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How do you know father knew best? You ever see the record collection?


JSngry

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My Dad was musically gifted.  He sang in the chorus when opera companies would come through town back in the '50's and '60's and he once sang with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in Salt Lake City.  He had perfect pitch and played piano. recorder, ukulele, harmonica and pedal steel guitar.  As a matter of fact he traded in his guitar to buy our family's first television set.  Unfortunately, his record collection, while substantial, was peppered with the likes of Jackie Gleason, Lawrence Welk and Mitch Miller.  I still remember him coming home some nights with five or six LP's tucked under his arm.  He loved music, but he absolutely hated rock and roll...all the stuff my twin brother and I listened to religiously.  If I had a dollar for every time he yelled at us, "Turn that crap down", I'd have been set for life.

Edited by Dave James
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My dad had 78s of Billie Holiday ("Strange Fruit" & "Fine and Mellow"), Bird & Dizzy ("Salt Peanuts" & "Hot House"), Benny Goodman ("Body and Soul" & "Benny's Boogie"), Coleman Hawkins/Chocolate Dandies ("Smack" & "Dedication"), Dodo  Marmarosa (!) with Lucky Thompson on the Atomic label, and stuff by Kenton, Basie, Nat Cole and others.

I've got all of these now. Don't play 'em -- my turntable won't play 78s and they're fairly worn anyway -- but I look at them every once and while and give thanks that they helped get me off on the right foot when I discovered them around age 9.

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We didn’t have a lot of jazz but a lot of everything else: showtimes (Guys and Dolls, for example), James M. Cohan, classical and Sinatra. Some Herb Alpert too. No Mantovani or Lawrence Welk or that kind of music thank goodness (although when we’d visit my grand mother she’d make me watch LW with her)  He bought me a special two lp set of civil war music, the Union and the Confederacy, by Richard Bales and the National Gallery Orchestra. Wore these records out on our Fisher Hi Fi, one of these units that have a turntable and built in speakers. 

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My father was only 21 when I was born in 1968.  Back then, he loved all sorts of music: rock, pop, jazz, soul, blues, you name it.  He had a sizable record collection too.  I still have a few of his LPs.  My dad enjoys music to this day, but he's not the avid fan that he was back when I was a kid.

I've dug much deeper into jazz than he ever did, but I'm sure that my early exposure to bands like Santana and the Allman Brothers Band -- two of his favorites -- had a big impact on the way I hear music.  I also remember hearing jazz too.  Contemporary stuff like The Crusaders and Gato Barbieri. 

No Ellington or Coltrane or the like.  But still.  Not a bad start! ;) 

 

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As I think of it, I guess you can say that my father did know best, for among his broadway show/hollywood musical cast albums and a lot of Sinatra were Ella and Louis and Ella and Louis Again. It was probably the top two records for actual listening while I was growing up (total collection wasn't more than 40 LPs, I'd say).

So in the fall of 1987 I was in my first semester of grad school in St. Louis.  My older brother had a friend in St. Louis who reached out to invite me to a get-together at his apartment. Turned out to be three couples and me, the guy nobody knew.  So I ended up paying a lot more attention to what was on the stereo - Ella & Louis.  This was around Thanksgiving and not long after Mom asked me what I wanted for Christmas.  Since I had spent the previous four years at FSU becoming more and more estranged from modern pop music in all its forms, I told her I had no idea what, but maybe I'd enjoy some jazz LPs.

She gave that request to my brother, who picked up two Columbia Jazz Masterpiece sampler LPs.  And it was off to the races ...

So in a long-range way, Dad helped me discover jazz, or want to explore it.

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Nothing from my father, but I had an older cousin whose possessions I used to explore in 1954-55 when I was 14-15. I found a trombone, a wind-up gramophone and 78s by Muggsy Spanier, Bob Crosby, Meade Lux Lewis, Buddy Featherstonhaugh and many more whom I forget.

Edited by BillF
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19 minutes ago, HutchFan said:

I'm sure that my early exposure to bands like Santana and the Allman Brothers Band -- two of his favorites -- had a big impact on the way I hear music. 

