It is surely a tell tale sign of growing up when the things from your childhood that used to make you feel stiflingly claustrophobic, resurface in a new incarnation. For me, that thing is jazz radio.
My mother loathes silence, with such a passion that she sleeps with music on. I can say, without remote hesitation, that for the duration of my childhood, her clock radio was perpetually playing, 100 percent of the time. In the mornings I woke to Phil Shap and the bird flight, his nine o'clock slot reminding of my lateness for school. In the evenings it was Dizzie Gillespie with the soft drone of a Columbia student's voice reciting the circumstances of the band's recording, or an opera station. As I got older, my mother branched out from WKCR, the student run jazz FM, settling unfortunately on a Chinese pop, opera and techno station. Whatever the genre, the music was always there, and by the age of twelve her cultural explorations had come too late - the sound of jazz made me shudder, it gave me inexplicable hot flashes of anger, and I usually rushed from the room when it was played.
Fancy it then, that at 23, in the midst of a creative stall, I'd get a phone call from an older artist, his words slurred from a morning binge and bout of inspiration, telling me to turn on WBGO, Newark Public Radio...a jazz station. In his cluttered rat's nest of a West Village apartment, a radio perpetually blares from it's perch on the back of his dingy toilet. It is an audial canvas backdrop, a blanket of calculated and indiscriminate noise that exists as rhythmic score to his manic movie of a life.
