My boss surprised me this morning, and gave me a new guy to babysit. He walks in, introduces the man, and leaves just like that. I had been hoping for an easy Friday. This little development put me a little further away from that goal, but I decided to make good with it. I played nice. I said congenial things. I hobnobbed with the boss. The boss left. The new guy showed me a great site for job searching. We laughed about that a bit. I gave the poor new guy some really lame work to do, and he went to it.
We had been working quietly in the same room for a while when I started to feel bad about the lame work I’d given this guy. He had sharp eyes, so I thought he might feel a little like Marvin the Robot from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy with a brain the size of a planet doing minial tasks and all that. I thought I’d lessen the blow by putting on some music he likes. I said,
“Hey, what kind of music do you like?”
“Good music.”
I opened a tab on my computer to grooveshark, and one to youtube. Then I persisted
“Good music? You like good music. Good. Care to be a little more specific?”
He said something I did not understand.
“What?”
He said the same thing I did not understand the first time, again. I gave him a dumb look. He typed something into my computer, and brought up a page for a website called Jazzradio. It was like Pandora, but instead of a search for specific bands, it had jazz genres. He said,
“Jazzradio. I like smooth jazz. Is good music.” I hadn’t been able to understand him for his accent. I couldn’t place the accent yet. He wanted to listen to smooth jazz. I asked if we could do cool jazz instead. He agreed. We worked for half an hour without a word. I was working so I could not keep track of every song that played as much as I would have liked. I did distinctly hear a tune I recognized from Miles Davis’s album Birth of the Cool. I also heard a tune I recognized from my time working at Panera Bread. I’ve never known the name of that song. The web page was glitching when I looked at the display. I may never know the name of that song. The new guy walked to me and said,
“It’s so hard to find someone who likes this music. Music in America sucks. You know what music I think is good in America right now? Christian music. Christian music, the lyrics are ok. The rest is,” he made a trifling guesture with one hand, “the lyrics are no good. There is so much garbage.” He went on. I asked him where he was from. He said he was from Brazil. We did some more work. Jazzradio played a series of commercials. I started looking for a new sound track for my Friday morning. I went for an old standby, Explosions in the Sky, but this was not really doing the job. The new guy’s face was doleful. Just then I remembered a song I had studied called Inutil Paisagem by Antonio Carlos Jobim. Jobim wrote that song in Portuguese because he was from Brazil. I searched Antonio Carlos Jobim in youtube and someone had posted an album Jobim called Stone Flower. I played the album. Then, a bit too proud of myself I asked the new guy if he had ever heard of Antonio Carlos Jobim. He said,
“Yeah, but we call him Tall Jobim, or Tall Jo.” I remembered that I had read that somewhere, and reflected for a moment on the way knowing a thing by reading it once is not very much like knowing it at all. I told him of my revelation that about the song I had studied by Tall Jo. He said,
“It wasn’t Inutil Paisagem was it?” I said that he was. He laughed at me. I laughed too. He started to tell me about Jobim’s talent and that is was a good talent, that it was a loss when he died. He told me about the way Jobim could make very complex music sound very simple. When you listened to it, you thought “Oh, yeah, I could do that.” But that was just because he played so well. It was a great talent. I asked him a few things about Brazil, and he told me. This was a good morning. We took a break from work for coffee and the restroom. When we came back the album was still playing. A song called Old Brazil was playing. He told me that was not one of Jobim’s songs. Jobim was playing it, sure, but it was not one of his songs. The next song that came on was a song Jobim wrote. The new guy from Brazil pointed out to me that the song was going back and forth between jazz and a Brazilian style called Frevo. He would stand at attention listening to the song, and when the style would change he would say “You see? Now it is different. See how it was something else, and now it is jazz…and back…and jazz.” I listened, and agreed. “Yeah, I hear it.” The new guys said, “Jobim, he is not jazz, he is not frevo, he is fusion.” I listened and agreed some more. The next song came on, and the new guy from Brazil started humming along. We were in a good rhythm of work now too. He said,
“I think this is my favorite song by Jobim. When you go to Brazil, you ride an airplane and come into Rio de Janeiro, and that is what this song is about. Samba do Aviao, Samba of the Airplane. When you ride in the airplane to Brazil you see Rio de Janeiro and everywhere you look is wow! You look and say wow! Oh wow!” He pointed at his arm to show me the goose bumps on his arm. “You see? It is just wow! Even now thinking about it…and that is what this song is about. It is what it feels like to see. Hearing this song makes me think of that, and that is why it is my favorite.”
We did some more work, and then it was time for lunch. This was a good morning.
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