowd went wild. In my empty apartment the only sound was the keys clacking and my occasional sighing. But my back? It felt a whole lot better.

Rating
The Smith-Corona has remained in my life, albeit at the margins. After I began teaching at a university I placed it on a table in my office on campus. When our son was a toddler I took him to the office and, fascinated by the chrome return bar and those tantalizing keys, he urged me to shove a piece of a paper into the slot, roll the platen, and have me help his little fingers poke at the keys and print a few words.

It is magical.

Most of the time when I stop using things, I get rid of them. They get traded in like my cars or they go to a garage sale or Goodwill or end up in the trash can. Not my typewriter.

Both the typewriter and I know. My computers are convenient, lightweight, and quick, but I'll never save a computer and enshrine it on a shelf. The computers are casual, colorful affairs, the typewriter is someone I've loved. Its key pressure and clacking sounds and dinging return bell and its twenty-pound weight are aspects I know intimately.

Just look at you, Smith-Corona. You traveled from Anchorage, Alaska to go to college with me in New Haven, Connecticut. You got me through a nearly 100-page senior economics paper. Whew! In your greatest feat, you churned out pages that were mailed to New York City and eventually they came back to me in published form. And those are just the highlights. That's reason enough to rate you four stars **** - V.W.



Van Winkle and a Mess of Metaphors

Pietro Longhi's "The Confession" (1755). The Venetian artist
painted the wealthy and poor of his day queuing to unburden
themselves. Here at the Van Winkle Project we must do likewise...

The most significant thing that's happened to me of late can be seen on the right-hand margin of this blog.

A few days ago the counter that shows "Time Remaining Before I Awake" fell below two hundred.

This may not sound momentous, but as difficult as it has been  for me to get through the first 165 days of this project, I find myself claiming comfort wherever I can.

Hurray! I'm getting closer to the halfway point.

You see, I'm not exactly enjoying this regimen of keeping my eyes and ears away from television, newspapers, and a major chunk of the Internet or ordering my family to remain silent at the dinner table about whatever might be going on in any part of the world, large or small.

One reason for my discomfiture, which I've confessed at various points along the way, is that I tend to fail. Or to use the phrasing of old-timey alcoholics, I must confess that on occasion I have fallen off the wagon.

A SERIES OF UNINTENDED FAILURES
It's time to analyze what's been going wrong of late and develop a plan to do better with the remainder of my time "asleep."

It seems like there are three ways someone in my position can easily mess up. Conveniently, there's a metaphor for each.

1 - I'm a Cracked Egg

That would be Van Winkle (me) with the dent on the right...

It's hard to blame myself for those times when I happen to be in the presence of someone who reveals something about the news or developments in culture. I'm struck by their information like a fragile egg that's received a hammer tap. I'm not completely shattered, but my universally uninformed status has been cracked. A couple of quick examples:

- Someone in church mentions "the sad thing that happened in Tuscon" and asks us to "pray for the victims of the shooting."

- I see a person the week of the Super Bowl wearing a foam chunk of cheese on her head walking into the grocery store. The day after the game I overhear someone saying, "It was a tough day for us Pittsburgh fans." Hmm...do you think the Packers played the Steelers in Super Bowl XLV and won? Duh...

2 - I'm a Hungry Hibernatin' Bear

Van Winkle is a like a blissful sleeping bear until he stretches,
gets up and begins to groggily prowl...

The real Rip Van Winkle was a world-class sleeper. In his twenty-year uninterrupted sleep he outdid any bear hibernating throughout the winter. Bears are known to stir in their dens and briefly arise and then go back to sleep.

Somedays I'm more like one of those bears than I'm like Rip. Without completely realizing what I'm doing I flip open a newspaper or glance at a news magazine cover. It's not like I fill my belly with news. I just crunch upon stray words as if they were dried berries. Examples:

   - Republicans, House, Budget Cuts, Obama Reaches Out to Business

   - Egypt, Riots, Dictators Fall, Libya, Vow to Fight to Last Drop of Blood

3- I'm a Straw Attached to a Vacuum

Sometimes I long to suck up the news
without regard to consequences...

