In general we do not have as many pictures of our parents as we have of our children. I have of course no basis for saying this, it is just an inference from the pictures I have from my son and those I have from my father. I can fill photobook after photobook with my boy's pictures, from my father I have a good handful left. And my preferred are the ones I took myself, later in his life.
Pictures are poor conveyors of memory, anyway. Recollections work in subtler ways than that. The ones I have from my father come more vivid when his music is up. His musical signature is recognizable, even by people that did not know him for long.
For one thing, he did not go for a wide selection. I cannot go further than a handful of names: Dave Brubeck, Stéphane Grapelli with Oscar Peterson, Stan Getz, Sinatra. And from Sinatra, a narrow selection, the albums with the Count Basie Orchestra, the one with Tom Jobim. From time to time he would take in some Armstrong and Glenn Miller.
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Once in a business trip I met this guy named Joe. Joe has a broad smile, weighs twice as me, goes to the church every sunday morning, sings in the choir. He lives somewhere in Georgia, and he told me family stories about the civil rights movement from back then. We lost contact soon after finishing business together. Like many other people I met, I would have kept only some vague sympathetic recollections if we haven't sit down one day and chatted about music.
We discussed about Wilson Pickett and Otis Redding. About legendary shows in the Apollo theater in the sixties. About my visit to Graceland and more important to the Sun studios. And Booker T. and the M.G.s, the Drifters, and about the old legends of blues, and Sonny Terry. He was for Motown, I was an Atlantic-Impulse guy. I was immensely happy to find someone that had lived in that culture and knew it from within, he was impressed that this skinny white guy from Brazil could sustain any conversation on the topic.
I worked voluntarily five years on the university radio as a volunteer, and most of what I discussed with him I had put on air. I actually discovered the stuff through some Rhythm and Blues anthologies from the Atlantic label. And what pointed me to that was a box called "Atlantic Blues". I took those vinyls from my father's collection, he never actually claimed them back. And they are pretty good stuff. I never knew how or from whom he got them. I don't remember ever seeing him listening to them. But I can track my whole musical taste back to that specific box.
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After I left university and got some assurance on my musical tastes, I tended to find my father's selectionrather stiff. How come there was no Coltrane, no Clifford Brown on his shelfs? From the height of my twenties I tried to correct that through birthday gifts. A "Kind of Blue" here, Wynton Marsalis there. Very few made their way to his list, like a CD from Ellis Marsalis. Most where politely piled up together with other occasional music he would hear but not carry along from year to another.
It is a mystery to me how arrived to love such music. On movies, his taste was more for the frankly popular. West Coast and Continental jazz were way too cerebral for him. Picking Count Basie from the Sinatra discography is also a highly distinct choice. Regardless of how he got to them, he stuck with them for many many years.
When I put his music and nostalgia for him fills the place I end up finding one or another of this paradoxes. On these occasions two feelings invade me, being puzzled by so many small ambiguities, and the humility to accept the he had damn good taste for music.
