NONFICTION - April 23, 1995

DROWNING IN THE SEA OF LOVE: Musical Memoirs by Al Young (Ecco Press: $24; 273 pp.). Here’s poet and musician Al Young, then a child, recalling an encounter with “Flyin’ Home” in a Detroit club in the 1940s: “You didn’t have to crawl, limp, walk, swim, or row. You didn’t have to hitch up no wagon to no mule, or sit up all night on some train with a boxed chicken lunch. . . . No, you didn’t have to go through all that to get to heaven with Lionel Hampton’s band. You plunked down for your ticket, you got yourself either an aisle or a window seat, and, depending on your needs, you either clicked your seat belt into place or took your own sweet chances, but, doggone it, you took the trip direct. . . .” “Drowning in the Sea of Love,” which consists of 60 vignettes mostly drawn from Young’s previous collections of musical memoirs, does feel like an after-midnight gig, one based on the idea that “music can become a powerful way of remembering.” Young’s musical interests center on jazz and the blues, with the occasional foray into pop and classical, and a great many celebrate--like the Hampton riff quoted above--music’s ability to transcend, and sometimes just capture, the ordinary. On jazz itself, pianist Ben Webster playing Duke Ellington: “Barely touched elegance . . . you’re seductively reduced to essences, and then to essence.” On Bix Beiderbecke, the white cornet player heard on a 1927 recording: “Play it one more time, Bix, so I can cascade down your waterfall and up again all on my own.” Talking with John Lee Hooker in Palo Alto (of all places) on the blues you can get playing modern blues for white audiences; says Hooker, “I play a lot of stuff now I really don’t like playing,” namely “fast boogie.” “Drowning in the Sea of Love” doesn’t only concern music--there are odd, interesting takes on Berkeley in the 1960s, and an unexpected piece on cartoonist Gary Larson--but Young shows pretty clearly that if there is one universal language, music is it.