The Long View

All of the recent hoopla about the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock music festival in 1969 (if everyone who claimed to have been there were actually there, it would have required the entire state of New York to accommodate them) had me thinking about where I was in the “Summer of Love.” I don’t remember, except that I do remember feeling sad when Judy Garland died that summer (and unbeknownst to me, Gay Liberation’s “Bunker Hill”–the Stonewall riots–followed within days). The only person whom I’ve ever known who was actually at Woodstock is Patty Gilbertson, my former opera buddy.

I was not at Woodstock. I was listening to jazz. I probably went to the Laurel Jazz Festival that summer with our neighbor Dan Gaither, the first black man that I knew who was not a janitor or domestic. (He once told my parents about a patronizing white person’s characterization of his and his wife Florence’s home: “It is so clean you could eat off the floors.” His commentary: “We don’t eat off the floor; we eat off dishes.”) He was proud to have been descended from slaves of the Gaithers of Gaithersburg, Maryland. He was a Republican when one could still be black and a member of the party of Lincoln. “Liberal Republican” was not yet utterly oxymoronic. I felt like the only white boy at the Laurel Jazz Festival, which was a salutary experience. That night, Lionel Hampton, Miles Davis (utterly ignoring the audience), and Roberta Flack.

The summer before, on a trip to Massachusetts to visit my father’s sister and her family, I persuaded my father to take me to the Newport Jazz Festival. It was, I realize now, a ghost of its former glory (celebrated a decade before in the equally wraith-like musical remake of The Philadelphia Story, a confection called High Society, starring Grace Kelly, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Louis Armstrong).

Frankly, I don’t remember if we went to the Newport Jazz Festival on Friday afternoon (when, according to the printed program that I still have, we would have heard Rufus Harley, The Clark Terry Big Band, Elvin Jones Trio, Archie Shepp Quintet, Dizzy Gillespie Quintet, and Sadao Watanbe) or Saturday afternoon (featuring Duke Ellington, Benny Carter, Montego Joe Septet, Tal Farlow Quartet, Sonny Criss, and Vi Redd). Since I’d already seen Ellington and band in concert at home in DC at the old Watergate amphitheatre, it was probably Friday afternoon. I was at the time enamored of an album by Dizzy and Paul Quinichette, The New Continent, a complex orchestrally arranged suite for big band, composed by Lalo Schifrin, best known as the creator of the Mission Impossible theme, but whose jazz riffs on baroque music, the album The Dissection And Reconstruction Of Music From The Past As Performed By The Inmates Of Lalo Schifrin’s Demented Ensemble As A Tribute To The Memory Of The Marquis De Sade,  whetted my appetite for classical music.

I came to jazz through my parents, musically omnivorous, who took me to free concerts in DC, and by listening at night on my old Philco radio to the soothing voice of Felix Grant, the Album Sound ’til midnight.

“Bliss it was in that time to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.” –William Wordsworth