uTopianTurtleTop

RAINBIRD

Every once in a while on an oldies station they play a song I loved at the age before the names of the singers and groups registered with me.  Music was just something on the radio or my parents’ record player, or something you played on the piano -- I had piano lessons and my grandma was a terrific pianist and my mom still is darn good. Or something you sang. My grandpa was a great singer of the Terrible Voice But Tremendous Enthusiasm School. The pre-teen years.  Anyway, I heard one of those songs the other day -- “Here Comes that Rainy Day Feeling Again.”  From the early ‘70s.  Always loved that song. Still do. Couldn't tell you more than a handful of the words. "That rainy day feeling" is evidently not a good feeling, even though the music is lovely and energetic. I think the singer mentions that soon his tears will be falling like rain.

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Been listening a lot to Charlie “Bird” Parker lately.  For my 15th birthday my parents gave me the 6-record set “Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz,” from ragtime (represented by Scott Joplin) and rural blues (Robert Johnson) to Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor.  Bird was the last music I got into from the collection.  Free jazz appealed to me pretty early on.  Every few years I’d check out Bird again, and he’d grow on me every time.  Now he’s a king.  Incredibly fleet harmonic imagination and great melodicism and real swing at terrific speed -- swing, with that element of relaxation, even at burning tempos and with constantly twising accents and phrasing. 

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Bird and that Rainy Day Feeling.  In classical Indian poetry, or so I’ve read, the Rainbird is a symbol of eroticism.  Fertile rain.  Sexy bird.