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1.
The boy next door has learned how to create piercing whistles with a blade of grass and tells me he can get the attention of crows and blue jays. He's just a kid in suburban Columbus, Ohio, a ten-year-old who plays too much Nintendo but now he's delirious because he's got the birds talking. He stands under a locust tree and blows. A loud crow struts a telephone wire and calls back.
I picture Yamaguchi Goro playing the shakuhachi flute in the woods of Nara. Music, even a child's primal music, pays homage to the soundscape. When I was a kid we lived on a dirt road in New Hampshire. The crows and blue jays walked across our roof and fought like mad. We were an anomalous family out there in the woods. We practiced a kind of ersatz Zenrisking silliness with the crows and talking back to everything that called.
2.
New Hampshire, 1959
The Victrola dates from the mid-twenties. It has long been surpassed by electricity and high fidelity and, yes, stereophonic sound, a sound that can be heard in the Armstrong's house-the family down the roaci.
I am in love with Bessie Smith's voice. It springs from the Victrola's gooseneck horn-a voice that can pound nails. God how I love this! And I love the sound as the fat needle pitches through the grooves of the record: this is a seashell's hiss or a noise like a radio tuned to nothing. I love it when the record comes to an end and the needle drunkenly bobs against the red paper label. And the ghost of Bessie's voice still circles around me. Then I notice the deep Sunday silence in the rest of the house!
I fish through stacks of acetate records. What an odd assortment! Dinah Shore's "Mother May I" and Amelita Galli-Curci singing in Carmen; Furtwangler conducting the Berlin Philharmonic; "The Great Caruso"; Bix Beiderbeck and Tommy Dorsey. Strangest of all was a group of records from the Soviet Union-martial music performed by the Red Army. The labels in Russian revealed nothing about their mysteries. One could hear the Stalinist fervor of a thousand men with arms linked, men marching across Kazakhstan.
I spent the better part of that summer...