Voenix Rising

One of the unexpected perks of my job is finding music left in the CD ROM drives while re-imaging the PCs of employees who have left the company. Most of the time what I find is trash, but occasionally I run across something that I find interesting enough to listen to all the way through and become quite enchanted with.

Most recently it’s been Miles Davis’ Blue Miles.

Despite my long-time love of jazz, Mr. Davis has never really been on my radar. This album however, may provide the impetus to explore his music further. It’s proving to be my favorite morning commute soundtrack—especially since the local jazz station is in another one of their seemingly never-ending fund drives.

Music can do wonders to improve one’s mood.

Back in the day, this album—along with Constance Demby’s Novus Magnificat—was one of the quintessential “New Age” recordings in my collection. I first bought it on cassette tape and nearly wore it out on many a late Friday night drive from Phoenix to Tucson while dating my second partner, Bernie.

I bought it on CD after we moved to San Francisco, but like so many other recordings over the years, it was either lost, loaned and never returned, stolen, or sold.

I stumbled across it on iTunes the other day and thought “What the hell…you’ve wasted $20 on worse,” and downloaded both volume 1 and volume 2.

When I started listening, I was immediately transported back to what seemed like a much simpler, far more innocent point in my life, and as those familiar notes washed over me, I felt my blood pressure immediately go down and I entered what I can only describe as a very happy warm-and-fuzzy place. I suppose anyone hearing this for the first time in 2013 would think it’s just so much electronic schlock, but after all these years, it can still play me, and while I can never regain the innocence of my 20s and 30s, the music allowed me to at least reconnect—if only briefly—with a part of me that used to believe in magic.

I’m not talking about magic as in “now you see it, now you don’t,” but rather the simple wonder of the Universe and belief in something bigger than myself; something I used to consciously feel while living in San Francisco but seem to have lost during the intervening decades.

I’d really like to have that part of me back and cast off this bitter old queen persona that seems to have taken over of late…