Personal history, Part I

It's a matter of personal history. I am sampling some songs on iTunes. I am browsing artists and I click on Anita O'Day (Randy's recommendation and favorite), and then to an album called Verve Jazz Masters (my favorite albums in high school years). I'm hearing the songs, I have $11 credit on my iTunes. Then I start listening to A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square (our jazz choir song along with Bach's Organ Fugue). Maybe no one likes this song. Maybe they'll think it's cheesy, or too slow, or too boring. But I love it, and I think I will always love it. It's personal history. It reminds me of the jazz choir days in my freshman year when we used to try to sing this song in harmony, with Burak Bedikyan on the piano. It reminds me of walking home on winter days in the dark, with this song on my mind and with loneliness in my heart. Anita O'Day's voice brings peace into the room. Brings me back the days I thought maybe, maybe I can be a full-time singer. There's just so many songs to listen, so much time to spend tracing back the memories, so far back that you start to live in that first moment you probably didn't appreciate them. But then there's so much to do in life, that's brand new, that hasn't been dipped into personal history like chocolate-covered strawberries (there is something associated with that but it has to sit in the cellar for a while until I can call it history). I will sample some more songs and then try to work some more. Here I pick another artist, Benny Golson, just because I met him and I listened to him play Whisper Not on one of those Nardis nights. Boy, do I have something for familiar territory.