Scat Nostalgia…

Yesterday was Dad and Sofia day and we had a fine day. Early on the bug put on her latest accessory and wore them all day… even to the Red Pooper. They must have been a hit because I noticed many envious stares, of course Sofia was oblivious to them and I think she forgot that she had put them on…

It got me thinking about when I was in the ceramics program at Murray State University studying under one of my favorite people, Fred Shepard. Anyway, there was a student… a young girl from Ecuador whose dad was a famous painter in Quito and he had managed to trade painting(s) for her tuition into the art program. She was beautiful and I was smitten and to make a long story short I started going out with her. In addition to being beautiful she was extremely superstitious in a manner that I have become more aware of over the years but at the time I chalked it up to a combination of me thinking that she was putting me on and the language barrier… plus did I mention that she was beautiful? So I went to central NY state for xmas vacation and she wouldn’t come although I pleaded with her to make the trip. At home I found a pair of glasses that had no lenses (because my dad was blind in one eye and used to collect sunglasses from people, including my mother, that had the lens for his blind eye popped out – his version of recycling I suppose) and we were taking pictures and we took one of me with my Mom and Dad and me wearing these women’s sunglasses with no lenses. I wrote my Ecuadorian girlfriend a letter because the break was quite long and I thought she needed cheering up and told her that while I was home I had my eyes checked and found that I needed glasses and that I had picked out some frames and hoped she liked them… and enclosed the picture. To skip to the end, she didn’t get the joke and took the picture to a mutual friend and told him that she couldn’t be seen with me anymore because the glasses looked bad and no matter how much he tried to convince her that it was a joke, she wouldn’t have any of it. When I got back, we were broken up and it was not up for discussion. While thinking about Murray and at the risk of making certain my age, I remembered at the time (1980 or so) the big thing was “boom boxes” (portable cassette tape players) and although I had hundreds of LP’s, the idea of being able to carry my stereo around (and more specifically, to the clay studio) was too much so I took part of my student loan money and got a portable cassette player. The problem was that I had no money and I also had no music on cassettes. I managed to get someone in the dormitories to record two tapes for me and I’m not exaggerating when I say that I played these two 90 minute tapes constantly for years, hundreds of times. At the time I had become entranced with scatting and because of this my 2 double LP albums that I chose to record were “Ella and Duke Live at the Cote d’ Azur” and “Look To The Rainbow” by Al Jarreau. Sofia and I went on YouTube to see if I could find her some scatting and found this…

I forgot how much I love this album as I don’t have it on CD. In retrospect, I believe that my eventual love affair with jazz was probably largely due to my poverty at the time and having “only” Duke, Ella and Al to listen to while I was working. Here’s another bowl that’s on the AKAR site

Tags: ceramics, clay, porcelain, pottery