When my dad was getting his college degrees, he got to be friends with a couple of his students, some hipsters, and later beatniks, who all turned him on to jazz. They lived in Venice in a worn-down house, at a time when it was unheard of to live there. Coltrane, Brubeck, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Getz—those were their reigning jazz heroes. John Coltrane was probably the most avant-garde of the bunch, but my dad loved him, too. I’m almost positive my dad’s jazz record collection later influenced me, or at least got me used to abstract music—that, and my parents’ blues, folk, and classical LPs, as my mom was always coming back from neighborhood garage sales weighed down with box sets of Mozart and Beethoven. But jazz has been a lifelong love and interest of mine. I remember when I was little, my dad and I went to visit one of those Venice beatnik guys, though I mostly remember his glam girlfriend with her long, straight black hair, her red-polished fingernails, and her guitar. She was the first beatnik I ever met. I sat in her lap, thinking, I wish my mom were as cool as this.
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