'Nothing Is Waste That Makes a Memory'

The ragtime pianist-composer Eubie Blake claimed to have lived until he was one-hundred years old. Like his musical junior, Louis Armstrong, Blake was creative when it came to his date of birth. He maintained he was born in Baltimore on February 7, 1883. In fact, when Blake died on February 12, 1983, in Brooklyn, days after a celebration of his centenary, he was a mere ninety-six. But who would quibble with the composer of “I’m Just Wild About Harry”?

 

No one disputes Ned Rorem’s stats. He was born in Richmond, Indiana, on October 23, 1923, meaning he turns ninety-nine today, making him a centenarian-elect. There’s an odd convergence between Rorem and jazz. Six months before his birth, on April 5, 1923, King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band entered the Gennett Records studio in Richmond and recorded “Chimes Blues,” which includes Louis Armstrong’s first recorded solo. Other musicians who recorded at Gennett when Rorem was an infant and toddler include Jelly Roll Morton, Bix Beiderbecke, Hoagy Carmichael, Charlie Patton and Blind Lemon Jefferson.

 

I know Rorem best not as a composer but as a diarist – one of the best to practice and publish in that beguilingly egocentric form without form. Rorem writes in The Paris Diary & The New York Diary 1951-1961 (published separately, 1966 and 1967; one-volume edition, 1998):

 

“How many thousands have I spent on perfume and alcohol, cigarettes and Turkish baths, disappointing trips and third-class movies; how many months in silent bars or parks, expecting, in a chair with a book not reading, or waiting in line, waiting in line? Who will tell me it’s a loss when I know life must be for pleasure? The parks were balanced by museums, the baths by oceans, bars by composition, and the dreaming chair by books finished. Nothing is waste that makes a memory.”

 

[Go here to hear Blake performing one of his best-known compositions, “Memories of You,” followed by versions from Earl Hines and Charles Mingus.]