When I have misbehaved and actually betrayed the spirit of the Van Winkle Project it been by giving into temptation and starting to read an entire article including the following:

- A review of the Coen brothers latest film, a remake of True Grit. I found it irresistible. The Coen brothers have made some of my favorite movies (see The Big Lebowski and the Whole Brevity Thing), yet they've never shot anything but their own original scripts. What's up with this? Why True Grit, which with John Wayne in the 1968 lead role is already an Academy Award-winning classic and so who needs a remake?

- An article on the lawmakers meeting in our state capitol this year and suddenly dealing with a multi-billion dollar deficit whereas the last time around they still had been able to balance the budget using leftover money from flush times. My excuse for reading this? Well, as an educator I could be affected because if they start hacking at student loan money...

ACTION PLAN
I learned something from my breakdowns and failures. Even having little chips off the news in the form of headline words or a picture here and there or an overhead remark is enough to assemble the larger picture. The mind can fill in the missing pieces.

I suppose this is why so much of the news is habitually boiled down to soundbites or crawls at the bottom of the television screen. It may not do justice to a complex, larger experience or issue, but it conveniently conveys just enough that people are happy to settle for it.

Recently my wife warned me: "If you start to hear more about certain things, then you might as well stop the whole project." That frankly frightened me. I've invested too much into my not knowing to have it all turn out to be a meaningless exercise.

So I've resolved to take the following steps.

• Never take the newspaper out of the its plastic sleeve.
• Make sure the copy of Newsweek is always lying cover-side down.
• Keep my road vision high enough when I'm stopped at stop lights that I can't see bumperstickers.
• Think about other things besides news, sports, entertainment, and weather.
• Take lots of cold showers.

All right, that last bullet point is a joke, but if this project is to set me up for a windfall of missed information in something less than 165 days from now, I do need to remain where I've vowed to metaphorically be. Outside in the cold. - V.W.

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Chance Meeting - Two Veterans

When I created this blog I vowed that there would be no political or religious opinions expressed herein. The reason for this is that I feel such material tends to divide people from one another wherever they are in the world.

Instead, I'd rather write about everyday wonder and memories and what strikes me as humorous. These are things that humans can mutually love and appreciate and they might bring us closer.

But I suppose it's possible something historical and harsh can bring us together as well. If nothing else, I hope in the wake of what I'm about to share we can stand shoulder to shoulder and affirm that the pain some military veterans still suffer is worthy of concern and grief. 

What follows then, in true Van Winkle style, isn't likely in the news headlines that I've forbidden myself to consult. Instead, it amounts to a wholly accidental, face-to-face discovery. I sat down to eat dinner and I ended up hearing the tale of Margaritte and Tyrone (names changed to respect their privacy), a husband and wife who were caught up in a horrific war.

There was no agenda as they told me their stories. It was an outpouring, as if they felt, "I have to finally tell someone what happened over there."

He fell in love with her hands...

AN INNOCENT QUESTION
So I am at a writing festival this past Thursday-Saturday and it is on the campus of a college which happens to be a few miles away from a major U.S. Air Force base.

At dinner on Friday night I see a neatly dressed twenty-something couple sitting by themselves at one of the tables in the Theater Building. I get my shrimp cocktail, sit down beside them, and we introduce ourselves.

Margaritte works in the human resources department. Her husband Tyrone, who is wearing a sport coat and tie, has just begun his first week at a new job with a technology based organization.

Margaritte and Tyrone have not come to attend the writing festival. What happened is that Margaritte got an email earlier in the day from the festival organizers saying there was extra food and the university staff and spouses were invited to join us at the dinner at no charge.

So she told Tyrone about it and there they are--a free delicious meal is before them; it's a smart thing to do.

I finger a shrimp and begin to ask the first of my get-to-know-you questions.

":How did you two meet?"

"In the Army."

"Oh, really. What did you do?"

"I was a dental assistant and x-ray technician," Tyrone says.

"I was trained in heavy weapons and chemical weapons detection," Margaritte says.

"We met," Tyrone says. "when I took x-rays of her hand."

"Yeh, I slipped in the shower and I thought I broke my hand. It hurt!." Margaritte laughs. "Then I get it x-rayed and Mr. Suave here tells me I have beautiful hands."

I tell them that's a nice story. Then I do it.

It's like stepping on a mine. Except at first it doesn't go off. If anything maybe there's just a little "click." The "click" is in their eyes when I ask, "Did you ever go to Iraq or Afghanistan?"

They're thinking. Should we tell this stranger or not?

