Spring awakening

The singer with a name out of a Roald Dahl novel

I’m not used to this feeling. The sun is bright, the birds are singing, the squirrels are already nipping at the rising leaves of the tulips - and it’s only early March. I expect to feel beaten down by this point, sick of winter and despairing at the lingering (or, worse, fresh) snow and ice. Instead, my head and nose are stuffed already from allergies, and outside it looks like this:

Spring is the overlooked season in my part of the Great Lakes. Summer makes its presence known with heavy humidity and warm nights, and hovers into September. Fall is sometimes cut short by a messy, abrupt, slushy end, but until then, it’s colourful. Winter takes more than its due, lingering like the proverbial three-plus-day houseguest. My garden is spring-loaded, meaning in some years, when temperatures hover in single-Celsius-digits until vaulting way up to +15 and staying there, most of it blooms within a matter of weeks. So I’m not sure what to do with a month of March that comes in like a lamb and continues to just, like, gambol.

As Holly Cole sings on the tape that I once wore out from OCD-level repeat listening, spring can really hang you up the most.

I’m not sure when or how I discovered Blossom Dearie. I do know I heard a recording of something she’d sung, and sought out an album. Then another. One CD I bought had a photo of her, but it was filtered in a green colour and half-covered with type, and I never looked closely, so was surprised when doing research to see her blonde hair. Her voice is higher than Holly Cole’s dark tones, and her delivery so impeccable it sounds like it’s tossed off, so is very clearly not. She was a pianist and songwriter herself, and the first to record this standard, though it’s not one of her own compositions.

“They Say It’s Spring” is a less melancholy, perhaps equally bemused, take on spring, and it comes with a warning about the treacherous autumn to come:

They say it's spring
For lovers, there's where the lure is
That evil thing
For which September the cure is

There’s a shout-out to [tortured] poets:

If poets sing
That when a hard sympathetic
It's merely spring
Then poets plights are pathetic
Though I'm poetic too

Someone I know mentioned seeing Blossom Dearie in a jazz club in Manhattan in the early 2000s. I was astonished when I heard this — she was still alive? But in reality, she started recording only in the late 1950s, and was in her late seventies in the early part of the 21^st century, younger than Mick Jagger is now.

Looking more into Blossom Dearie, I wonder if I actually heard her much earlier, without realizing it. I remember “Conjunction Junction” from Schoolhouse Rock – a show I was too young to watch or understand, but that lived on in re-runs for years – and, of course, was re-introduced to “Three is the Magic Number” by De La Soul’s masterful reinterpretation

. I don’t remember this mournful number about multiplying eights, but who knows? Maybe it’s what led me to Blossom Dearie as an adult. And in any case, it’s got its grips on me now.