Music

Music

Music has always been one of the most important elements in my life, because of my dad.  I grew up in a home where music was cherished. My dad loves jazz which I wouldn’t embrace for some 50 years, but I did eventually get there in part due to a local jazz club, Squashed Grapes. But jazz wasn’t the only music I grew up listening to at home in Whittier. He also loved rock with a Latin sort of slant, Sergio Mendez and Brasil 66, Santana, Chicago, The Average White Band as well as the Motown sound.  We had a monster sound system that I learned at an early age to respect, from a distance at first, then slowly I was taught how to operate it.

So I grew up indoctrinated by my dad’s  musical tastes, but I did have my own transistor radio to listen to the top forty hits including the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Hendrix, Rolling Stones and the basic rock and roll of the day, which I in turn would introduce to him.  I was a huge Led Zeppelin fan in my teens, but my dad wouldn’t embrace them until the 80s, and then, OMG! Did he ever.  He would play Zeppelin at full blast having discovered their own brand of magic.

When my dad moved to Ventura he quickly found the jazz haunts including California 66 which close a dozen or so years ago, but soon he was attending shows at Squashed Grapes with me.

Some of his favorite artists in town include Jimmy Calire, Ruben Estrada and his son Cougar Estrada, Albert Lee, Shawn Jones, The Swillys and Kramer’s band, The Divebar Messiahs (not all jazz of course).

Pam