Monday, February 14, 2011

Shearing

My friend, I'll call her Shelley, and I were sophisticated jazz fans at 14 because of our fathers. My father had been a Big Band man, Basie and Glenn Miller and the two guys whose names I'll remember in 20 minutes who arranged for Miller before breaking out on their own. I wish I had those records now.
Her father was a jazz DJ at a local Milwaukee station.
We decided we would attend the George Shearing concert when he came to town, get dressed up and take the bus down and back all by ourselves. And we did.
We wore identical pleated white polyester skirts, which were in style at the time. Every girl in our school had one.
Shelley was a cool girl and fat like me, so we had that. And jazz. But for some reason, we did not become close. Maybe it was the year I moved to Omaha and it was cut short. In which case, I was 15.
(Sauter-Finnegan, their names were Sauter and Finnegan and their band was the Sauter-Finnegan band.)
Shearing was great. You could hear him, blind, kind of humming while he played.
I listened to the record we had of him all the time.

No comments:

Post a Comment