The photo above shows a dinner conversation she was having with two close friends, near the end of her life. I got the idea when she had come home from Arizona after a leg operation that had her walking on 'Canadian Crutches', a type of crutch which swivels to accommodate a severely bent leg. I thought "the way she is walking now is the way she thinks:" and at the same time I had never improvised a piece in the Ornette Coleman style. So I thought, let's portray Mom's thinking by playing a solo piano piece with the left hand doing a constant 4/4 walking bass, while my right hand is totally free rhythmically and harmonically, meantime the melody will follow how I imagined my mother's mind working on a theme. I think this is one of the two really good pieces I composed in my New York stay.
My mother had a mind which never stopped running: she loved long intellectual dialogues with close friends. She liked to hold dinner parties with my parents' friends – most from the colleges where they worked, from Dad's artistic career, and from the pre-Word War II days of their marriage. I was fascinated by their conversations, so different from the way my friends and their families talked. My mother was a brilliant conversationalist and this piece is an attempt to recreate in music the way my mother's mind worked. She was at heart a poet, an intellectual, with a bit of a bohemian, and not really made to be a suburban mom. Her biggest flaw, which I think ultimately killed her, was her ingrained rejection of anything Jewish - she was raised to think of herself as an upper-class Anglo-German, not as a Jew: her whole family suffered from this. It was the worst case of Jewish self-hatred I ever saw.
However, if lacking on the maternal warmth side, she was a wonderful tutor, leading me through Mozart and Dickens, Wozzeck and James Joyce, and many others, She also saved my left arm from the permanent paralysis often caused by polio by exercising it and bathing it every day for a year. After another year of wearing my left arm in a brace, I was able to move it enough so that I was able to play the piano. And it gradually came back to almost full strength. Syndrome peaking in power around 1980 (check out my Left Hand bass on Morocco) and then post-polito comingback accompanied by Parkinson’s, so that when I was was 75 in 2020, my Left arm was almost completely dysfunctional and I had to stop performing.
Mom also continued to influence my music - by playing operas and other classical music on radio and her record collection; by encouraging my improvisations; and sometimes dancing when I played waltzes and improvisation in three-four time.
However, Mom hated American pop and jazz, and when my first beloved teacher called her excitedly that I had so much talent I could be another Liberace, the fired him immediately and replaced him with a Ukrainian strictly Classical teacher, Sonia G., who despised all American pop, folk and jazz. When I wanted to learn harmonica for summer camp, she forbade it and instead wanted me to learn recorder! I finally fired her so I could, if only self-taught, get back into the blues and jazz that I loved Still, I now realize that it was Sonny who gave me the finger strength and agility that made that German reviewer of my free jazz recording Space Swell praise me as “ein grossartiger Techniker(‘’magnificent technique/technician”’).
When I left Sonia, she had me playing Chopin Preludes and some sonatas from the big Sonatina-Sonata book – ‘the big yellow book”. By a strange coincidence, many years later, the Car Chase #2 family (see “Car Chase Stories 2”in Prelude), came back to visit me this year in my Parkinsonian half-life, and each of the two girls played one of the last classical pieces I had learned with Sonia many years ago. Probably quite a bit better than I had done. Still, a marvelous coincidence (did Mom arrange it from heaven? My son Jason the Judeo-Christian philosopher tells me that religious people don’t Believe in coincidence).
Anyway, here are those se Dunne girls recapitulating my past
while old Daddy Parkinson Beard sways around on his couch or crutch
(thunder courtesy of Luzon rainy season)
Philomena Solo = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtViN1RTWK0
Anne solo= https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BR5hqv4JM1w
My mother and father truly loved each other, and this life grew greater with each passing year. The decision to buy the French cottage, to move to Manhattan when Mom wanted to see their friends outside of the Westbury suburb, everything, in fact, Dad did was for her. This picture says it all.
 |
| Phot of mom and dad sitting on hillside in France |
Comments
Post a Comment