Columbia Records, 1959
The grey sky and the pork pie hat.
I drive home with a new, old hat in the narrow back seat. An inheritance. What must my grandfather have thought of this hat in his couch-wide Cadillac, cruising home from the airport after ordering it from the New york haberdasher on a business trip. Or, more likely, what must he have thought of my grandmother ordering it for him after purchasing herself a designer gown so nineteen-seventies that today it could pass only, maybe, on Halloween. Ordering it as an afterthought, him far away somewhere home-like with one of his girlfriends; she on a trip with her ladies to see the shows on Broadway. Every year passed this way for them. This hat seldom worn.
My mom tells me my grandfather was secretly musical. A trumpet player. Did he ever solo over soul claps and the sound of men talking and hold his own against the silence of rhythm itself?
He gave it up for money. Son of a dustbowl sharecropper makes good, gets sent to med school by the army, is shuffled around like a drum’s undertones until he lands in the fertile conquerable airs of southern California. There, there is a dream that has nothing to do with trumpets or struggle and he snatches it. He doesn’t seem to regret it by the time I come around.
The dream was false. The backbeat scarred with the blood of the underclasses and the deception of the middle ones. It doesn’t exist now, and didn’t even exist when my grandfather and grandmother stood poolside holding cigarettes and cocktails in rich hues of oranges and yellows that embossed the southern sun permanently onto a photograph of them, dusty now in the shadowed den. America was never my white landowning waitress’-ass-pinching grandfather’s either, even if he thought it was. So whose was it?
Maybe these guys. In play. In the twist of “Pork Pie Hat,” which is that the song is a steady low flow tricking you into thinking it’s easygoing, the calm swoop of horns over Mingus’ lead edge, the downtempo pause in what is otherwise a fairly bop lineup of songs. It’s not. It’s never easy.
Better, then, to not be false, to stick with a trio, slam sounds out of metal objects, catch on the wind the next through-line and see if you can just, maybe, for a few bars, win it over to be your at last.
This is the moment you wonder if what you picked was right, because you thought the whole album was like this famous song but the whole album is really fast, sort of upbeat, swinging as they say, and is that the right pensive tone for a grey beginning of yet another day doing what you have to do? Is that the right way to remember the histories of us, to sit wrapped in blankets sewn by other mothers and beneath your naked head slowly fizzle your way back into daily awakening?
It’s all the same underneath: these low-picked raindrops of bass, the glue, the accelerator and the decline of everything we see on the surface.
