Music And My Dad

Yesterday, I was on my weekly Zoom call with my parents. Of course, my dad’s some sort of boomer proto-hipster, so we were using Jitsi instead of Zoom, but that’s besides the point. During this call, I mentioned to my dad that I’d listened to Blue Train by John Coltrane for the first time the day before. He didn’t respond the first time, because he was writing an email, so I went back to talking to my mum, but I tried again later on in the call and he seemed much more interested. He mentioned that his cousin Hugh had been a big “‘trane” (as real aficionados apparently call him) fan, and that in the final weeks of his life, he wrote to my dad about how much comfort jazz had brought him.

Hugh was dying of lung cancer – my only memory of him is from when I was very young, and I was confused about why he was attached to an oxygen canister – but he was writing to my dad about John Coltrane. This certainly says something about Hugh, and it probably says something about Coltrane, but to me the most interesting character in this story (simply because he’s the only one I really know) is my dad.

My dad’s always had a very close relationship with music, which he passed on to me, though he’s not yet succeeded in convincing me that Bob Dylan can sing. Even when I was a small child, I knew that my dad loved music. The only time I can remember him shouting at me is when I turned the volume all the way up on his amplifier – to this day, I’m not sure whether he was more worried that I was going to damage my ears, or his precious hifi kit. His record collection is about as big as my mum will allow – about 1,000 records, acquired since he was 13 and got his first record player, which made his room in boarding school something of a communal space.

He ends most days now by spending a couple of hours listening to records in the living room while playing Bridge on his iPad. Back when we lived in Nottingham, his routine was similar, but the hifi was in his study, so he’d be playing bridge on his computer instead. I often used to lie in bed half-awake listening to the muffled sounds of The Who making their way upstairs, as I drifted off into the weird dreams you have when you’re a kid.

These days, my bedtime isn’t so early, so I’m usually still up when he’s listening to music. I’ll often join him and listen to whatever he puts on. It’s an eclectic mix – he shares my love of jazz, but he also listens to a lot of prog, classic pop from the 60s and 70s, Bob Dylan, and even Harry Styles (I bought him Fine Line on vinyl for Christmas, which he loved). If it’s the weekend, we’ll often have a couple of glasses of wine while we listen. Those evenings are some of the things I miss most when I’m away from home.