23. Scats & Riffs

JazzLoft 2.0

My whole life has been one big improvisation. — Clint Eastwood

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Jazz was a key element in Dod’s life. As a young man, Dod had aspirations to become a musician, a dream that he felt had been thwarted by his family. His father, Nelson Young, had been a small time jazz saxophonist who got gigs here and there, including a few for a popular band at the time that featured popular trumpet player Bix Biederbecke. Nelson had hoped it would turn into a steady gig but it was not meant to be.

In 1929 Bix’s drinking began to catch up with him. He suffered from delirium tremens and he had a nervous breakdown while playing with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, and was eventually sent back to his parents in Davenport, Iowa to recover. — The Syncopated Times, The Red Hot Jazz Archive: Leon “Bix” Beiderbecke, syncopatedtimes.com/bix-beiderbecke-1903-1931

Without steady work, Nelson continued to merely scrape by. So, when the stock market crashed in October 1929, Nelson saw his already uncertain income potential dwindle to nearly nothing. Nelson’s wife, Christine, was six months pregnant at the time of the market crash. David, was born in February of the following year, but Nelson still did not have any significant improvement in his income. With the pressure mounting to provide for his new family, Nelson buckled. He concluded that he could not provide for his family so he took the cowardly way out by ending his own life only two days after his son was born. 

With this one tragic act, Nelson changed the course of Dod’s life. From that point forward, being a jazz musician was permanently linked to a propensity for suicide, an association that would persist in his family so indelibly that Dod was never able to overcome it. This made Dod resentful, ever so resentful of the “dream” that he felt he was denied the chance to pursue. He was resentful of the controlling nature of his grandmother and the lack of nurturing from his mother. But most importantly, Dod was resentful of the fact that he never got to know his father. Yet, he couldn’t blame him, no that was not possible, it had to be everyone else’s fault. He blamed his grandparents for not supporting his parents’ relationship which grew into a distrust for authority; he blamed his mother for not nurturing him when he was young man which grew into a hatred of women; and he blamed society for creating the conditions that led to his father’s actions, feeding his emerging narcissism. He blamed everyone and fed on that anger, everyone, but the man who was truly to blame. So in this mania in his mind, as he grew as a young man and began to piece together the backstory of his life as he saw it, jazz became the symbol of all that was good, all that was special to him. Jazz was the one thing that always made him happy.