Jazz Improvisation on a Theme by Birds on a Wire

I am a part of the first television generation. We both became available to the general public at about the same time, and some of my earliest memories (age 3) involve watching TV. Back then, television only came in two networks, NBC and CBS, and had only two colors, black and white. When I was 7 years old, one of the more popular shows on television was "The Steve Allen Show." (It was very popular with me.) Steve Allen was a TV personality who, besides being witty and hilariously funny, was the original host of "The Tonight Show," the author of more than 50 books, and, more to the point, was also a very accomplished musician, jazz pianist and composer. The list of talented people that man brought to national attention (including a young comedian from Nebraska named Johnny Carson) is mind-blowing. Back in 1956, the year his show debuted, the whole nation, not just the South, was still very much segregated and most of white, mainstream America considered jazz "race music." But Allen was a TV pioneer in more ways than one. Not only did he perform jazz himself on his nationally televised show, but he also showcased many talented black jazz artists in a time when showing a "colored" person doing anything on TV was risky, let alone allowing black musicians to play their music. The jazz Allen played was the new, "cool jazz," that had been "pasteurized" and "intellectualized" by white musicians like Dave Bruebeck, Stan Getz, Bill Evans, Chet Baker and others, many of them formally trained, who were too cool for Big Band and too radical for the Doris Day set, having crossed over to the "dark side," after being seduced by the music of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk, Charlie "Bird" Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, et. al.

The madeleine that triggered the above spasm of "recherche du temps perdu" happened when I was outside watering the yard last night. I always water after dark during the hot months to minimize evaporation losses, and I time the sprinklers by the TV -- which was why I was in the back yard at 11 o'clock at night resetting a sprinkler to water the lavender end of the climbing rose flower bed, which is next to the back gate. I was also "kind of" watching a show on the Ovation channel about the photographer Sally Mann, that I was recording to DVR with plans to transfer it to DVD (sans commercials) later. Her photographs had gotten me in the "artsy photographsy" mode, so while I was adjusting the sprinkler, I was checking out various views of the yard with a "photographic eye" and so happened to look up at the night sky above me. Since I was right by the back gate, I was close enough to the alley that the power lines were directly above me, and there were several bright stars visible through the spaces between the individual wires.

Stay with me now. Here's the point where this whole piece comes together like an asterisk of intersecting lines of thought: I flashed on the visual image of the power lines and stars and thought: Power lines = lines of the musical staff; stars= notes on that staff, notes that could be interpreted as music and played, that could become a theme/motif for a piece of music. That's where Steve Allen comes in. That visual image was primed by a memory of one of the old Steve Allen shows where he did a "jazz improvisational thing" -- What stuck in my 7-year-old mind about that particular show segment was that Allen used "found melodies" from a series of photographs as the themes he would improvise on. The only one of the several photographs that I remember, and I remember it very clearly, was a picture of some birds roosting on the wires strung between two telephone poles. There happened to be five wires, which translated to the five lines of the treble clef, and the birds perched on them became the notes. He played the bird "notes" on the piano, and that became his theme. Then he took that theme and improvised on it. Brilliantly.

The idea of using stars as notes and telephone wires as the musical staff to provide a "celestial" melody is going to turn up in one of the stories from the "Johnny B." universe, just you wait and see. And I think I know exactly where. It'll involve at least one of Sam's cousins (whom he reckons by the dozens) -- definitely Fionnuala, the lady that's half seal (selkie), and almost certainly the harpist named Taliesin, and it will probably involve Wuffa's harp. Stay tuned.