By Joseph Milosch
In late summer when the rain came from the North, Joseph
would pull out his ballroom record player, pour a couple of high balls and dance in the screened in porch with his wife, whose legs flickered below her skirt’s hem.
They would sit on their porch and watch the aurora borealis over the distant islands of Tan Lake. The rainbow ribbon shimmered, a curtain of Christmas tinsel. Then as if the rain signaled that all was good, they’d kiss, and his wife would twist her braids, pinning them in a pretzel shaped bun, a sign it was time to fix a quick dinner of dogs and potato salad. Sitting their children at the kitchen table, they’d eat, listening to music on the porch.
The son could have accepted his father’s most generous invitations to listen to Joseph’s music and stories. Before the boy turned thirteen, he would have sat at his mother’s feet as Joseph talked and placed his records gingerly on the turn table.
As the aurora borealis bent light into hues of color, Joseph would play three outtakes from an Armstrong recording session: Scratch — pop — scratch — pop. How Louie played. “Listen, he’d say, “Here it comes! Here it is!
In the time of the aurora borealis, Joseph became a guide. “A man puts mustard only on his dogs. The best dogs are burnt on one side. To be considered a musician you have to be as good as Krupa, Nichols, Wilson, and Armstrong.”
After his son turned thirteen, the late summer storms were different. Joseph would talk more to the screens than to his son. The son didn’t know what the mother knew Joseph’s heart was melting and thinning his blood like whiskey does ice. She knew, but she couldn’t speak about it. Pretending to watch the sky, she listened to him.
“One night I worked in the studio with Louie. He told me practice your solo over and over note for note. Then on the bandstand, if you’re lucky, a new idea will come to you.” Sipping his drink, he’d look out the screens as the lake breathed the last of summer, and the sky opened to lights from a place as distance as Detroit in 1936.
Joseph’s wife wished her son wasn’t so hard headed. She wished he’d come in from the kitchen and join them on the porch where the music danced like a distant ribbon of light. But he fancied himself as a rocker, he’d sing songs by Berry, Diddley, and Domino.
The son was forty before he realized what his mother was trying to tell him. It came while he stood in the bathroom line at a rock show. It came shortly before he realized what his father was trying to tell him: a musical idea is a pure thought; it is hearing what you think.
Joseph had told him, “To hear what you think happens to an average musician once in a while — happens to a good musician once a night. To a master it can happen anytime he picks up his instrument. With Louie it’d happened when he was whistling, playing to loosen his lip or because he wanted to hear his horn.
In late summer as the son watched his parents dance, it was impossible for him to think one day a retired mechanic who had forgotten his youth, his horn, his albums would walk out to the car port, start his car not for a drive but to listen to the music of a well oiled machine.