: lower black pain
: lower black pain.
Like a record, baby.
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Like a record, baby.

Two pieces of one piece of music.
6

I think I’m getting old. Er. Well, we’re always getting older, but my inner self is starting to feel more vintage than classic, reflected most strongly when either bending down to pick up something or when trying to keep all the musicians with the word Baby in their names straight (the Grammys were really confusing, although I do know all the names of every member of BTS).

I guess I don’t really look vintage. The most you could say is that my mirror currently displays what I’m gonna call a 'subtle weariness’, which is a pretty fair reflection of my current inner state. I think that’s lucky because as we get older, inner and outer realities are often at odds. Expectation battles reality, lofty goals evade real progress, confidence is bested by a sudden clear reflection in the automatic glass door at Whole Foods. While technology accelerates the world around us, inside our heads we accumulate more memories every day, anchoring us. This wearies me (subtlety). I think the best I could hope for is to turn out anything like my grandfather.

My mom was always Mom and Dad, but my grandpa (lawyer, County Commissioner, one of the first black District Court Judges in the nation (first in Kansas) represented Men to me.  Wise, patient, direct, straightforward. Kind, but unquestionably powerful. He passed when I was in college, but I did get one last opportunity to spend a day with him during spring break. He had spent the last few weeks in my mother’s old room (guess it was closer to the stairs);  he really wasn’t used to sitting down for so long, but he didn’t really have enough energy to get up. Mom told me he was a little bored.

So I basically brought him a circus. Tons of photographs from New Haven, comic books, a 4-track recorder with a microphone, an alto sax, textbooks from classes I was taking (with post-its marking passages I thought he’d like) and the coolest thing that I actually owned at the time –  a CD. He had never seen one before. They had only been around for a couple of years.

“…and this is music?” he asked me, afternoon sunlight reflecting those crazy rainbows all over the bedroom walls.

“Yep, as much as both sides of an album!” Cause, y’know, that was really impressive.

I popped it into my bright yellow SONY DiscMan (the “shock resistant”one) and handed him headphones. It was either the Beatles or ZZ Top because those were the only two I had.

He listened for a while, then opened the player and looked at the disc again and said, “Y’know, when I was young you couldn’t hold music. You could hear it, since almost everybody had a piano, and they played music, but you couldn’t take it with you. I remember when I heard my first radio it was like magic - I stood outside the neighbor’s window and just listened, but even that you couldn’t capture.”

He turned it over and over. There were more rainbows.

He said it was a while until he saw his first phonograph (of course, no one he know could afford one), but that he used to, as a young man, sneak out of his house at night and head over to Vine St. and listen to Count Basie play. Blew my mind, because my grandfather had given me my very first record, which was a 45 of Count Basie’s orchestra playing “April in Paris” (I begin all my live shows with it).

I knew he loved jazz, but we had never really talked about it. He had married a musician, my grandmother, who played piano and organ; but it was almost a decade later that I would accidentally discover her original concerto manuscript in the bottom drawer of the buffet in the living room underneath the formal linens, which I digitally scored and burned CD’s of for her 80th birthday party. He would have really loved that.

And now, here was me, by the bed, musician as I was, firing up the 4-track recorder and building a simple tune that was going to have a sax solo, but my reed was split so I just sang a sax-ish solo on top, making the entire thing sound like a love ballad from a space opera staged in Marrakech. But Grandpa listened very patiently, kindly, and at the end, he said “Hot dog!”, which was a very high level of family praise.

That piece of music is in the ballet I’m currently finishing. I composed most of it about 22 years ago, but in the ballet (and this is kind of a hard turn) it’s a scene with a father and a little girl, she’s standing on his feet, waltzing in the kitchen. Not at all connected to my grandfather or that day. Inside my head, it’s the soundtrack of a memory, outside it’s kind of a premonition, two authentic and equal identities. To me, there’s a harmony there.

Maybe this is true for all of us. We can hold our histories yet constantly evolve, like Pokemon, the energy in the gap between these realities sparking us to become not just one thing, but new things all the time.

Grandpa requested that I sing at his memorial service, a tune by Irving Berlin titled “The Song Is Over, But The Melody Lingers On”, a metaphor of life as music, impossible to hold. My grandfather created harmony, held a steady cadence, always learned something new, and steadily bypassed fears of whatever came next. That is the sort of man I would like to be.

Y’know, when I’m older.

1. Marrakech: © 1986
2. The World and Me - 3rd Movement - Love © 2001 / 2022
composed and performed by Jd Michaels
and inspired by Judge Cordell D. Meeks, Sr.

©2022 Jd Michaels / CabsEverywhere Productions

…thanks for your time.

©2022 Jd Michaels / CabsEverywhere Productions
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: lower black pain
: lower black pain.
Life’s lemons into rich, dark chocolate.
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