{"id":2213,"date":"2011-04-08T23:34:43","date_gmt":"2011-04-09T03:34:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=2213"},"modified":"2015-09-26T13:43:12","modified_gmt":"2015-09-26T17:43:12","slug":"dialogues-for-jazz-combo-and-orchestra","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=2213","title":{"rendered":"An Empty Room, Green Trolleys, and Brubeck"},"content":{"rendered":"

Theme Songs Page<\/a> | Previous Theme Song<\/a> | Next Theme Song<\/a><\/p>\n

An Empty Room, Green Trolleys, and Brubeck<\/h2>\n

\"\"<\/h2>\n

Dialogues for Jazz Combo and Orchestra: III \u2013 Adagio-Ballad, by Howard Brubeck, performed by the New York Philharmonic with the Dave Brubeck Quartet conducted by Leonard Bernstein (1961), encountered 1966(?), re-encountered 1967<\/h3>\n

Buy it here<\/a><\/p>\n

In a nearly empty room, after perhaps weeks of silence, music begins.\u00a0 A group of cellos is heard, meandering through a series of desolate chords without a clear direction, while above them a lonely French horn picks out a melody as if at random, as if trying to find a footing in the insecure and seemingly trackless chordal structure.\u00a0 Then, after two minutes, the whole thing jells, and a jazz saxophone picks up where the French horn left off, and, confidently navigating the chord pattern, swings effortlessly where the French horn stumbled.\u00a0 A piano picks up the stride, and struts through what now turns out to have been a 16-bar pattern, and then the saxophone comes back, and marches with the entire orchestra to a composed, if bluesy, and subdued, and melancholy conclusion.<\/em><\/p>\n

This is the way I still picture to myself hearing part of the Dialogues for Jazz Combo and Orchestra: in my empty college dorm room on my very first night there, all alone.\u00a0 It is a powerful recollection.<\/p>\n

We are now entering the densest collection of songs for any time period I\u2019ll be discussing in these pages.\u00a0 Some years don\u2019t rate a song; this one is worth several.\u00a0 Freshman year was an explosion of new things, music among them, all discovered together.<\/p>\n

Ending a Summer, and a Time of\u00a0 Life<\/h3>\n

The preceding period had been\u00a0the opposite of explosive.\u00a0 In the previous piece, I wrote about how the summer after graduation was an exhausted, solitary, and introspective time, as, among other things, my stepdad recovered from a life-threatening illness and surgery and I tried to write a novel.\u00a0 By the end of the summer, though, we were all pulling ourselves together.\u00a0 I visited my father in New York, and my mom and stepdad vacationed in Bay City (while the Detroit riots raged).\u00a0 And when I got back, and they got back, we were all refreshed and recovered, and it was time to get serious.\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

None of us knew much about what we were getting serious for, though.\u00a0 In my case \u2013 and from talking to contemporaries, it seems that this was far more typical in those years than nowadays \u2013 I had literally never set foot on the campus of the university I would be attending and couldn\u2019t even picture it in my head.\u00a0 (I did like the cream-colored stationery with the interesting typeface but that was hardly something to start planning a future around.)<\/p>\n

Not to Be Rushed<\/h3>\n

I really had no idea of what the place was like.\u00a0 There were no websites to visit, very little in the way of counseling to advise me, and my parents were, for a set of academics, singularly clueless about where I might like to go, or why.[1] I had applied to six schools, all of them elite Eastern institutions.\u00a0 I just assumed that I was good enough and would get through the screening process.\u00a0 It was a near thing in the end, though;[2] only one ended up accepting me.[3]<\/p>\n

My stepdad, now well enough, took me to Fiegel\u2019s<\/a>, an old-line men\u2019s store on Main Street, to get some clothes for college.\u00a0 I remember getting much that turned out to be too dressy, although that could have turned out to be more a sign of the changing times as we moved into the later 60s than of any norms at the University of Pennsylvania, my new school. \u00a0I had this picture in my mind of people attending football games dressed a bit like collegians from the 20s, which sort of was true for about one year.\u00a0 (I ended up hanging onto those largely-unworn ties well into graduate school.)\u00a0 Somehow we also acquired a huge green trunk with a removable shelf, and packed a lot of my stuff, including some records and stereo gear, into it.\u00a0 Then we entrusted it to the care of the Railway Express Agency<\/a>,[4] in the hope and expectation that it would be delivered to my dorm in time.<\/p>\n

And then it was time to go.\u00a0 But we did it my family\u2019s own unique way.\u00a0 My mom called her brother in Southern Maryland, her father in Boston, and an old high school friend of hers in Washington, and urged them all to be part of the sendoff in Philadelphia. All of them could and did make it.\u00a0 Not only that, but we made a royal progress of what was at most a two-day journey (we\u2019d got to Washington in one day on my high school junior trip), stopping in Pittsburgh and with old graduate school friends of my parents in Chambersburg as well.\u00a0 We even toured the battlefields at Gettysburg.<\/p>\n