No Ellington or Coltrane or the like.  But still.  Not a bad start! ;) 

 

Agreed.  Getting from, say, "Afro Blue" to, say, "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed" or "Every Step of the Way" (the climax to Santana's 'Caravanserai') is not a long journey.  And of course Santana then blatantly recorded Coltrane in that album with John McLaughlin.

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My father never bought any records. He had played cornet in the village brass bands before leaving his parents' home, loved Louis Armstrong but besides listening to a classical symphony record on Sundays with my mother (who was in a record club) -  nothing. After the war they even stopped going to an occiasional concert, never went out after moving to the countryside in the 1960's. 

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3 hours ago, felser said:

Agreed.  Getting from, say, "Afro Blue" to, say, "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed" or "Every Step of the Way" (the climax to Santana's 'Caravanserai') is not a long journey.  And of course Santana then blatantly recorded Coltrane in that album with John McLaughlin.

Yessir!  :tup 

While I was in college in Athens, there really wasn't any "jazz scene."  Occasionally, the university would bring in jazz groups.  And Athens had a jazz festival for a few years. (I remember seeing Freddie Hubbard one year.)   ... The closest thing we had to jazz that you could see regularly was the jam-band groups.  I must've seen Col. Bruce Hampton & the Aquarium Rescue Unit twenty times and Medeski, Martin & Wood nearly as many.  

To me, Colonel Bruce & MMW are similar to groups like The ABB or Santana or Traffic.  They might not be making "Jazz" -- but jazz is definitely in the stew!

 

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Yeah, and now giving advice on how to catalog/sell it. He's got lots of beach music not listed on discogs as he used to DJ so he's trying to sift through that to determine value. Also has stacks of Stax and tons of Southern soul records, not to mention loads of Johnny Mathis (mom loves him). Mathis records mostly have zero resale value, but that was never why he bought any of it anyway. 

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41 minutes ago, Dub Modal said:

Yeah, and now giving advice on how to catalog/sell it. He's got lots of beach music not listed on discogs as he used to DJ so he's trying to sift through that to determine value. Also has stacks of Stax and tons of Southern soul records, not to mention loads of Johnny Mathis (mom loves him). Mathis records mostly have zero resale value, but that was never why he bought any of it anyway. 

Mathis was my mother's favorite.  "Johnny's Greatest Hits", "More Johnny's Greatest Hits:, and "Merry Christmas" were the soundtrack of my youth, and I still have a nostalgic soft spot for them.  I play that Christmas album while we decorate our Christmas tree each year.

 

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My dad loved classical music, Mozart and Rossini above all. He despised jazz, brothel music for him, I couldn’t influence his opinion about it. I still play his LPs I inherited when he passed.

edit: he played bandoneon in his youth he retained a sweet spot for Italian folk music though he usually didn’t listen to it as far I remember.

Edited by porcy62
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My father played the guitar during the Depression, and tried to hit it big as a songwriter. The furthest he got was entering a Tommy Dorsey song contest with a song he wrote called "This Love of Ours", which he and my aunt gave to Buddy Rich when he was playing with Dorsey at a Hotel in NY.

The song later came out as a Sinatra hit called "This Love of Mine" with the melody changed enough so they couldn't sue them. There were three names on the song, Parker Sanicola and Sinatra, which was done because the lawyer my father consulted said it would be harder to sue three people rather than one or two.

, He had a love for music that never waned until he had a stroke at 79, because his carotid artery was 99% clogged up. He stopped listening to music for the last 14 years of his life, although he seemed to like the CD I made and never released.

Anyway, this seems to be a topic that holds a fascination here that never seems to be satisfied.. The MIA Teasing the Korean's father was much more accomplished than mine was, and probably had a fantastic collection. My father's was mainly guitar centered,but he had a thing for female vocalists like Cleo Laine,(he always said her voice was like a musical instrument), Sarah Vaughn, and Shirley Bassey(?). He never held anything against Sinatra, and had a few of his albums, but one album he bought that changed my life was the Verve album "The Great Guitars of Jazz". It had cuts by Kessel Herb Ellis, Tal Farlow, Wes, Howard Roberts and Oscar Moore. He also had "Piano and Pen", a Dick Katz LP that had Jimmy Raney on some cuts, and ,Chuck Wayne on the others. He also had a lot of Tony Mottola albums, but his favorites were Wes Montgomery and Django Reinhardt.

