Today’s pick was born of a photograph disguised as a memory.
I myself was born in Okinawa, Japan, as my father, an Air Force Captain, was stationed there during the Vietnam War. My mother, all of six months pregnant and big as a house with my sister and me, flew over so that she could be with Dad for our birth. We stayed there for another two years before Pop resigned his commission and we came back to The States to be closer to family.
The photograph in question shows my dad, a lithe, athletic man of 30, balancing me in one hand, with the beautiful Pacific Ocean in the background. This was taken somewhere around my 1st birthday, so I have no actual memory of the event, but the concept of it is very comforting.
Dad and I did not see eye-to-eye on many things (such can be the nature of fathers and sons…), but we always connected through music. Both he and my mother were classically trained singers, and our house was always alive with sound, either coming through the stereo, from one or both of my parents or, eventually, all four of us. As we began to do public performances, my father would jokingly refer to us as “The Trapp Family Hudgins” (younger folks can google “The Sound Of Music” about this).
As I got older and my music tastes broke past even the far-flung levees of my dad’s, we’d still have shared moments around sound. Sure, there would be times when one of my selections would get too weird for him (he definitely drew a line at Skinny Puppy…) and so we’d “change the station”, but more often than not he’d give a quizzical look, sit and listen for a minute, and then say, “Yeah. I get this.”
I certainly miss those times, sitting in his backyard garden in St Augustine with music flowing out from the back door and into the dark, but there are enough collective sounds we shared that those memories shall always be at my fingertips. So with something for my dad, which whilst he never heard, he would totally “get”, here's some more (US) morning mellow.
#MorningMellow
Jaze Baqti - The Four Strings
millenniumjazz.bandcamp.com/track/the-fo...
Full story in the alt text. #NMM #Day831 #hednod #jazzloops #fluteflights #light #airy #nostalgia #FathersAndSons
