Thara Memory's New CD Captures His Mind and His Spirit

Thara Memory had a trumpet in his left hand. With the other he was gesturing to the musicians gathered around him in the rehearsal hall of the Musicians Union in NE Portland one bleak morning last week.

Janice Scroggins was at the old upright piano. Derek Sims was on trumpet, Renato Caranto was on tenor sax, Stevie Ray Mays played bass and Israel Annoh was on drums…five of the ten musicians he will have in his band at Jimmy Mak’s this Saturday, January 26, for a CD release concert.

Memory, as is his nature, was part conductor, part teacher, both intellectual and street. He traded abuse with Mays, chided Sims for playing too many notes, stopped a tune in the middle to tell Annoh to "swing the hi-hat." Paused to tell them all, "I'm coming back!" pointing out how he is getting a new set of lower teeth, and telling them that he was going to try a new treatment for one of the symptoms of diabetes that has ravaged him.

Yet he was forever Thara: smarter than you, can play better than you, knows everything from Beethoven to James Brown to Clifford Brown and back again. And if you're gonna play in his band, you're going to do it right.

The double CD album, Chronicles, is four years in the making and it is stunning. "The whole album is the adventures in my life," he told me. "To make sure that the beats didn't get lost. Many of them have. I listen for them, but the guys who are making beats now are not even thirty years old yet, they don't have any sense of history."

That's not old-school whining. That's the disturbing word from one still out on the frontiers.

Those beats are jazz, soul and funk. Anybody who has ever heard Thara's bands knows that he can throw down the funk as tough as anyone ever has, fly through hard bop with breathtaking agility, and play smooth soul music tender enough to make you cry.
It's all here.

Included on the album are four parts of a suite, "Alright Here We Go…" They are called "Hungerford H.S. Marching Band" after his high school near Orlando, Florida. That school set Thara on his musical journey.

"It had a very inclusive music program," he remembered. "We did everything. We played jazz in the marching band…concert band music…kept up with the new Ray Charles things, Miles things. It didn’t make any difference to us. We arranged, wrote, sang, danced…whatever was necessary. When I graduated from high school, I had two years of college training under my belt."

Caranto, trombonist Stan Bock, and Thara himself take sparkling solos, particularly Caranto on soprano sax, an instrument on which he's not as well known.

It's tempting to say that this album sums up the life of Thara Memory, given the state of his health. I choose not to think that way. His fire still lights up a room, and it will at Jimmy Mak's.

This was written for livepdx.com and appears there.