I am beginning to re-engage with my ‪music‬, with ‪‎singing‬, with my ‪‎voice‬.

I haven't made any music formally since August. Honestly, aside from breaking out into a medley of songs I have sung in the past at bus stops, I haven't even been singing much at all. Sometimes, I wonder if I'll remember how my voice feels in my body again. This is plain and utter torture from which I have been needing to depart. Not knowing where to begin, I decided to start with my old tatty fake book that I bought about 20 years ago from a fake book dealer.

Back then, you had to buy the book from a dealer. There was no Amazon and you couldn't get it from a music store. You had to know a guy, or a guy who knew a guy. It had something to do with copyrights. The book's transcriptions weren't licensed (no royalties were dished out to the artists whose songs appeared in the book). It might still be illegal. Wikipedia certainly thinks so. Reading down the comments on some of the Amazon links to the fake books (that's what we always called them -- on Amazon, look for 'Real Book'), it looks like due to copyright law, you might never really get an original Fake Book like I have. I mean, you might get something pretty similar, which is probably good enough. 

In any case, I had been singing with a vocal jazz ensemble in Oregon at the time and our conductor, Dave Barduhn, knew a guy. The cost might have been 35 bucks, maybe 40. I don't even remember, now. It was a stretch for me to come up with the funds but I felt that it really was something I needed to do. I wasn't sure when the dealer was going to come around again. 

I had also committed myself at that time to jazz. I wanted to do what all the jazzers did, especially the horn players I had been hanging out with since the summer before my senior year in high school. I felt obligated to learn the songs, arpeggiate all the chords on staff paper, breathe in as many versions of each of the songs as I could and then make them my own.

The dealer wrote out the receipt and gave me the Real Vocal Book. I remember holding it as if it would break. It felt like some sort of initiation to me even if the transaction seemed super quick.

As I walked away, the dealer shouted after me, "Learn every single one of 'em. Memorize every tune."

I always meant to do that but then life. . . . 

It wasn't until maybe a week ago, I saw the book out of the corner of my eye from the bookshelf. Dogeared, weather worn, some of the pages just barely hanging on, some others marked for performances, and even others with notes on the pages of what to remember, or what I'd been forgetting. I remembered that fake book dealer and I remembered how dear to me music is. I connected that with a need to sing and a need to just start and have some kind of focus of my own that had nothing to do with anyone else's projects or what I thought I should be doing to chase singing for the sake of singing (I'll probably write on that more at some point). The book would give me that. I could trudge through at my own pace, learn the songs, their histories, the originating and key artists and so on. I could also add to what I know and see where I have been.

And so, that's what I'm doing. One song at a time, I'm just getting them into me, singing them a little or a lot and as slow or as quickly as I need to. I'm starting with my tattered book, not even skipping pages, not even thinking of my favorite songs to sing or listen to.