"Or a dream that will fade and fall apart..."

I found my jazz recordings today. They were shoved away in a box, plastic dusty and liner notes faded, as if they belonged to someone else. I couldn't listen to them until now. The grief was too new.

Growing up as a violinist, you don't get many opportunities to play jazz. The orchestra teacher doubled as the jazz band teacher, since budgets were getting cut every year for arts. Since I couldn't play it, I listened. During college, I started playing in jazz combos. Improvisation unlocked a forgotten floodgate--composition--and my first piece (a little jazz waltz) terrified me. But composing for jazz ensembles--my real love--was frustrating (I didn't want to play it, although I enjoyed it; and jazz musicians can be the epitome of stubborn, when it comes to new ideas--things existing classical music for the past few decades.) I took a chance at a classical composition department--my Master's--and they took a chance on me. I hadn't listened to or written jazz since then.

Constant discouragement and fighting took its toll. Once I left my undergraduate school I was too burned out on the violin to keep playing, and jazz was an unfortunate casualty. Busy in my new world as a "classical" composer, I tucked away my jazz compact discs, instead discovering Lou Harrison, Colin McPhee, Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, Ligeti, Berio...

But these old recordings--their music as familiar to me as my fiancé's face--never left me. Everything I am today as a composer existed then--I learned to orchestrate from Billy Strayhorn and Gil Evans; the serialism in Miles Davis' album, "Aura," was my own because I didn't know the right way to write serial music; the sheer walls of raw ecstasy and timbre of late 'Trane; the displaced canonic metrics of Pat Motian and Bill Frisell, the wordless poetry of Kenny Wheeler's "Music for Large and Small Ensembles, the counterpoint in the microcosm of jazz voicing--these are my roots.

If you truly love something, it's so much a part of you that a little time, dust, or absence isn't permanent, an old friend you run into after decades of silence. After a little awkward silence, you find out they never went away.

(Whoever emails me with the correct standard the title comes from will get a surprise...you may have to bug me to mail it, though.)