INVASION
Margaritte: I moved up to the Kuwaiti border 48 hours before the deadline we gave Saddam expired. I was inside a tank. The deadline came and went and we rolled in. It took us a week and a half and then I was in Baghdad.

VW: Did you think you would find weapons of mass destruction?

Margaritte: No. But we tried! We found stuff. All of it was ours.

VW: What do you mean ours?

Tyrone: The U.S. gave Saddam weapons in the '80s when he was fighting a war with Iran.

Margaritte: We knew he had it. We gave it to him.

VW: If it wasn't about WMD, why did you think we were invading the country? Was it for the oil? Or bad intelligence?

Margaritte: We wanted to have a government in there that would be friendly to us and do what we told it do. That's all. It was regime change.

EARLY DAYS OF THE WAR
Margaritte: At first they wouldn't let us shoot unless we were shot at. We couldn't believe it. It was crazy!

Tyrone: Saddam had his Republican Guards, but most of the Iraqi army was just a bunch of men who they found and stuck guns in their hands. A million of them. All of these people are suddenly out of work. And we're surrounded by them.

"We were told to do things we had no training for..."

Margaritte: The Army told us we had to go on patrol. We were told to do things we had no training for. They should have called in the scouts, but they'd tell me to go clear a house. I have no idea how to clear a house. I refused.

Tyrone: I'm a dental assistant. They put me on street patrol. There was looting going on and we just watched it. They told us to report it. So we'd get on the radio and tell them where the looters were and where they had moved to next.

Margaritte: One of the myths was that women weren't in combat. I was walking around with a rifle in my hand. Before that I was manning the 50-caliber machine gun on a tank. I was in a fire fight. After three hours I couldn't hear anything. I could only see the tracers and RPGs going by. It all appeared in slow motion. We'd move to a new position, they'd find us and start shooting again. After 24 hours I couldn't do it anymore.

Tyrone: There was no "insurgency." It was all various tribes fighting us and each other. They started sending women suicide bombers to check points because they knew Americans wouldn't pat them down the same as men. After one week when 9 Americans got blown up that way the higher ups changed the plan. Now we could shoot and ask questions later.



"It was totally misreported..."

 Margaritte (still thinking about the women's role in the Army issue): That Jessica Lynch thing. It was totally misreported. She was injured all right, but she ended up in an Iraqi hospital. The Iraqis tried to give her back to us twice. But we wanted to stage a rescue to look good for the folks back home.

Tyrone: And they didn't report, too, that the Iraqis after they killed everyone else in that convoy, they beheaded the bodies and buried the heads in the sand. They thought it would keep them from going to heaven. I know. Because I was involved in identifications. You know, dental records.

IT GETS REALLY BAD
Tyrone: We met some special forces from Macedonia. I said you're from Macedonia? What are you doing here? And they told us. We don't follow the Geneva Convention. That's why you want us here.

Margaritte: Abu Ghraib that was all misreported. You can look today. None of the military personnel they identified as the perpetrators are in jail. You look at those photos and you know these people didn't do this torture because they were just sitting around and felt bored.

Tyrone: Yes. Look at the photos. It's all done according to the textbook. The torturers were trained. Then they left and the reservists were fall guys.

Margaritte: That's why I got out. I couldn't take any more of the Geneva violations. The stuff we were willing to do.

Tyrone: You want to know about the Surge? The Surge isn't what stopped the bombings and the violence. Adding those troops wasn't enough to make that kind of difference. What happened was that they turned loose the special forces and they went out in  assassination teams. At Fallujah they surrounded the city and they let out the women, the very young, and very old. They made the males age 9 to 60 stay inside. Then they killed them. All of them.

VW: If the media failed to cover this, why didn't soldiers speak out about some of these things. Or at least tell their families? They had access to the Internet and...

Tyrone: The Army controlled what you sent on the Internet or said on the phone.

Margaritte: If you were standing in line to use the phone and someone ahead of you said something they shouldn't, they'd suddenly say the phones were down. In the whole country! Once I sitting around while some officers were talking and I had a notebook. I was doodling in it. An officer came over and took it away from me. Even after I showed him I hadn't written anything.

GOING HOME
After the couple got out of the Army it was clear that Margaritte suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, something the Army has been reluctant to acknowledge is a legitimate combat caused disorder. She is now part of a class-action lawsuit (Sabo v. United States) to receive benefits and care for this injury. She admits, "No one thinks you have it. You look normal on the outside. But you're not normal on the inside."

