Tenderly

For the last eight years I have been listening to Chet Baker, especially a song entitled "Tenderly." I found it on a CD entitled "The Last Concert" that I stumbled upon in the stacks. His music has always seemed hauntingly familiar, as if somehow imprinted on me, especially this last recording, in which you can definitely hear the rasps of mortality in his voice. There are moments when the trumpet work is divine. I have played the CD over and over these past few years, have listened to his earlier recordings, and have even written a poem for him. There is something wonderfully fragile and vulnerable and confident in "The Last Concert" that has really had a pull on me. It's shaped my sense of nuance and mood and feeling. So much so that I've sought out other artists recordings of the song "Tenderly." (Even this afternoon I was caught off-guard when driving along Captiva Island Road to find a residence named "Tenderly." Among all of the typical nautical monikers and island names and pirate titles, we saw "Tenderly," which seemed as out of place and refreshingly rare as any boat or place name I've seen in years. So tonight, imagine my surprise when listening to Mantovani's recording of "Tenderly" that I suddenly recognized a song I'd been listening to all of my young life! The version is so schmaltzy and cleansed of countermelody that it sounds almost unrecognizable, except a particularly rich phrasing of trumpet. I used to place that song, and that Mantovani album, over and over when I was young. I played it because it evoked a deep sense of feeling in me--a confusion of tears, of sadness, of joy and love, of grief and sorro, of loss and loneliness. (Leave it to Mantovani's rich strings) . There was something in Mantovani that said it was okay to feel in music, something I realized in snippets in band. It was a bit grandiose, and haunting, and full of bathos, sure, and for me it was the ultimate escape in a household that seemed devoid of emotion--schmaltzy music that was nothing but emotion. It was about being alone, letting my constructed self go, and letting this music in, letting feeling in. In a way, when I was home alone and listening to my mother's Mantovani album, for that brief respite of loneliness, the solitude of being alone and listening to the music, that hour of self-indulgence, the house could have been called "Tenderly."