MY FIRST BASH

[With links to vintage versions of my all-time Jazz Bash faves]

Many years ago, North Shore Drive ended at The Mooring, just west of my current Holland home.  The old house where Blair and Elizabeth now live was the last on the road and was known, informally, as the Lodge or the Big House. Beyond lay the cottages, scattered across a wide lawn encircled by Lake Macatawa. On the western shore of that point sat the Mooring dock, beach and fleet of small sailboats. On its southern shore, a sandy strip from which one could take a far longer view toward the entrance to the Narrows.

"Doctor Jazz" -- Jelly Roll Morton

  Back then, the Lodge belonged to Charlotte Horner, owner of the Mooring. She, along with her late husband, Bob, had operated the place since 1939.
Along the way they had attracted a loyal following of summer people-- disciples, almost, who returned to vacation year after year, usually during the same week. Our friendships went back, in some cases, decades. Bob and Charlotte, who had no children, thought of us as family.

   The Horners were jazz fanatics, and knowledgeable ones. Bob kept a bank of filing cabinets filled with 78s--disc after disc recorded by just about every jazz great from the 20s, 30s, 40s...New Orleans jazz, Kansas City jazz, Chicago jazz, you name it. The Horners knew quite a few of the musicians. Back in the 40s and 50s, many black jazz artists, unable to find area lodging when touring the upper Midwest, were offered hospitality by Bob and Charlotte. [This was also the era when resorts in this region felt free to stipulate “Christians only.’ The Horners did something about that, as well. Charlotte is said to have tartly informed someone: “We accept everybody--even the Dutch.”] You could stop in at the Lodge almost any time, day or night, and hear a sampling from the famous record collection. In my memory, sometimes right around happy hour, they’d put one of their 78s on the loudspeaker usually used to announce mail call, and wander down to join the families du jour for a round of whatever.

Jazz Bash as Fundraiser

    After Bob died in 1970, Charlotte initiated a tradition she named the Horner Memorial Jazz Bash. Every June, first weekend after Memorial Day, she invited her many friends and Mooring family to hear an evening of live jazz right in her own expansive living room. They made a long weekend of it, with Charlotte billeting them communally  throughut the cottages. The July people met the August people and often made new friends.   

In return for her largesse, Charlotte asked only a $25 contribution to Michigan Child and Family Services, her favorite charity, which she served as a board member, plus $15 per person to cover expenses. Guests arrived bearing their own beverages of choice, plus all kinds of home baked sweets and covered dishes to supplement the meals. And I'm sure that many of the checks to MCSF well exceeded $25.

I'd heard accounts of the bash for years from Uncle Ernie and Aunt Suze. But even though I received an
annual




"Cake Walkin Babies From Home" -- Bechet/Armstrong

invitation (“Attire: mini, maxi, bikini, pantsi”), years went by before I could accept. Finally one spring in the early ‘80s, I managed to make the trip, driving up with my cousin Mark.

Coming as a singleton, I bunked with Ellen and Chris in the upstairs Great Scott and had a great time getting to know both of them better. We were about the same age, all of us at turning points in our lives. We had LOTS to talk about. Chris had just finished reading Megatrends, the hot book of the season. Somebody else that year, at the high-touch end of the literary spectrum, was fascinated by Out on a Limb.

The weather turned halfway accommodating, so Charlotte sent her revelers off on the Pomie with one of her more experienced guest skippers, for a chilly, first-of-the-season sail. A new friend, DC, took us out that year the day after the bash, and later on a longer sail that echoed my epic voyage with Mack Parker some 20 years earlier. Fortunately we did not meet a freighter in the channel.

    Elsewhere on the property, you could hear pingpong balls popping through the rec room, take a walk through the woods, engage in a Mooring heart-to-heart or bake bread with Charlotte.

 

Concert Time

   While the rest of us were out and about getting back our Mooring legs, the band set up around Charlotte’s Steinway, at the west end of the living room. At long last it was concert time: we filtered in, drinks in hand, to check in with Bernice and Marie at the welcome table. Blair, who had done a huge percentage of the bash prep heavy lifting, now had time to take a breath and get in party mode with his summer friends. So. Much. Laughter.  I remember looking out to the lake, framed in the panoramic south windows-- sundown was nowhere in evidence and I could see sun sparkles dancing across the water.

  Finally our musicians tuned up and began to play. Who was it that year? Bill Hanck on trombone, I think, and Charlie Hooks on clarinet. There was a trumpet, of course, and piano and percussion. I’d be willing to bet they led off with “Struttin With some Barbecue” --an exuberant, sassy, party-just-beginning kind of tune that got us right into the mood as the band showed their stuff .

"Struttin With Some Barbecue" -- Pete Fountain

I was loving it. I think of a photo from that year, in which my cousin Mark and I are seated with Walter B, one generation older, he of the hypnotic eyes and rumbling Teutonic intonation. Boy, I was smiling in that shot, the night of my first bash. Not long before, after months of painful soul-searching, I had come to the hardest decision of my life. Now free of agonizing and not yet living the consequences, I was ready to laugh, sing, stomp. Wheee! All was groovy.

  During the break, everyone enjoyed Charlotte’s generous buffet, along with a refill of liquid amber or clear. The concert resumed with Charlotte’s annual jazz parade, based on a New Orleans tradition of second-lining during anything-but-somber brass band funeral processions. Charlotte led the female guests, snaking through the room, all of us twirling elaborately decorated and wildly colorful silk parasols, the handiwork of friend June Z. Bobbie P snapped still photos, as she did each year, reminding us that she really preferred photographing animals and only shot people on this occasion as a favor to Charlotte. Without any such disclaimer, Bernie D, always armed with the latest in technology, prowled benignly, filming and audiotaping the revelry. Later he would offer the tapes to everyone for a nominal cost; I still have several.

   How long did the concert last that night-- two hours? Three? The music wound down, and at last the surrounding tall trees cast long shadows. Lake-sparkle had long yielded to reflections of the pink and mauve wash of sunset.

"Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans" -- Billie Holiday

How beautiful, I thought, how piercingly sweet. How did I get so lucky? Could there be any group of people more fortunate than we, to have won a place in this room, with this music, and this extraordinary woman at the heart of it all?

  I knew beyond question:  here is what it means to be rich.

  Too soon, I would have to head back home to face a steamy St. Louis summer and a very different kind of music. But I could do it now, with some measure of grace, because I had again touched my true north. And heard some great jazz in the bargain.