When Margaritte enrolled in college one of the first classes she took was history. She dreaded the possibility that the class might reach the Iraq War as it moved forward in time. It did. When she spoke out about a few things she experienced she was told by two 18-year-olds, "You were never there!" Another student took another line of attack and called her a "baby killer."

Hearing that I understood why the couple was so reluctant to speak in the first place. But I couldn't help thinking they deserved to be heard. Maybe they weren't eyewitnesses to everything they claimed, but they actually had their boots on the desert ground while the rest of us were sitting at home in comfort. They put their lives in harm's way every day.

I'm sad to see them end up this way. Conflicted about what they did. Feeling used and abandoned by the people in power.

I hope they are successful in what they're trying to do nowadays. Move on, raise their son, and forget about those bad years of their lives except whenever the nightmares still overtake them in the dark. - V.W.

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An Oprah Reading Fantasy (Black History Month - Part 3)

At this point  I suppose no one needs to heap praise upon or call further attention to Oprah Winfrey.

Who is this woman? Just one of the best known people on the planet, that's all.

Yet, as I conclude this series on Black History Month, I would like to point to Oprah as one of the few celebrities who manages to deliver to us a valuable paradox.

Oprah is not a case of "what you see is what you get." Think about it. Here is a person who comes to the us via the borders defined by a box and moves around with complete comfort and ease in that medium, She is so successful in the realm of the glowing rectangle that she has virtually owned daytime TV for decades.

Nevertheless it is Oprah who has been using television to tell us that we, in effect, need to turn off our TVs. She reminds us that we are missing out on something huge if we don't shun the "boob tube" from time to time and make room in our lives to read more books.

A while ago Oprah devoted an entire issue of her magazine to books and authors. One can see: this is someone who takes reading very seriously.

                          

FINDING THE FREEDOM...TO READ
If I keep unwrapping the mystery of Oprah, I find a further paradox. The woman who loves reading so very much that she had constructed a personal library to die for has a very different story lurking in her background. As an African-American, Oprah is a descendant of slaves. One of the strongest prohibitions that slaves lived with was that they were not allowed to learn how to read.

The slave masters understood. Access to books could begin to erode their power structure. Ignorant slaves were the most malleable. Books, by contrast, taught a man or a woman how to think for himself. They delivered identity. Books could become keys and gateways to freedom.

Frederick Douglass

In the famous Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, American Slave, the author notes that, " it is almost an unpardonable offence to teach slaves to read in this Christian country," but Douglass got around this high wall when his "kindly" Mistress taught him the alphabet.

He took those 26 letters and literally ran with them.

Douglass tells how as he went on errands for the master he took a book with him and got the white children in the neighborhood to give him informal lessons in reading. And his eyes were opened...

Douglass was born in 1818. Nearly two hundred years later Oprah Winfrey, born in a world that no longer withholds literacy from anyone, asks all of us to remember what reading can do for us. At the same time, the pressures not to read books increase.

We're busy. We spend hours on the Internet doing casual, superficial reading of emails, Facebook posts, websites, and yes, blogs. And if we finally wish to turn our attention to a full-blown narrative, it's easier and faster to pop a DVD into the Blu-ray player than to crack the cover of a book.

I think Oprah understands what's happening. With her Book Club she has not only performed the role formerly played by influential critics and teachers who singled out works that everyone should read, she has also tried to create a culture of reading. She promotes the idea that one can enjoyably and profitably gather with friends who are reading the same book and discuss it.

TOLSTOY AT 30,000 FEET

Advocating the idea of reading these days is like trying to roll a rock up a steep hill. Will the rock make it to the crest or will it roll down upon us? I honestly don't know. Reading may become more and more a niche activity that goes through frequent bursts of revival (like knitting) and at the same time never reclaims the more thoroughgoing popularity it had, say, at the height of the paperback revolution in the 1950s. That was before television and movies began to siphon away the mass audience.

I suspect that without Oprah things would be worse. Fewer people would be reading and many books she's brought to their attention over the years would be vastly neglected.

I think of the time a few years ago when I was on an airplane and I saw a woman reading a thick trade paperback of my all-time favorite novel.

Anna Karenina.

