White Christmas - Ella Fitzgerald
I suspect it's for purely generational reasons, but I often imagine jazz as the soundtrack to sophisticated adulthood. I hear the
xylophone at the beginning of this song as ice clinking in a glass, and imagine the singer swaying against a dimly lit bar after all the children have been put to bed.
Some years ago, a cousin of mine asked me what it was like to be an adult. "Well," I said, a teenager out of my depth, "maybe the biggest difference is that, even though you still can't control what's going on, you usually have an idea of why things are happening the way that they are."
I still believe that. Still, as I get more technically
adult (am I even a "young adult" any more? I don't think so?) I've been disappointed that there doesn't seem to be a threshold of knowledge that makes me feel in control. Earlier this month, I wrote to a friend:
I am so mad that apparently the threshold of adulthood "gets to speak at the UN" is not incompatible with "eats only tortillas out of the toaster for dinner, while sitting on the kitchen floor and crying about nothing in particular"
Anyway, I'm probably going to have an Ella Fitzgerald number on this mix until I've run through her entire seasonal oevre. If you and I both stick around, this should happen sometime in the late 2020s. Maybe we'll be grown-ups by then.