When I heard the news that Eric Jackson left us, I was hit with a heavy dose of nostalgia from my youth. I was an eager teenage musician in the 1980s, growing up near Boston. WGBH was one of the few stations that I had preset on my FM tuner, and it was mostly to listen to Eric in the Evening. This was my first true education in jazz music, and Jackson's expert curation of artists and albums had a large impact on my own musical tastes. I will always be grateful.
It is difficult for young people to understand what it was like to build a library of recordings in the pre-internet days. You had to buy, or borrow albums. I had very little money, so my collection was small and every record was precious. It was also hard to know what to buy, so you relied on friends and mentors to recommend "the good stuff." Although we never met, Eric Jackson was my friend and mentor.
I usually listened with a cassette loaded into the recorder, ready to jump at anything that struck me. Sometimes, I would record a minute or two and then decide it wasn't for me. Other times, I would go back and listen to a track over and over again, until I could either find the album at the public library, or scrape up the money to buy it. One particular evening, Jackson gave me a pole star that steers my ship to this day: Mingus Changes.
I was probably in the eighth grade, so I was just learning to play the saxophone. When the ferocious George Adams exploded through my speakers, it was as if time had stopped. Adams' virtuosity spilled out all over the place, but it was the way that the technique connected with his soulful, bluesy approach that really hit me in the chest. In the stillness of that evening in my little suburban bedroom, I received "the call." I knew that I would be a professional saxophonist and that nothing could stop me, if only I could unlock the mysteries of George Adams and Charles Mingus. Here is the track that knocked me over: Remember Rockefeller at Attica.
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