So it was that not until about 5 p.m. on Friday, September 1, did we reach the point at Valley Forge where the Schuylkill Expressway diverged southwards from the Pennsylvania Turnpike.\u00a0 And I knew from the maps (I\u2019d become the family\u2019s navigator on long car trips), that I was finally getting close to my new home. \u00a0And a sense of anticipation that had sort of been dammed up inside me until that point started to spring some leaks.\u00a0 I just wanted to be at Penn, whatever that was like, and doing things my own way.\u00a0 Instead I was still part of a family get-together.<\/p>\n

But of course my parents, being who they were, were not to be rushed.\u00a0 We didn\u2019t go past the campus then, but instead made for the Sheraton in Center City, on the John F. Kennedy Boulevard.\u00a0 Then we had to go to one of the Bookbinder\u2019ses[5] for dinner.\u00a0 Finally<\/em>, after dinner, my parents consented to take me over to the campus; a campus cop let us in.\u00a0 We found my dorm room, in an ivy-covered quad.\u00a0 It would have been a little too hi\"\"<\/a>gh off the ground for a Sebastian Flyte to have been likely to come and vomit in my window, a la Brideshead Revisited<\/em>,[<\/a>6] though this photo taken of the same window the following summer (with the ivy unfortunately stripped) demonstrates it might have been technically possible.\u00a0 Still, I was going to be almost as immediately exposed to whatever would go down out there on the quad as Charles Ryder had been.\u00a0 I thought about this as we drove back to the Sheraton.<\/p>\n

The following day, all the other members of the family group gathered.\u00a0 All I wanted was to get away.\u00a0 We \u00a0retrieved the Railway Express trunk, and moved my things into the dorm.\u00a0 I got to make my bed, and pulled my precious stereo components together from the green trunk and the boxes in the car, but I don\u2019t think I had time to wire them. The six of us went out to dinner at the other Bookbinder\u2019s.\u00a0 And then, gloriously, I slipped away\u2026<\/p>\n

Trial by Trolley<\/h3>\n

I was always the navigator, as I\u2019ve said, and I could have walked it, and I\u2019m sure for that matter my parents would have staked me to a cab.\u00a0 But I really wanted to do it the way a Philadelphian would, by the underground trolley.\u00a0 Somehow I\u2019d rese\"\"<\/a>arched it, and worked out that there were four lines that ran through a station a block from the hotel, and would deposit me right on campus outside the dorms.\u00a0 (Just avoid the Number 10, I was warned.)\u00a0 So, as soon as I\u2019d made my leave, I went down into the portal of the 19th<\/sup> Street Station.<\/p>\n

I was excited and nervous.\u00a0 I remember being struck by what I would come to recognize as the peculiar smell<\/em> of that tube, something reminiscent of steam and heated electrical copper.\u00a0 There were four tracks, but only two were accessible from the platforms in this station; I saw bigger, faster trains traverse those tracks, and for some reason that made me nervous whether I was truly on the right line.\u00a0 Eventually one of the correct trolleys came by, a shiny green thing, but needless to say, I was still nervous.<\/p>\n

I was puzzled, too, when the trolley came to a switch in the tunnel, stopped, and waited for the track alignment to reset.\u00a0 Again, I was concerned that somehow I might have things wrong, and that this new alignment would take me out to whatever place I shouldn\u2019t go.\u00a0 (You can know facts like the fact that you\u2019re not on the Number 10, and then somehow still worry, especially when you\u2019re just 18 and in the big city on your own for the first time.)\u00a0 So at the first stop after the switch, I bolted.\u00a0 I figured if I were not too far out, I could either go back, or work my way over to the campus and the dorm, whereas if I waited for the next stop, somehow it might turn out not to be 37th<\/sup> Street, but somewhere else entirely, and I might find I was further out in the wrong direction.[<\/a>7]<\/p>\n

So out I got at the Sansom Street stop.\u00a0 If you go by there today, you\u2019ll find it\u2019s part of the gleaming, transformed Penn of the 21st<\/sup> Century, in a smart, retail-heavy neighborhood.\u00a0 When I alit at the same stop on the evening of Saturday, September 2, 1967, the street was dark, empty, and a little bit sinister.\u00a0 But I felt reassured somehow that I was in about the right place, and struck out in what I figured had to be the right direction.\u00a0 I was correct on all assumptions.\u00a0 My dorm room turned out to be only about three blocks off.\u00a0 I got inside without trouble.<\/p>\n

