I don’t know if you’ve ever felt this way, but once I hit my thirties, I began to wonder if all my great artistic discoveries in life were over. Had I seen all the great movies? Had I read all the great books and heard all the great songs? Is everything from now on just a sequel, a watered down version of the original?

Tonight I was in the grocery store. Like always they were playing music over their speaker system. Normally, I pay little attention to what is playing. It isn’t that it’s bad. Maybe I tap my fingers a little as I cruise my cart up and down the aisles. But everything they play is like a pop classic. I’ve heard it all before. It’s not bad, it’s just nothing new. Well, tonight the song “New Frontier” by Donald Fagen started to play. Now, I remember this song from when I was a kid. I must have been nine or ten when the tune came out, but I loved it back then. I memorized every line. It had been years since I’ve heard it, but even tonight I found myself mouthing the words to the song. I never forgot those great lyrics.

Yes we’re gonna have a wingding
A summer smoker underground
It’s just a dugout that my dad built
In case the reds decide to push the button down
We’ve got provisions and lots of beer
The key word is survival on the new frontier
The imagery of it still gets me. I could even recall that great album cover.

Even the album cover evokes a certain Evening Melancholy feel. It is when the song got to the following lyrics that I realized something:

I hear you’re mad about Brubeck
I like your eyes I like him too
He’s an artist, a pioneer
We’ve got to have some music on the new frontier

Now, at nine or ten I had already been exposed to jazz, but didn’t know it was jazz or that the reason why I loved Charlie Brown cartoons or the television show “Taxi” were, in part, because of the music. Vince Guaraldi made those Charlie Brown specials great. The ones that came after Guaraldi’s input were good because of the material, but they were not great, in my opinion. The Guaraldi tunes cemented their greatness. The opening theme to “Taxi” is so infectious. Maybe it does begin to cross over into jazz fusion. I don’t know. All I know is that I love that song. I believe the title is “Angela” by Bob James. So I liked jazz, even then, but I didn’t know it was jazz. I definitely didn’t know who Dave Brubeck was. So when I heard “New Frontier” and I heard the lyrics about Brubeck, an artist, a pioneer, I figured he must be one hell of a painter. It was only tonight that I realized he was talking about the great jazz musician.

To make a long story even longer, that was what I was getting at with the title of this entry. A song I enjoyed almost twenty five years ago had a completely different meaning to me then than today. I loved it then and perhaps I love it even more now because the references make sense. “Casablanca” was a good movie when I was a teenager, but after I sank my teeth into World War II and as I saw more and more movies and read screenplays, I came to discover a whole new movie. Good became great. “The Germans wore grey. You wore blue.” Just the poetry of it bowled me over. With the station I am constantly discovering new artists, new songs, new listeners. What would life be without discoveries? Whether it’s art or other people or even ourselves. Having our eyes opened from time to time can definitely make life more interesting, and at times, more palatable.