Featured Essay: Echoes in the Groove: A Forgotten Jazz Record and My Father's Memory

by MaryAnnDave

Sound becomes something bigger than sound in life. It turns into memory, existence, and even curing. Several years after my father had died, I happened to find an outdated vinyl record, hidden away in the back of a box in the attic. It was the Blue Train by John Coltrane, which had been his record. I had read it a thousand different times as a little boy, its startling blue-colored cover depicted Coltrane as he sat thinking, but I never took the time to listen as long as our father was around. It was just the landscape in our house, reclining against a shelf as I did other work.

That’s when I got to the day when I finally put the record on the turntable. When the needle dropped and Coltrane’s saxophone filled the room, I heard music and the slight clicks and crackles of the vinyl. Such flaws were their own rhythm, as whispers of the past. Then suddenly it was not Coltrane making the sound anymore–it was my father laughing, tapping his foot to the beat, calling out to me in the kitchen. The record did not merely play music; it reminded me of a human being I had lost how to recall: my father, cheerful, carefree, and completely alive.

Hearing Blue Train was not just hearing jazz. It was moving into a time conversation. The notes that Coltrane flew were, in a sense, a reminder to me that I should not allow the things that mattered to play quietly in the background. Something like this must have been the case with my father, as he listened perhaps even with the aid of this very record to steady himself after a hard day at work. What I used to pass off as old music used by my dad was a vessel that transported his spirit into my life when I had the greatest need.

The more I listened, the more the album became a mirror of recollection. There is never a perfect memory; the memory is scarred, broken, and misshapen. Voices are not remembered as they were, and faces become watered at the extremities. Vinyl is the ideal metaphor in that respect. A record contains remnants of the past - warps, dust, scratches, all of which leave their traces in the sound, unlike a digital file, which flows in perfect clarity. Every click in the copy of Blue Train that he was using became a point in the discussion. They were blemishes, all right, but they were also there as reminders that this had been in his hands, his home, and now mine.

Vinyl has an intentionality about it as well. Patience is needed in listening. You must carefully take the record out of its sleeve, dust it off, put it tenderly on the platter, and lower the needle. Then you sit down, wait, and surrender yourself to the sound. There is no shuffling or forward-jumping of tracks as in the case of modern streaming. You hear what the artist ordered, in the sequence he planned. That ritual turned out to be noble to me. When I played Blue Train the first several times, I repeated the same movements my father had possibly done decades ago. The touch of hands across time was like in this wavering medium.

The album played, and the music brought me through various colors of recollection. The first song, the trumpet-tongued Blue Train, with its bossy brass band and Coltrane with his authoritative saxophone, was always a call to come to his attention, as though he were saying, Listen, you better listen, Boss–something is going to happen. Other songs, such as the rhythmic complexity of the track, “Moment’s Notice, appeared to reverberate the uncertainty of life, the mingling of loss and recovery. And now came gentler, more lyrical episodes, where the music seemed to take its breath and to enable mine to breathe accordingly. The songs expressed a new aspect of mourning, strength, and acceptance.

The thing that caught my eye the most was that the record had become a source of sorrow and changed to be a source of strength. It was challenging to play at the beginning, it brought back to me what I had lost. However, as time passed, I discovered it was also a gift. Adverse experience enabled me to be close to my father even through listening, reminding me not only of him but also of parts of myself that my grief had buried. The record taught me that memory is not held in perfection but in presence. Like the solos of Coltrane, which run and twist erratically, life is not about perfect continuity but about incidents, incidents to which to cling.

My sorrow and healing are reflected in the LP, which is distorted by age. It reminded me how broken things, even lost people, can be put back together in sound and spirit. This is the manner in which the record became more than a token. It was made an ally in the work of healing. Whenever I experienced the silence, I could peep the needle down, listen to both Coltrane and my father, and be reminded that nothingness is not emptiness.

Blue Train is more than an album to me today. It is an intermediary between memory and recovery, an invitation that my father’s story is written not only in photographs or objects but in notches of vinyl that still rotate with life. Whenever I drop the needle, I think about how music can break the silence or reunite with the world what I wanted to believe had disappeared, and how it can turn loss into presence.

The record in my attic that I had forgotten was the greatest thing that I bequeathed. And each time Coltrane’s saxophone makes its appearance, I am listening not only to a masterpiece of jazz but also to one of the echoes of my father’s life, alive, breathing, and memorable.

Maryanne Dave is a writer who loves music, memory, and storytelling. She inspires by drawing on personal experience, the close practices of listening to vinyl, and how sound can create identity, healing, and intergenerational connection. Her essays frequently combine nostalgia and the retrospective, and are concerned with discovering the latent meanings in commonplace things and events. Outside writing, MaryannDave likes gathering documents and documentation and finding the interplay between art and life experience. She ascertains that narratives such as music can maintain memory, arouse feeling, and transcend time.