Stop and Hear the Music

I was sixteen when I moved out of my parents house. I started attending school at a small liberal arts college halfway across the country. I remember the day they dropped me off. They helped me unpack. My roommate had already moved in but was nowhere to be seen. She’d already covered the walls with her Ella Fitzgerld posters.

“At least she has good taste in music,” my father’d say.

He’d argue with me about nothing in-particular before they left. I didn’t know it then but that would become a tradition.

When my parents finally left, I put on this record, Dear Old Stockholm. Then I sat in the middle of the floor, closed my eyes and listened. This was my new home–one large open room with two beds, two dressers, and two desks. My roommate’s things hung on the walls and all of mine were tucked neatly into drawers.

When I was a girl, my sister and I used to lace up our roller-skates and skate around the living-room. We only did this when our parents weren’t home. My father had a big stereo system and shelves of LP’s. I studied the covers of most of those albums–flipped them over and over in my hands reading titles and liner notes.

My favorite album to play while we roller-skated over the short blue carpet in the living room was “John Coltrane Live at Birdland”. I thought the second track on the album,I Want To Talk About You , was best for roller-skating. Even then I connected with that tune. I played it again and again as I skated in circles around the sofa.

Now I keep the CD in my car. When I listen to it, I always end up listening to track 2 three or four times before I listen to the rest of the CD. All of the tracks are outstanding, but that one is still my favorite.

Coltrane squeezes every note he can possible play out of that tune and it all means something. Nothing is wasted. He says everything that needs to be said. There’s nothing left to add. No one else takes a solo on the track. What would be the point?

Though I’ve heard it thousands of times, each time I hear that tune I hear something new. That’s why I love it so much.