The Wild Party

Damn, I missed that!

This is the long story of why I love Ian:

My mom was from the UK. Davyhulme, Manchester to be exact, and she was a neighbor of Peter Noone (she doesn't remember him but my Uncle Tony remembers playing football with him.) If I ever come across as music obsessed, it was because of my mom. Her entire reason for moving to New York was the music that she grew up with in WWII, having snuck into clubs as an underage teenager with her friend Peggy to see the Glenn Miller Orchestra or Tommy Dorsey playing in a Manchester dance club for American GIs, or climbing up the fire escapes to building rooftops to watch through the windows if they couldn't get in.

There was always music playing in the house when I grew up, and if West Side Story or Carousel were on TV we were required to sit down, shut up, and watch. To this day I cry my ass off like a baby when I see these films. She actively encouraged my brother and I to be musicians. When I was eight she put a down payment on a piano, only to find out later that same day that my dad's union was going on strike at General Electric in Schenectady, a strike that ended up lasting thirteen weeks and there was no money coming in. Tough times in the Miller household. I think she cried like hell when she went back to the store to get the deposit back. We never did get that piano.

In the first year of high school I took up the guitar because I was always rock and roll and wasn't sure if I wanted to be like Brian May or Pete Townsend or Johnny Ramone, my brother picked the trombone for no other reason than the school band needed more trombone players. He ended up spending 24 years in the Navy, and although I am at heart a pacifist I am hella proud that SOMEONE in the family stepped up to make a contribution to the world.

My mom's brother, my uncle Michael, also dreamed of being a jazz star. He played clarinet, and my mom's job as the kid sister was to keep the record player cranked so he could practice along with the jazz greats on the 78s. WWII interrupted his ambitions of musical stardom and he ended up learning the newspaper trade as a 17 year old serviceman suddenly put in charge of a German newspaper in the British DMZ. He spent his adult civilian life working for the Manchester Evening News, and Michael Parkinson (Mike as he was known around the house) was his drinking buddy.

Michael never gave up his love of music though, especially American music, and over the years he and my mom traded tapes via airmail (I remember those postage stamps that were stamped "PAR AVION" like they were yesterday, and how my brother and I would fight over them because we both collected stamps.) His trip to New Orleans with my mom and dad in the mid 80s put him in seventh heaven when a local Nawlins jazz band let him sit in on clarinet to play some ragtime! I don't know how good he was after 40 years but everyone had a good time and the pictures from it are in my prized collection, along with the Gene Krupa autograph written on the back of a bar menu from Club Metropole circa 1962 or 63.

So getting back to Ian, the music he plays is what my mom played on those tapes she got Par Avion from Uncle Michael, and when I hear it, it's like she's still here snapping her fingers, humming along, and tapping her toes to the beat.

Ian, I hope you read this.

I really dig the swing era (if I understood you properly), too, as well as the transitional era between swing and bop, and of course bop itself. One tip, if you don't know it yet yourself: The records by (Captain) Glenn Miller's Army Air Force Band. Those are basically transcriptions recorded for airplay, and they do a remarkable job in preserving the atmosphere of those days. (And Jerry Gray was just a remarkable arranger; witnesses: the intro to "All's Well, Mademoiselle", and especially "Russian Patrol", which is really dynamite.)

Cheers,

Claus