<\/p>\n
Pure jazz<\/strong> <\/span>was my thing. Blues, too. My roommate, John, was an inner-city kid who didn\u2019t know a clarinet from an oboe, or anything about music. I visited John at his Chicago house decades later (1995); he lived in his childhood neighborhood, Wrigleyville. His teenage kid was jamming to Jamey Aebersold jazz play-along records.<\/p>\n John had started U. of Michigan as a pre-med, like me and everybody else, but he came out a railroad brakeman. Sophomore year he chalked \u201cTake Drugs\u201d and \u201cOnly Fools Stay in School\u201d on the sidewalk in front of our co-op house, and he dropped out.<\/p>\n In 1995<\/strong><\/span>\u00a0he said he was sweating his monthly urine test with the railroad. His house, which he had bought in 1975 for $30,000, was worth more than a half million. \u201cI\u2019m a capitalist now,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd I have two renters.\u201d But he still subscribed to The Militant<\/em>, the Socialist Workers newspaper. His son played \u201cWatermelon Man\u201d on tenor sax. This was familiar to me, except for The Militant<\/em> part. My parents had subscribed to Newsweek<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Pure jazz was my thing. Blues, too. My roommate, John, was an inner-city kid who didn\u2019t know a clarinet from an oboe, or anything about music. I visited John at his Chicago house decades later (1995); he lived in his childhood neighborhood, Wrigleyville. His teenage kid was jamming to Jamey Aebersold jazz play-along records. John […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-coming-of-age"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25436"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25436\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25441,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25436\/revisions\/25441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}