BeBop

I got to thinking while I love the Smiths, they're far from the most significant band in my musical life.

I like a broad range of music. Heavy metal, bluegrass, classical, folk, novelty, etc. But jazz: jazz has a special place. Twenty years ago, I couldn't imagine a career choice besides eking out an existence as a jazz guitarist. I wasn't particularly talented, but I was obsessed.



In fact, I enrolled at North Texas State the year it became the University of North Texas. But my senior year in high school, I battled all kinds of problems with my left arm. The diagnosis at the time was tendonitis, but in 1988, there was practically no other repetitive motion injury diagnosis being made. I think they might have told me it was tendonitis if I was complaining of a sore throat.

Therapy for tendonitis did little good. Rest worked, but every time I'd get back to playing I'd aggravate things. Physical therapy, drugs, it all worked short term but my arm just wouldn't play nice.

I withdrew from North Texas when it became clear that I'd be coming home by October if I went. By dropping in August, I got my big out-of-state tuition check back.



Ten years later, I finally got an accurate diagnosis: thoracic outlet syndrome. And by adjusting some techniques to avoid pinching that nerve in my shoulder, I found I could play indefinitely without symptoms.

Of course, by then I was a family guy, with a full time-plus job and other hobbies on top of it all. So playing indefinitely isn't really on the menu, but I can play.

Plus, by then I'd learned that there are some elements that make up someone who can make a living as a jazz guitarist that I lack. A willingness to live in grad-student type poverty on a permanent basis, for instance. A good sense of time, for another.

Still, I love the music. Of the thousand-or-so CDs I've accumulated in my life, at least three fourths are jazz titles.

And as I say, I got thinking, how is it I have Floyd (my 18oz pink monster), Hatful of Hollow, basically a Smiths tribute rocket, and yet none of my rockets really relates to the musical genre I consider to be the apogee of artistic achievement.


To remedy this deficit, I give you BeBop. BeBop is an Estes Big Daddy kit, and for some reason I thought of Dexter Gordon, Daddy Plays the Horn.

I painted him metallic copper, and toyed with trying to make him appear to have saxophone keys. In the end, I neglected to include Dexter Gordon in the photos I put on his fins.

Present on the fins are: Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, Sonny Rollins, Wilbur Ware, Ron Carter, Elvin Jones, Art Blakey, John Coltrane, Wes Montgomery, Jimmy Garrison, Freddie Hubbard, Clifford Brown, Eric Dolphy, Thelonious Monk, Herbie Hancock, and Art Pepper.

The musical notes you see on the body and nose are the heads for Donna Lee (a Charlie Parker tune) and Daahoud (Clifford Brown) scanned from the Real Book.

As always, I modified the Estes kit a bit. They gave me a motor tube I felt was too short, and I added a longer 24mm tube to give me some room to work. Then found when I went to fly him that the nose cone sat so close to the end of that center tube that there was no room for the parachute. I removed some of the elastic shock chord and went to a smaller 'chute and squeaked by. I'm going to have to Dremel that tube down a bit.