Lares and Penates<\/h3>\n

So I settled in, all by myself.\u00a0 And that\u2019s when I hooked up my lares and penates<\/em><\/a>, the stereo components, and sat in the semidarkness.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know just what it was that made me pull out the album pictured above, with the too-long title, for the very first thing I would play, but I\u2019m quite clear that that was the music.\u00a0 I\u2019d been turned on to the album by Bob, a high-school classmate, who like me used to sit in the small audio-visual section and play music through headphones.\u00a0 I loved Brubeck\u2019s crunchy piano chords, the searching, piercing sax of Paul Desmond, and Joe Morello and Gene Wright\u2019s elegant drums and bass.\u00a0 But most of all, I loved to hear them set against an orchestra.<\/p>\n

The work I was listening to was a four-movement concert piece composed by Brubeck\u2019s brother Howard, which gave the orchestra set things to do and periodically opened up windows for the quartet to jam in.\u00a0 All of the movements were wonderful, but there\u2019s no doubt that that night it was the third movement, the Adagio, that mattered.\u00a0 I was lonely and a little frightened, and I embraced those feelings.\u00a0 And that Adagio, described at the head of this piece, nailed that feeling.<\/p>\n

My roommate was coming the next day, I knew.\u00a0 But for that one night, I could revel in my aloneness, in a strange place, after a challenging first encounter with public transport, and a great adventure before me.<\/p>\n

That would be a nice note on which to end this piece, but in truth there\u2019s a little more to tell.<\/p>\n

The next day, typically of my upbringing, started with my finding my mom at the Cathedral for mass.\u00a0 Afterwards I had to play tourist courtesy of my mom\u2019s old friend, who had been a lawyer in Philadelphia for some years before decamping for Washington (she\u2019ll come into these stories again), and we toured, for instance the Main Line.\u00a0 But I cut out when I could, got back and met and spent the night with my new roommate, with whom I hit it off pretty well (a friend to this very day).\u00a0 So that was exciting.<\/p>\n

That Guillotine Moment<\/h3>\n

The following day, though, was the one I\u2019d really been anticipating and dreading.\u00a0 I wrote earlier about how high school graduations mark the moment when the pulling apart of the ties between parents and children, so necessary and so scary, begins in earnest.\u00a0 However, for sheer guillotine-like intensity and definitiveness of severance, nothing in our society, short of divorces and funerals, begins to compare to the moment when parents leave kids off at college for the first time.\u00a0 I have now been through both sides of the experience, and I know.\u00a0 Talk about necessary; talk about wrenching!<\/p>\n

I rejoined my family for breakfast, and then everyone but my parents got going on their respective modes of transport out of town.\u00a0 It was down to my parents and me.\u00a0 My parents checked out of the hotel, and drove me over to the campus.\u00a0 The new roomie, his parents, my parents and I all went to the Dean\u2019s reception.\u00a0 Then came the moment of goodbye.\u00a0 I had this terrible hollow feeling.\u00a0 I don\u2019t remember the hugs and what was said, but I do remember, after my parents had left, being unable to talk to anyone.\u00a0 I just needed to get out.<\/p>\n

The campus block that includes what were then known as the Men\u2019s Dorms, a sprawling polyhedron of connected quads, was quite large, encompassing also the University Hospital and the Arboretum, perhaps a mile around.\u00a0 I went out walking, head down, crying softly.\u00a0 Suddenly, someone honked at me.\u00a0 I looked up, and there were my folks, one more time.\u00a0 \u201cHey,\u201d my stepdad yelled, \u201ccan you tell us the way to Penn?\u201d and then they sped off.<\/p>\n

I burst into tears.\u00a0 I may have misted up and sobbed to myself before; now I was bawling.\u00a0 My childhood, at this very moment, was completely gone, all used up.\u00a0 A door had slammed behind me.<\/p>\n

And After<\/h3>\n

I finished the long walk around the block, pulling myself together as I went.\u00a0 I made it back to my room, and sat down and wrote Stefan and Walter, my two closest friends, that I had \u201ca king-sized case of the blues.\u201d\u00a0 There was no one to tell me what to do anymore, I confided, and part of me wanted that back.<\/p>\n

Still, I promptly went out and began my campus life.\u00a0 They had something called Tradition Night that night.\u00a0 I described it to my parents as \u201can orgy of chauvinism backed by the Glee Club.\u201d\u00a0 I also wrote: \u201cOne of the funniest things that happened last night was when this doddering old alumnus, representing the big alumni organization, stepped up to the microphone and said, \u2018Welcome aboard.\u2019\u00a0 My first response \u2026 was \u2018Who in the hell is he?\u2019\u00a0 It was obvious that anybody of his mental caliber couldn\u2019t possibly make it into Penn today.\u201d<\/p>\n

