disappearing post

I thought I had written one a couple of weeks ago. I was having a reaction to writing a book and movie review last time around. Opinions are fun and I like my own, but reviews were not the reason why I started on this blog. I'm still not completely sure why I'm doing this, true, but reviewing stuff was not really the point, unless the book or movie or whatever snagged into something else, some broader association.

Well, that's what I thought anyhow.

I'm listening to Gary Burton and his band from the mid-nineties playing "Poinciana". This song must have been all over the place in the fifties, the way that Coltrane songs were in the seventies, the way that everybody and her sister has recorded "Yesterday" or "Louie, Louie" or tried anyhow. It's a cool jazz sort of thing and for some reason it puts me in the apartment I grew up in without missing a beat.

It's strange how evocative this single song is. It's not like songs that I've got some concrete memory associated with - like Joe Cocker's Mad Dogs and Englishmen album, that I mainly remember for going to buy it the very day it came out. I was still living at 364 Orange Road in Montclair then. It was the summer of 1970. I'd quit Howard and I'm fairly sure I didn't have a job. I also didn't have a car, so I bicycled up to E.J. Korvettes to buy the double record. I got the record, put it in my bicycle basket, nearly wiped out on the steep hills between the mall and our apartment, then danced to the whole record all that hot afternoon.

"Poinciana" is not like that at all. The chilly vibraphone melody's just like a time machine, not one of the ones that you can crawl into, go into the past to fuck things up immensely, and take pages (or hours) to fix (or not). It opens up a space of sensibility, a porthole of feeling. It feels as though I discovered something about music the first time I heard it and it's that discovery that echoes when I hear it again.

A little Googling shows that "Poinciana" has been covered twenty-four times and I'm willing to bet that the version I heard as a kid was the Dave Brubeck one. It was a hit for Bing Crosby of all people. Oh well.