Linda Carlson, actress.
She was the TV station owner on “Newhart” and a judge on “Murder One”, among other roles. I was not aware there was a 1993 “Beverly Hillbillies” movie, nor did I know there was an attempt at an “African Queen” TV series. She also did an episode of “Space: Above and Beyond” and appeared in “Honey, I Blew Up The Kid” for those of you looking for genre credits.
Pat Martino, jazz guitarist. This is a little outside of my usual beat (ha!) but it sits at a point I find fascinating: the relationship between music and the brain.
In 1967, when he was in his early 20s, he released his first album, “El Hombre,” on the Prestige label, and a series of well-regarded records followed. At the start of his career he often drew comparisons to earlier jazz guitarists like Wes Montgomery, but by the 1970s he was forging his own sound. “Pat Martino: Breaking Barriers Between Rock & Jazz,” a 1975 headline in The San Francisco Examiner read.
On a tour supporting his first albums for Warner Bros., “Starbright” (1976) and “Joyous Lake” (1977), Mr. Martino began experiencing frequent headaches and seizures, something he had dealt with occasionally since childhood. One seizure came while he was onstage in France in 1976.
“I stopped playing and stood there for about 30 seconds,” he wrote in his autobiography, “Here and Now!” (2011, with Bill Milkowski). “During these moments of seizure, it feels like you’re falling through a black hole; it’s like everything just escapes at the moment.”
Cutting to the chase, he had brain surgery, but was left with total amnesia.
“When you don’t remember something, you have no idea of its existence,” he wrote. “And upon awakening after the surgery, I remembered nothing.
“But it wasn’t a disorienting feeling,” he continued. “If I had known I was a guitarist, if I had known those two people standing by my bedside in the hospital were in fact my parents, I then would’ve felt the feelings that went along with the events. What they went through and why they were standing there looking at me then would’ve been very painful for me. But it wasn’t painful because to me they were just strangers.”
His parents helped him relearn his past, showing him family photographs and playing him his own albums. Picking up the guitar again was another form of memory recovery.
“I had to start from Square 1,” he told The Edmonton Journal of Alberta, Canada, in 2004. “But once I made the decision to try, it activated inner intuitive familiarities, like a child who hasn’t ridden their bicycle for many years and tries to do so again to reach a destination. There are moments of imbalance, but it’s subliminal, and it emerges after some mistakes, and then it strengthens.”
By the mid-1980s he was performing again. Jon Pareles, reviewing one performance, at Fat Tuesday’s in Manhattan in 1986, found Mr. Martino as virtuosic and unpredictable as ever.
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In his autobiography, he described the process of recovering the ability to play.
“As I continued to work out things on the instrument,” he wrote, “flashes of memory and muscle memory would gradually come flooding back to me — shapes on the fingerboard, different stairways to different rooms in the house. There are secret doorways that only you know about in the house, and you go there because it’s pleasurable to do so.”
The records he made after his surgery included “All Sides Now” (1997), on the Blue Note label, an album on which he shared tracks with other famed guitarists, including Mr. Paul. Two of his albums, also on Blue Note, were nominated for Grammy Awards, “Live at Yoshi’s” (2001) and “Think Tank” (2003).
His surgery and the recovery period, Mr. Martino said, changed what he was after in his music.“It used to be to do everything I possibly could to become more successful in my craft and my career,” he told the Edmonton paper. “Today, my intention is to completely enjoy the moment and everything it contains.”
I can only imagine the difficulty of relearning to play an instrument that you had mastered to the level of someone like Pat Martino. I am not certain, but I think that my parents had one of his albums in their collection of records.
I have mentioned that I played saxophone, and after awhile, you get to where you no longer think about the notes or the fingerings, but instead, become more like one with the instrument, and the sound, and sort of float above the music, at least with improv. jazz, of course, most sax players first love. And so when just noodling around, that is what I would play, on my own, and to think of then having to go back and start from the beginning and relearn each fingering, and how to not only play from the basics, but to progress to getting to sound more professional, it had to be tough.
I know that I only started to sound somewhat like a professional after a solid 2 years of playing at least 25 or more hours a week, after I was playing with a band. The little bit I played in school was enough to get me decent for a high school kid, but to actually sound like a pro, you either need a good teacher, or like me, you have to practice, and play, every day. Some weeks, I played my instrument more than I did my day gig, of 40 hours.
The one thing that I think I regret the most about spending my life in a manual labor job, in a foundry, isn’t that I wasted my intellect, or anything like that, it is that my hearing is shot. And with ringing in both ears at 3 different tones, I can’t play as well as I used to with others. I guess that I am not much different than when I was a kid! lol
I just saw this, and had to mention it. Jay Black of Jay and the Americans passed away.
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/jay-black-jay-and-the-americans-singer-dead-obit-1247111/