I had a job where I sat at my computer with a headset on listening to the afternoon jazz show on the college radio station.

When they had a quiz, I'd win a CD.

I won a lot of jazz CDs for Balder. He was into jazz, playing trumpet and all.

Once, I won two tickets to go hear Wynton Marsalis at the Saenger Theater, in Pensacola. Balder and I went.

Marcus Roberts opened for him, playing from his new CD, Alone With Three Giants.

That was a good record.

One year Balder and I went to Jazz Fest in New Orleans.

Larry and Hazel loaned Balder my old bebop records. He made tapes of them and photocopied the liner notes, then returned them.

It was a trip down Memory Lane, for me. I remembered being in the Air Force band, in Waco, buying the jazz lps in Japan, tax-free.

By this time I was listening to jazz less and less.

There weren't that many places to go and hear it. After the college radio station went over to an all-talk format, you couldn't hear it on the radio anymore, in Panama City.

I listened to a progressive bluegrass, bands like the Dreadful Snakes, David Grisman's Dawg Music, anything with Vassar Clements on it, anything with Stephane Grapelli.

One band we could see locally at the Boggy Bayou Mullet Festival in Niceville was the Newgrass Revival.

We listened to Strength in Numbers on record.

We wore those records out.

Mind you, I still liked jazz, but I didn't feel like the people who were playing jazz liked me. Some of the younger ones said so.

Also, I thought some of the jazz musicians who were making a living at it were either old masters who were finally being recognized or younger musicians playing recycled Jazz Messenger licks. They were technically brilliant, but they were not advancing the art-form as the innovators I liked had. They sounded like Japs, playing John Coltrane licks, as soon as the record was off the boat. But John Coltrane was dead.

And he wouldn't have stood still.