"WHAT 'HOP'"?....I GASPED...

Recently I was driving back from Northern California's Monterey Jazz Festival to San Francisco with my son, Solomon . It was hot, the freeway was crammed with vehicles and we were diggin' some serious hard bop jazz music on a CD called, The Definitive Clifford Brown. "Brownie," as he's known in jazz music circles, had a stellar cast of jazz musicians backing him on the date: There was Max Roach on drums, Harold Land on tenor Sax, Richie Powell on piano and rounding out the quintet was George Morrow on bass.

They had just finished playing Duke Jordan's classic composition "Jordu", followed by Cole Porter's "I Get a Kick Out of You," and Clifford's own tasty composition, "Joy Spring" was beginning to weave its way through the car's sound system just as  the traffic snarled to a stop. Slowly it began to worm forward and from somewhere behind us, we heard a muffled, thumping sound, so I lowered the speaker volume to check out the noise. It was getting closer and causing our Toyota Camry to shake.

Soon, a relentless, vibrating, boom! boom!boom! was right on top of us drowning out all sound...then an old 1960's model Ford Mustang sidled up on my left with its speakers throwing sonic booms left and right . It's lone occupant was hunkered down in the driver's seat like a scared GI in a fox hole trying to evade an enemy.

I felt the Ford inch by.

After Mustang GI Joe was gone, and my hearing had returned, I turned to Solomon, "What was that noise coming from the Ford's speakers?"

"Hip Hop." He answered nonchalantly.

"What 'Hop'"? I gasped. "There's nothing hip about that noise".

Regaining my cool, I turned "Joy Spring" back up on the sound system, and made a mental note to give anything called hip hop, a very wide berth in the future. I am not knocking any one's musical preference; people can listen to or play what they want, but personally, I'll stick to jazz music. It doesn't put cracks in the pavement, dislodge bricks from buildings, loosen lug nuts or destroy your hearing when it is played.