2 Sound Pieces, by Jim Mazza

A List of Favorite Sounds


    •    An E-flat-seventh chord
    •    Church bells at noon along the seashore
    •    Waves lapping at the dock
    •    A songbird at sunrise in January
    •    Singing all the songs of Bye, Bye Birdie — straight through
    •    My father's voice, saying farewell: "Take 'er easy, Jim"
    •    Fred Astaire's tap shoes in a syncopated rhythm
    •    The late-summer evening song of crickets and cicadas
    •    The gurgle of the creek outside our bedroom window
    •    Leon Redbone in a near-final concert, singing, When I Take My Sugar to Tea!
    •    The roar of jet engines just before takeoff




Oh, To Be a Dancer!

I should have been a dancer.  Sure, I sing a little and play the piano with some flare, but buried in this short, roundish physique is the soul of Astaire, Kelly, the Nicholas Brothers, Sammy Davis Jr., and Gregory Hines.

Graceful movements, the staccato of taps against a wooden floor, the swoosh-swoosh-swoosh of a sand dance: these images and sounds call to me, fill my thoughts, my ears.

Some people hear voices in their heads.  I hear a time-step.

My Aunt Rosie had been an Arthur Murray dancer — and she taught me, as a young child, several basic steps: a foxtrot, a waltz, the Charleston, and the Jitterbug.  I loved the feeling of my body freely moving along the floor, the sound of my shoes as they took each new step.

But dancing, in the eyes of my father, was not something boys were to do. (Traditional and outdated views of masculinity often pervaded his opinions.) Football, soccer, golf: these things were okay. There were no dance lessons for me.

Not until college — when I took a jazz-dance class in an old, dusty, downtown theatre — did I have the chance to start again.  I attended classes from time to time in my early twenties and even a tap class later on, but somehow the rest of life took over — school, work, relationships — so I never really pursued this great love.

Yet, I still have a dancer inside of me. I cannot walk down the street or up a set of stairs without hearing —and feeling — what my feet might be doing . . . if they only had the chance.

More than once I've caught myself strolling down a sidewalk and adding in a rough cadence between my steps.  Usually, this is just in my head but sometimes I find myself literally dancing down the street.  Inevitably, someone coming from the other direction is startled by this seemingly crazy behavior — and yet it always results in a big smile.

Having recovered from three hip-replacement surgeries and one seriously-broken leg over the last 25 years, it may seem odd that I should have dancing constantly in my head.  But I simply cannot escape it — the sound, the rhythm, the joy of a swaying body and the tap-tap-tapping of my feet.