Grover at the Indiana Roof Ballroom

I was young once, and loved jazz.  I didn’t really know anyone growing up who shared this love of mine, so I reserved it as a personal corner of musical taste that I felt set me apart.  It could be considered an elitist attitude I guess, except I was a preacher’s son living on the edge of a tiny Midwestern town and aren’t most teens simply self-centered in their desire to differentiate themselves and learn what makes them unique?  Jazz was that thing for me and a bulwark against insecurities which were plentiful.

When compact disk players entered the market in the mid-eighties I pooled my meager resources to buy one.  It was the promise of a more pure and unadulterated sound using a laser beam straight out of Science Fiction.  Jazz, like Classical, had the potential to be a great benefactor of this new technology with its perceived complexities and instrumentation.  

I went to Kmart which was in a larger town north of us and the closest place to find these new compact disks or “CD’s”.  At that time there were literally only a handful of offerings and they were packaged in thin rectangular boxes that I would cut up and use to decorate my walls.  The CD that caught my eye on that first foray into the world of digital sound was one by Grover Washington, Jr.

And this briefly brings me forward in time to my current location which is a hotel in downtown Indianapolis.  Just a block away is the Indiana Roof Ballroom.  It was there in 1986 that a high school friend and I met up with two girls we’d befriended in the summer at a Chemistry Honors Seminar at Indiana State University.  They lived in the Indianapolis area but my friend and I had to drive up from our small town 2 hours away.

We all “dressed up” which for me was gray khaki’s and a t-shirt with suspenders covered by a tweed blazer.  It was supposed to be “cool” but please, no.  When we entered the Indiana Roof Ballroom it was like we’d stepped into a completely different world with its own rules and reality that we had not hither-to been privy to.  It was a Grover Washington, Jr. concert and we looked to be the only non-African Americans in attendance.  And not only that, we were the only teenagers as well.  Everyone was dressed in jaw-dropping attire with flashes of gold and silver winking in the darkness.  I suddenly felt silly in my sneakers as nearby eyes fell on my peculiar appearance.

The experience was unforgettable and possibly even unfathomable.  The ballroom had a high smooth curved ceiling on which were projected the moon and stars along with moving clouds.  Grover was on stage with his band exuding coolness at amplitudes that I could hardly comprehend.  I was entranced by his quiet swaying motion as he patiently waited to enter the flow with his saxophone.  The tone of his instrument is rich and warm on a CD, but hearing it as it was being exhaled from his very lungs in that relatively intimate setting was a whole other thing.  It was a time outside of time and I wasn’t sure that I was “supposed” to be there but there I was nonetheless: a wonder-filled oddity caught up in his love of jazz.      

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