Just before dinner, my wife hums a tune. A friendly, slightly melancholy piece — classical, but somehow jazzy too. I’ve heard this before. But where. And when?
I think for ages, dinner gets cold. I dig through my memory, where music links with a place, a feeling, and a time. When the combination of time, place and emotion matches the right music, I can connect even 40-year-old songs quite precisely to a location and year. But where did this hummed melody come from?
Now, about 15 minutes of processing time in my long-term memory later: My wife was humming “Vis Fran Utanmyra” by the tragically short-lived Swedish pianist Jan Johansson. The piece is on his equally wonderful Jazz Pa Svenska album. Yes, who still listens to whole albums these days?!
The connection: I heard that song around 2008 in the evening, in the car in Canberra. My two-year-old daughter and I were picking up my wife from her late shift in an already ancient Subaru Forester. I switched on the radio and the song was already playing. I was immediately captivated by this haunting lo-fi music, but in the back-announce they mentioned neither the title nor the musician. So my research began.
I sniffed around various record shops for this gem (particularly JB Hi-Fi in Canberra with its massive CD selection). Hard to imagine now, but I hummed the tune to the staff. Listen to the song — it’s hardly mainstream. But somehow I figured out the title and artist. Can’t remember how. Sometimes the journey’s more vivid than the destination.
Of course I bought the CD and listened to it repeatedly over the following years. Maybe while doing so I thought about that perfectly ordinary evening and the drive through empty streets to the hospital in Woden. Maybe not. I can’t remember. I definitely haven’t heard the song for ten years.
Why is my wife humming it? She must have heard it somewhere in passing. But she’ll have a different memory anchor for it. I asked her where she knows the song from. She says: That’s Ludovico Einaudi. Close enough. But he’s deeply connected to my first daughter’s birth, so similar time-music memory.
Now I wonder: Will this ever happen with songs I just briefly play once on Spotify or Apple Music, because the selection is so vast and time for repeated listening so short? Pity. Maybe we should more consciously build our musical memory. Like the Aboriginal people here in Australia, who connect places and pathways to places with countless songs, always finding their way when they sing. Fascinating.
But right now it’s enough just to hear this beautiful song and be catapulted back to another time for a brief moment. Swedish jazz in Australia. Why did they even play this on the radio? Thank you.
From reinergaertner.de, est. 1997. Translated with the help of an AI that speaks better English than I do. Which isn’t saying much, after 25 years of Denglish.