Who on earth would be reading Count Tolstoy's masterpiece? It's rarely studied even in college. It's too long and perhaps not obtuse enough for lit professors who think wrestling with "difficulty" is the purpose of their discipline.

Then I saw the sticker on the front cover and I understood: A.K. was an Oprah Book Club Selection.

OPRAH AT THE DOOR...
How remarkable are the twists and turns of history. I can imagine Oprah, this descendant of those who were forbidden to read, paying a visit today to the white-washed, stately, suburban home of the great, great, great, great grandchildren of those who owned the slaves. Just after dinner she rings their door bell.

Ding-dong! Very sonorous and impressive! But...

When no one answers, Oprah shyly opens the door and looks around. No wonder no one heard the doorbell. Inside the white-washed, stately, suburban home the parents and four children are:

• Playing video games
• Watching TVs and movies on high definition screens.
• Noodling around at their computers.
• Texting on their phones

Oprah looks about, shakes her head, and at last speaks.

"What's wrong with all of you? Why aren't you reading?"

And it's true. There are shelves in the house, but on them rest knick knacks and DVDs. Other than some obscure tomes obviously chosen for their decorative cachet, there isn't a book in sight.

The family hears the commotion as Oprah strides through the house, moving from room to room. Each, in turn, looks at her, noting the strong voice in their midst, but their eyes remain vacuous, unfocused.

"Don't you get it?" Oprah shouts. "You've all become slaves!"

In desperation she places a stack of Book Club books on the dining room table where perhaps the family will stumble upon them the next time they sit down to eat their microwave meals. Then she departs and tries the house next door...

The family members in the white-washed, stately, suburban home turn back to their individual screens and diversions. I'm sorry to report that hour after hour the loudest sound in the house is the clanking of chains. If you've ever been around slaves, then you know the harsh truth. You can only free those who actually want to be free. Not even Oprah Winfrey can change that. - V.W.



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Clifford Brown, A Life in Jazz (Black History Month - Part 2)

Life is odd. Horrible things can happen (like my ancestors owning human beings as slaves, see previous VWP post), but from such horrible things sometimes quite different states of being emerge. Unambiguously good things.

Like jazz.

If African-Americans had never been loaded aboard slave ships and brought to a distant land, if they had remained just what they were, Africans, who would have invented this most American of music?

And without jazz I wouldn't be telling the story of quite likely the greatest and least known trumpeter of all time.

Clifford Brown.

MY MUSICAL MELANGE
Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Tchaikovsky. This was the music I grew up with. My father wanted his sons to be exposed to the best of culture, and in the Western world, European classical music was considered to be at the pinnacle of the human effort to turn instruments and notes into compelling sounds.

My first musical love...classical music.

Our father purchased stacks of RCA and Columbia Masterwork records at what happened to be a propititious moment. He could still get his boys' attention by dropping the needle on, say, a Rachmaninoff piano concerto.

A few years later, though, the British Invasion of rock 'n' roll roared ashore in America. Our ears tuned into a new sound. Goodbye, Ludwig. Roll over, Beethoven!

Oh, I still liked, even loved, classical music, but it took a backseat in my musical interests. Rock music was so much more dashboard and steering wheel direct. For starters it was louder and the singers sang words about what was on their minds.

Classical music, on the other hand, was more of an extended impression of a feeling, that gradually unfolded and shaped the listener's soul over time. Why a symphony might require an entire forty minutes of listening! Rock music tended to serve up three-minutes doses of sound that gouged, carved, and stomped the psyche in satisfying ways.

If classical music was courtship and seduction and love letters written back and forth, rock music was a vivid one-night stand, a sudden jolt of a drug to the head...

But where was jazz in those days? Actually, we were living in the golden age of it, the late 1950s and early 1960s, but I had no idea. I heard jazz, in a degraded or altered form, and no one told me that was what it was.

Call it jazz...because it sorta is.

Jazz was in Henry Mancini's "Pink Panther Theme". It was in every other note of the elevator music of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. It was even in the only instrumental The Beatles ever wrote, the blues inflected "Flying" on their Magical Mystery Tour album, and in the lonely saxophone wail of "Us and Them" on Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon.

And why was it I loved the massed brass, and most of all the horn solos, when I sat down and listened to the Blood, Sweat and Tears album or one of those classic numbered double albums by Chicago--I, II and III?

I was starting to hear the music I was destined to fall in love with.

