I left Ponca City in 1990 when I was seventeen. Enrolled in classes at the University of Oklahoma and moved into the dorms (required for first year students) and learned some life lessons that I should have paid more attention to (especially in retrospect). Spend a few months working in the scraping room at the cafeteria, which was every bit as nasty as it sounds) and then got a job as a graveyard baker at the hippie cafe, where I would remain until I left for Los Angeles in '94. The bakery was run by a powerful woman named Beverly who new her shit and took no shit - lots of stories and lots of laughs and just generally a good person to work with and/or for. Her partner was a jazz pianist who occasionally helped out and would sometimes just chill in the wee hours after gigs....and it was on these nights that I had my first real exposure to jazz. I really only "knew" the starter artists that would get mentions in mainstream rags so I understood that John Coltrane and Miles Davis were important and I had that Spy vs. Spy record andthought I knew something about Ornette Coleman (I didn't). But Beverly and her dude would play Sun Ra, Cannonball Adderley, Gábor Szabó, Pharoah Sanders, MODERN JAZZ QUARTET and countless other acts that I had never heard of while they tried to describe to me the nuances of free jazz, hard bop, Afro-Futurism and third stream. I never fully switched gears and I never really dove in, but those lessons and those sounds made the $4/hour I was getting for those bakery shifts seem more than worth it. Somewhere in that mix was my introduction to Charles Mingus....which is obviously the only connection between that story and this post. Check Larry Coryell's guitar on "Noddin Ya Head Blues" because that shit is just....damn.
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