When I was 8, my father introduced me to a man named “Dizzy,” which I thought was a funny name for an adult. Fourteen years later, I knew who jazz trumpeter John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie was, and when I was strolling through downtown Pittsburgh with my new bride, we came upon Gillespie’s band, playing in the square. We were on our “None-y Moon” (we could not afford a honeymoon, so we went to an out-of-town motel) and had come back into the city. I never knew who had sponsored the surprise, but I remembered that moment six years later, when the bandleader of the Paradise Island, Bahamas club that my bride and I had bribed our way into, called Dizzy from behind the curtain. Through circumstance and happenstance, I run into music.
The O’Jays, an R & B group, sang in 1975, “I Love Music,” and I do too. “Any kind of music…” My uncle was a jazz musician, my father managed the band and my mother told me that she used to travel with the band. Jazz was my first love, but my tastes have grown over the years to include almost every sound struck, plucked, sawed and sung. In the early 90s, I was living in St. Louis, Missouri, and while walking through Forest Park, I heard music. I stopped to listen to the band whose performance in the park was a surprise to me. That fall, when my young son and daughter were visiting me from Indiana, I took them to the Sheldon Concert Hall to see Farshid Etniko, a band led by Farshid Soltanshahi, an Iranian-born guitarist who makes the instrument sound as if three people are playing at once. My son spent a fascinated hour with me, listening to the musician I had wandered across.
In the subway stations of New York City it is possible to run into musicians of astonishing skillfulness “busking” for gratuities from the passing riders, and on my trips there as an art director for L.S. Ayres’ advertising department, I acted the role of stunned tourist, and filled hats with less than I received. About a year ago, the creative director of this publication took me to an 81-year-old Indianapolis bar to hear her friend “play music,” an event that captivated me, and to which I have returned every Tuesday that I am in town, my “benign presence” a silent appreciation for the art and craft of making music.
In late January of this year, I attended an event in my “hood” called “Sweet Thursdays,” at the Coal Yard Coffee House in Irvington. I was surprised to find Nick Tucker, Jay Tibbets and Charlie Ballantine, three young men playing songs from my jazz-infused youth. I forthwith pledged fealty to Charlie Ballantine after he hammered out Thelonius Monk’s classic, “Straight, No Chaser.” I’ve seen Charlie three times since then, including a “run in” at the Stutz Open House on April 29th.
How fitting, then, that I would bump into music in the basement of The Harrison on First Friday. I stopped to listen to a young lady sing, as she played her guitar. “Who are you,” I asked of the singer and she said, “Sarah Grain & the Billions of Stars.” I asked the man on bass guitar, Nate Gray, if he was one of “the billions;” he chuckled, but allowed that he was, as was Doug Souter, the man on the mandolin. I had once again, come upon music, and now must find The Chatterbox on the fourth Tuesday of each month, to listen to the music of those “stars.”