It all started this evening with a game of Grand Theft Auto IV.
I was playing the game on my Playstation 3, doing what I normally do in these situations, which is blowing off steam. Antagonize some cops, lead them to the GTA analog of Coney Island and run my dirt bike on the beach, leading cop cars through the pier posts and the rocks. In this game (and its predecessors since GTA 3), you can listen to various “radio stations,” which are really just playlists of various songs, each “station” corresponding to a genre. Lately, I’d been digging on the jazz station, Jazz Nation Radio, because it’s awesome to ride at night through New York, with its lights and population bustling, chilling out to some wonderful jazz classics from the pre-bop era.
At one point, I tired of the chase, but was still really enjoying the riding around, specifically listening to the Billy Strayhorn-penned and Duke Ellington-led classic from 1939, “Take the ‘A’ Train”. It was so nice, and I felt so good about that song in particular, I felt like not playing the game any longer. Weeks previously, I had been watching, piecemeal, the Ken Burns’ “Jazz” documentary via Netflix. At this point, I thought, Why not see if the documentary will cover the history of that song in particular? (which, at the time, seemed perfectly reasonable). So, I ejected the GTA disc from the PS3 and popped in the Netflix disc instead, then loaded up the documentary (I was up to part 3, it seemed).
After a few minutes of watching the birth of the career of Ethel Waters, I decided, with my nervous energy, to go to the circa 1929 Victrola my parents gave me last September, and pull out the old 78s. I figured I could see if my parents had collected any classic jazz records, especially some of the terrific stuff I was hearing on the TV at that moment. I even thought, “Wonder if they have any Duke Ellington,” since I was just listening to some Ellington earlier and I consider myself an Ellington fan. About eight records in, I uncovered the most amazing thing. Continue reading…
