Back Out to the Street

I’ve got Ike Quebec on.  Ike’s gentle.  I need something gentle.  I can tell the Freddie Hubbard bop I was playing has my wife’s neck set at an angle.  I get it.  I scroll down and put on “It Might As Well Be Spring” from 1961, and the title track is unassuming, as I’d remembered. But soon we’re into “A Light Reprieve” and before anything is spoken I can tell I ought to change things, once again.

Friday night and the kids all had other plans.  My veggie dinner for four has just become a veggie dinner for two.  My wife had some sliced lotus root in the fridge from a day or two back.  I figure I’ll fry them with some garlic and they taste alright.  But ou, as it’s called in Chinese is difficult to do well.  My brother-in-law has a way of stuffing them with chopped pork, dipping them in batter and deep frying them which is remarkable. I’ve flopped every time I’ve tried to approximate that.  Tonight, I just keep it simple.

My wife hadn’t wanted some theme music for a video she was making.  “No.  Not bebop, thank you.”  I suggested some twenties Ellington and I sold her on “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo.”  Now there is a video of young Chinese girls running around a kitchen cooking to James “Bubber” Miley’s plunger mute trumpet sounds.

We dine together with lotus root, tofu with scallions and some dill-stuffed cakes she’ d bought the day before.   No one around but us.  She wants to know more about Duke.  Where to begin?  “La Plus Belle Africaine”, “The Mooche”, “Caravan” and then I decide I really want her to hear “Echoes of Harlem” which I remember stopping me dead in my tracks the first time I heard it.  A cold, bitter walk through dark Harlem streets that opens into the seductive and expensive warmth of a jazz club in full swing and it seems to last just long enough to warm the traveler before he is forced back out to the street to keep walking.  “You know there’s a street named after him in Manhattan” I tell her.  But she prefers to listen without any narration.

Friday, 01/19/18