I, like many others in the past year, have been giving a lot of thought to productive leisure and hobbies, both old and new. Some have stuck (studying Vietnamese, running with intention) while others proved too ambitious (illustration by oil pastel, film photography). Yet as time passes as it must—I’m 24 and not getting any younger, you see—the thought of taking up something totally new is violently impeded upon by the consideration that, of course, I’ll never catch up to the guy who’s been doing it forever. That’s no way to think, but it’s hard to shake nonetheless.
This is just an overly-drawn-out introduction to a highly-specific fact about a late bloomer I recently came across.
Following the crowd (if the Instagram story function is an accurate sample, at least), I took in my year-end Spotify listening analytics with interest. I’m usually not a data nut, but, hey, it’s worth a look. It was, for the most part, predictable, though one artist was out of place in my top five. During a short-lived, pseudo-lockdown of this year’s spring in Vietnam, I spent a lot of time reading old Carl Hiaasen mystery novels set in South Florida and listening to records by the late American vibraphonist and bandleader Cal Tjader. So, I decided to learn a little more about the man in question.
Tjader has been called, ‘the most successful non-Latino Latin musician,” but he had more than a few other gigs. If his catalogue raisonné is anything to go by, Tjader was ambitious and unafraid to experiment with either genre or geography (a sense of humor, I’d surmise, is also key in this endeavor). Tjader belongs to a class of West Coast jazz guys who, it seems, didn’t necessarily have a problem picking a country and taking it out for a spin in album form (think Charlie Byrd in Brazil or The Latin Side of Vince Guaraldi. For Tjader, this meant releases with names like Cal Tjader Plays the Contemporary Music of Mexico and Brazil, Cuban Fantasy, and Breeze from the East , “the vibist's [Tjader's] Latin lounge style with kitschy Asian touches”). Anyway, Tjader is among the best vibe guys to ever do it.
Given his reputation, I was surprised to find out Tjader didn’t take up the vibraphone until he had already been working as Dave Brubeck’s drummer. So, mid-way through working with one of San Francisco’s most successful trios, he taught himself the vibes and then took off as an artist who would go on to, in the eyes of many, redefine the instrument’s role. I tend to think of heavy jazz guys as lifelong students of a given instrument and prodigious specialists, steeped in something so deeply and for so many years as for it to become second nature. Sure, there’s no substitution for coming of age in one of the defining scenes of the twentieth century, but, no matter who you are, taking hold of the vibes doesn’t happen overnight.
Anyway, I’ll probably keep listening to Cal Tjader and try to remember the fact that, ‘Hey, there’s still time!’