MACON BLACK

Ian McCann plays old sounds to new ears

- Ian McCann

Generation Z pays a visit. It has been a few years. Previously, the young man had told me he liked jazz, so I played him Dexter Gordon's One Flight Up. It's accessible, satisfying, warm, interesting; Gordon, one of the postwar tenor titans, didn't work with modal forms very often, but this is an exception. I bought the album at Ray's Jazz in the 80s, after a brief audition sold it to me. I'd hoped a similar experience might sell it, metaphorically, to the young man.

As we listened to it through the big speakers, we sat in the sun's dying embers, and by the end of the album, only the glow of the deck's indicator light and the amp's KT88 valves lit the room. I don't know what the youthman made of it; it would be an unusual 14-year-old who had the language to describe his feelings about a jazz record. I can barely do it at 64. But he did focus intently right through it.