JAZZ TRUMPET'S MISSING LINK
Decades later I probably listen to more jazz on a daily basis than any other kind of music. I'm no jazz expert, but I like how jazz shares with classical music the idea of being a musical impression of an emotion. I like too how, unlike classical, the musicians have the freedom to solo and display their technical virtuosity as well as express how they're feeling while the tune progresses.

I'm still making discoveries in jazz. Like the trumpeter Clifford Brown aka "Brownie."

For me it's like finding out that between Ludwig van Beethoven and Johannes Brahms there was another equally great composer, but somehow I never heard of him until now.

Of course, anyone who is very conversant in jazz will have heard of Brownie, but the casual jazz listener not so much. In fact, no one even assayed a book-length biography of the man until 2001.

It's not that Clifford Brown didn't have the chops to match Miles Davis. He did and then some. It's not that he didn't play with the greats of his time like Art Blakey, Max Roach, and Sonny Rollins, He did. It's that he died young. Way too young.

Brownie was just getting started.

ON THE CUSP (OF GREATNESS)

It is the summer of '56 and it is Clifford Brown's wedding anniversary. Normally he and his wife LaRue travel from gig to gig together. They have a baby this year and they would even bring the baby along.

In those days the jazz musician typically traveled by car. It's a hard way to make a living even if you're 25-year-old Clifford Brown who is seen by critics as the next great jazz star. He already has an album whose title sum up the possibilities:

New Star on the Horizon.

Brownie doesn't take wife LaRue and baby Clifford, Jr. on the trip on June 25, 1956. LaRue goes to her mother's house because she had never met her grandson. And it is her birthday. Yes, she and Clifford had married on her birthday two years earlier.

The birthday party is being held at the home of saxophonist Harold Land and his wife. Land isn't in the current incarnation of the Clifford Brown quartet, but he remains a close friend. Someone comes over and says there's a call for LaRue at her mother's house down the street.

THE NIGHT THE MUSIC DIED
Brownie has been playing at Music City, a jazz club in Philadelphia. After the show the band packs up, drummer Max Roach and Sonny "Newk" Rollins, the saxophonist in one car. Brownie travels with his pianist Richie Powell (younger brother of the great pianist Bud Powell) and Richie's wife in the other car. They hit the road, caravan style, Roach and Rollins in the lead car.

The band is headed to Chicago for more music making. Brownie and the Powells are riding in Brownie's 1955 Buick.

It is raining as June 25 heads toward June 26, 1956.

After midnight, Brownie's car stops off on the Pennsylvania Turnpike near Bedford, PA to buy gas. It's the last time Brownie and the Powells are seen alive.

Nancy Powell, who is now driving, misses a curve, smashes through a guardrail, and the car falls down a 75-foot embankment.

The rain continues to fall.

"...BROWN IS BEAUTIFUL." - Kalamu ya Saaam, poet/author
If Clifford Brown had lived, then what? For one thing, I wouldn't be writing a blog post about him in 2011 anymore than there's a need for someone to post about Miles Davis and what a great jazz musician he was. Everyone with even passing familiarity with jazz would know the name.

Brownie's solo for "Daahoud"

Brownie only had five years in which he recorded and played and positioned himself in the forefront of the future of jazz. It is an amazing accomplishment that is validated by the recordings. Sometimes Brownie's playing is, no other way to put it, jaw dropping the way you listen to a Charlie Parker sax solo and wonder how any human can have the breath and finger speed to produce such sounds. Other times, with the riotous bebop pushed to the background and replaced by a ballad, Brownie is simply moving and soulful.

He could do it all. Always his horn playing is impeccable and intelligent and commands my attention.

But there's one more thing that's always mentioned about Brownie. In an age when many jazz musicians followed the Charlie Parker model of dissipation--burn bright and burn out young--Brownie was a clean living family man. He didn't touch drugs. He was gentle and kindly. This is not myth making. It's what all those who knew him said upon learning of his death. The world had lost a great jazz musician and a great human being.

CODA? NOT QUITE
There were tapes in the trunk of the 1955 Buick that took Brownie to his death. He liked to record his rehearsals and gigs on his own reel to reel machine. Only one of the tapes was labeled, which means that as the tapes have finally come out on CDs in recent years people are left to guess where and when Brownie is playing. But what really matters is that he is playing. He will keep on playing. That's my definition of classical. - V.W.

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