Every week he'd come back Friday with new albums. All the jazz albums had guitars on them, so I got to hear Gabor Szabo, Johnny Smith, Grant Green, Cal Green, Dennis Budimir, Rene Thomas, Kenny Burrell, Barry Galbraith, Lloyd Ellis ("The Fastest Guitarist in the World"), Gene Bertoncini, Mundell Lowe and Buudy Fite.

My uncle was more of a pure jazz buff, and when we went over his house, I spent all my time going through his record collection, until I wa called for dinner.

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My father came home to the SF Bay Area from WWII just as the "dixieland" (sorry) revival was in full... well "swing" isn't quite the right word.  Dad loved Turk Murphy and Bob Scobey, that sort of thing , though there were some Bechet, DeParis and Bunk Johnson recordings in his collection.  Dad played the banjo and - while knowing he wasn't going to "cut it" - tried out for a Turk Murphy band opening, just because he "had to".  He was a good man.  

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Not the Record Collection though he worked tirelessly to make certain I loved Mozart.  My father had no jazz records at all, but he managed to surprise me.  In a conversation with him and his childhood running buddy about swing bands, the later mentioned that they had seen a "fella could really play the piano-Bennie Moten."  Now, he had no idea that Bennie Moten had made records or was highly thought of in some circles, they were impressed enough to remember the band 45 years later.  

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Reading the above with interest. My parents hated music and would look relieved when the “noise” was turned off. It didn’t matter what the “noise” was, they preferred silence.  I think the only CDs we had in the house were versions of some classical pieces that had crossed their 60s paths (Jacqueline de Pre etc.), but I don’t remember them ever being played.

Despite that, my dad had very happy memories of listening to Sonny Rollins as a younger man, which was a good direction to me when I started feeling my way into jazz. In the 90s, Rollins wasn’t really being marketed in the way that e.g. Miles was, and I might easily have missed him. Getting hooked on Freedom Suite (my Dad’s recommendation) after stumbling missteps with Bitches Brew and some Columbia-era Monk, was part of what got me actually interested in jazz.  

Edited by Rabshakeh
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My father's collection was much deeper on the classical side.  He had Brubeck's Time Out and a few other jazz LPs, though I am having a lot of trouble remember what they might have been.  He also had Sgt. Pepper's and a couple of Simon and Garfunkel albums, but not much else on the pop/rock side.   As he grew older, he gravitated away from classical guitar (he had been a very talented guitarist and actually later on a luthier) and more towards bluegrass and "old timey" music.  He and my mother listened to NPR all the time, including the jazz programming, though as I said, they didn't have that many jazz LPs in the house.  My parents certainly encouraged me to listen to mainstream jazz, getting me the Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz (on cassette!) and a Columbia sampler (one of my first CDs).

And oh so many books in the basement.  I have a lot of books (probably three thousand if you count the ones stashed away everywhere), but he must have had 2 or 3 times that many!

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  • 3 weeks later...

My Father was an Amateur piano Player but as much as I remember he also had perfect pitch. 

When I was a very Little kid I would sit under the piano just to dig the sounds. My dad didn´t know many tunes, but he used to Play "Mondschein-Sonate" from Beethoven and I would dig that Deep Sound, sitting under the piano. Then I would jump on his lap and watch the keys . 

Dad would Show me the keys and say look this is a C, this one is the C sharp, this is the D and so on. So I memorized all that when I was Maybe 3 years, 4 years old and I think thats where I got my perfect pitch. 

I think I remember my dad was a bit disappointed when I was 14,15 years old and didn´t listen to anything else than jazz, but eventually he noticed that this is serious Music too and Needs a lot of Knowledge of the Instrument. 

I´ll never Forget when he bought me that jazz book written by the italian author Arrigo Pollilo. It´s still one of my favourite jazz books and every time I have a look at it it reminds me of my Father, whom I miss very much. It´s 23 years since he passed away and it still brings Tears into my eys…...he was the best Person I met…..

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