I nearly choke when I read these words nearly half a century on.\u00a0 The misplaced negative is the least of it.\u00a0 I probably am now no younger than that \u201cdoddering old alumnus,\u201d and odds are I couldn\u2019t make it past a 21st<\/sup>-Century admissions committee myself. \u00a0\u00a0Still, I take that letter as overall a good thing.\u00a0 Surely the return of the insufferable arrogance of youth meant that some kind of equilibrium was being restored.<\/p>\n

I was launched, thanks to a million and one things, including that unfairly-maligned alumnus, a small victory over the green underground trolley cars, and Brubeck\u2019s Dialogues<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n

[1] I\u2019m the product of a Harvard-Radcliffe union, and my stepdad was a Hopkins product.\u00a0 I think my mom and dad couldn\u2019t image me not at Harvard, but to the extent they entertained the notion, they pictured the other schools as being more or less like Harvard.\u00a0 I\u2019m not clear on what my stepdad was thinking.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[2]<\/a> I shudder now to think how near.\u00a0 I nearly didn\u2019t get into Penn because the application process required me to have a Social Security Number, which I didn\u2019t have, and I delayed until the last minute acquiring one.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[3] Though it sounds peculiar today to say it, I did have one ace in the hole if all had gone wrong, the University of Michigan, which I was certain would accept me if I applied.\u00a0 But I was holding off applying.\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[4] Invoking the name of this company, which went out of business in 1975, dates me as much as anything in this blog.\u00a0 But they were a great thing; unlike the air express to which I turned thereafter, they would pick up the trunk at home and deliver it at the other end.\u00a0 This ad brags about it.\u00a0 Source: http:\/\/www.american-rails.com\/railway-express-agency.html<\/a> .\u00a0 (With air express, I was in charge of pickup and dropoff.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[5]<\/a> There were two seafood-oriented restaurants of that name in Philadelphia<\/a> in those days, relating to different offshoots of the same family.\u00a0 I understand that only one survives.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[6] If this reference escapes you, see Page 29 of the original American edition (1945).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[7] I had not too long before had an unsettling experience trying to take the New York subway from lower Manhattan to my father\u2019s appointment, and getting off at 116th<\/sup> Street \u2013 only to \u00a0find that it was not 116th<\/sup> Street and Broadway on Morningside Heights, where I meant to go, but 116th<\/sup> Street far to the east, in Harlem.\u00a0 For a white boy from the Midwest in that era, it was not the desired result.\u00a0 It may have given me a sense that subway tunnels were not to be trusted always to lead to the same points.<\/p>\n

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn<\/p>\n

Theme Songs Page<\/a> | Previous Theme Song<\/a> | Next Theme Song<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

However, for sheer guillotine-like intensity and definitiveness of severance, nothing in our society, short of divorces and funerals, begins to compare to the moment when parents leave kids off at college for the first time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,968],"tags":[2628,2411,2609,2614,2582,2625,22,2623,2591,2608,2605,2629,2602,2596,2606,2589,2380,2585,20,2590,2581,2607,2593,2586,2588,2618,2597,2624,2630,2626,2592,2583,2617,2603,2615,1107,2620,2594,2621,1718,2113,2584,2613,2616,2600,2465,2619,2060,2627,2595,2611,2612,2587,2599,2604,2610,2601,2622,2357,2464,2598],"class_list":["post-2213","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-closeup","category-theme-songs","tag-116th-street","tag-2411","tag-19th-street-station","tag-37th-street","tag-adagio-ballad","tag-alumni","tag-ann-arbor","tag-arboretum","tag-bay-city","tag-bookbinders-old-original-bookbinders","tag-brideshead-revisited","tag-broadway","tag-center-city","tag-chambersburg","tag-charles-ryder","tag-cheetah-club","tag-dave-brubeck","tag-dave-brubeck-quartet","tag-detroit","tag-detroit-riots","tag-dialogues-for-jazz-combo-and-orchestra","tag-evelyn-waugh","tag-fiegels","tag-french-horn","tag-freshman-year","tag-gene-wright","tag-gettysburg","tag-glee-club","tag-harlem","tag-harvard-university","tag-houston-hall","tag-howard-brubeck","tag-joe-morello","tag-john-f-kennedy-boulevard","tag-lares-and-penates","tag-leonard-bernstein","tag-main-line","tag-main-street","tag-mens-dorms","tag-morningside-heights","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-philharmonic-orchestra","tag-number-10-trolley","tag-paul-desmond","tag-pennsylvania-turnpike","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-cathedral","tag-piano","tag-radcliffe-college","tag-railway-express-agency","tag-sansom-street","tag-sansom-street-station","tag-saxophone","tag-schuylkill-expressway","tag-sebastian-flyte","tag-septa","tag-sheraton","tag-university-hospital","tag-university-of-michigan","tag-university-of-pennsylvania","tag-valley-forge"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2213","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2213"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2213\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5492,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2213\/revisions\/5492"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}