This is an odd one. I am not a jazz fan at all. It too often sounds noodly and pretentious. Aside from a little Mingus here, a little Miles there, I just never got into it.
Last Saturday, we ventured to the Northeast Heights in search of a burger. We settled on a place that we had known as a burger joint in Nob Hill and of all nights the venue featured a jazz band from the University of New Mexico, showcasing some graduates of the neighborhood high school. The place doesn't serve burgers anymore, so I didn't get a burger and had to sit through jazz. But the non-burgers were tasty, the kids were pretty good, and they played a fine version of "Blue Moon," the sentimental favorite, so it wasn't a bust.
I did try, back during my formative years, to explore my feelings toward another style of music besides the pop and rock I grew up with. I had a lot of alone time during high school, so I had a chance to explore a bit. That's how I discovered Willie Nelson and the various forms of country -- such as outlaw and Hank Williams -- and why I'm a fan to this day.
When it came to jazz, my attempt featured the group Weather Report, circa 1980. This was back in the olden days when WXRT in Chicago (now owned by a conglomerate) was more experimental when crafting its playlist and would still throw in a jazz piece here and there. One of those was "Birdland" by Weather Report, featuring Wayne Shorter (below, right) on soprano and tenor saxophones. The first time I heard the boppy little number I was hooked.
It was around the same time that the lite-jazz vocal group Manhattan Transfer was getting Grammy notice, and they scored airplay with a lyric-version of "Birdland," originally an instrumental written in 1977 by Joe Zawinul (below, left), the keyboardist in Weather Report. So it wasn't an obscure song at the time.
I splurged on a vinyl copy of Weather Report's "8:30," a double album recorded in Santa Monica and released in August 1979. I'm certain that it was junior year (perhaps the loneliest of the four high school years) that I dove into that album. I swooned to "Birdland," over and over, of course, but I scratched my head at most of the rest, including a skronky deconstruction of Bob Hope's theme song "Thanks for the Memory." Something about the combination of experimental jazz and old man Hope just gave me the willies.
But I never got over the swingin' suavity of "Birdland." I can hear the jazz purists scoff. It's cutesy and repetitive. The New York Times obit doesn't mention it. My clinging to it is probably the equivalent of someone claiming to be a rock 'n' roll fan by citing Chuck Berry and "My Ding-a-Ling." That's OK.
I never followed Weather Report much, and there are probably no more than 10 CDs in my "jazz collection." (I've taken multiple runs at Coltrane and failed every time.) But I always perked up when I ran across the names of Zawinul and Shorter. Wayne Shorter died this week at age 89. When I think of him, I think of those seven minutes of "Birdland." It's still impossible for me not to whistle along -- and to think of the jazz aficionado I could have been.
BONUS TRACK
One more knife-stick to the gut of the jazz world, and a whole nother separate essay about the indelible memory I have of discovering this album in my best friend's basement freshman year -- Shorter did the tenor-sax solo for Steely Dan's "Aja":
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