Alfonso pressed a CD into my hand and gave me a mission: Memorize the name of every musician and song on the album. In a few days, he planned to play a random 15-second section, and I would pass his quiz if I could identify the tune and its players by ear.
For a jazz aficionado, I suspect this task would have been trivially easy. Unfortunately, I wasn’t one. My mother had decided I would play the trumpet, hoping that the limited three buttons would give my clumsy hands more of an opportunity. After a few years of embarrassing progress on classical pieces, I deemed myself ready to move onto a trickier genre with which I had even less familiarity. I joined my high school’s jazz class, putting my ineptitude on a collision course with an eccentric music teacher.
Alfonso wore the bright, tight-fitting garb that typifies European men in the American imagination. In addition to being a talented musician, Alfonso claimed to be a yoga master — at random intervals, he would attempt to persuade us to do sun salutations. He had a thick Portuguese accent, through which he spoke a version of English that corresponded best to the last century’s era of jazz (he insisted on calling everyone a “cat”). From the perspective of my Zoomer upbringing, this quiz assignment…
