Don't know exactly when I fell in love with jazz, but when I started to fall hard for it I started listening to this program called "Jazz With Bob Parlocha." It was a syndicated program, but in the Twin Cities he was played on 88.5 over the overnight hours.
I don't remember when I first stumbled upon him. It may have been when I had the night shift job downtown, which is now about a decade ago. He played what I consider "real" jazz, what I guess is really called "bebop," jazz once Miles Davis put his imprint on it and tore it away from its big band, Louis Armstrong/Dizzy Gillespie roots. I still can't describe jazz that well, but it was ... cool to listen to. It's music to run towards while you're running away from the world, and its prying eyes. It was your dirty little secret, something you go down the stairs to the basement to hear, but only after you peer back and forth a couple times to make sure no one sees you going down those steps. Since Parlocha's program came on late at night, it was perfect for me to listen to (sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes) while I was trying to stay awake at work. Maybe it was due to listening to him in that dungy basement I imagined in my head, with his deep and rich voice, his hearty chuckles and the stories that he could spin that I concluded once and for all that it's absolutely absurd to listen to jazz when it's sunny outside. It is, don't you know.
Since I've gotten so busy lately -- really since I started the flu biller job a few years ago -- I haven't been able to listen to "Jazz With Bob Parlocha" except weekends when I was awake and remembered to flip the dial to him. However, in the past few months, when I turned my radio over to KBEM between 11 at night and 5 in the morning, I didn't hear his honeyed words. And when it was late at night and I heard blues on at the station (they play the blues, but I thought it was only on Friday nights) I wondered if something was wrong. He was getting up there in age, and I was afraid I didn't catch him retiring or something.
Just now, tonight, I finally remembered to go online and see if something happened to him. And I am afraid something did: He died of a heart attack. And unbeknownst to me, he succumbed to it back on March 15. Comments from Parlocha's fans saying they didn't know he had died have poured in throughout the summer. Maybe they didn't know until well after the fact because he regularly taped his shows months in advance, and his voice was heard with new blocks of music (which always starts off with one song at the beginning of the hour, then three songs before breaking to introduce himself, then two before talking about those songs, and finally two or three to end the hour, where he would then sign off for that hour in case the station was going to go to different programming -- that was his clock, and it was dependable) as if nothing bad was about to happen. Heck, whenever I and probably anyone listened to Bob Parlocha, his hepcat rasp had enough energy to make you feel like he was going to live forever.
Well, news of his untimely passing (even if he did live a very productive 76 years, the earliest ones as a psychiatric nurse at Cal-San Francisco before he submitted an air check tape to see if he could turn his hobby into a jazz DJ stint) has finally crashed onto my shores. And I feel bad about it, and I really feel bad that I didn't know at the time it happened. The most personal way Parlocha touched me is when I once took him up on his offer when he would say he could be reached through e-mail. There was a song that he played that I really liked, and he said the name of the album but I couldn't quite hear him. I may have not been awake during my night shift at the time. But I remembered to e-mail him about the name of the record and a couple days later he e-mailed me back, thanking me for being a long-time listener and saying that the album's name is You Get More Bounce With Curtis Counce! (Check out the album cover. That would be a scandalous photo nowadays; an album looking like that must have been stashed in the porno section of a seedy bookstore when it was released in the mid-fifties.)
And with that I felt a connection to him, even when that e-mail was about a decade ago. But he is gone. My love for jazz will never quite be the same. To commemorate him I should buy a t-shirt bearing the name of his program, or finally get that Counce album. All in tribute to a man who cemented my love for jazz.
Rest In Peace, Mr. Parlocha.
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