Easy on the ears

I’m no audiophile — which means I haven’t spent anything bigger than four figures to pamper my ears — and, until recently, I couldn’t tell a tweeter from a woofer if my life depended on it. This, I’ll admit, is one of the great gaps in my education in the modern manly arts. While some Pinoys might plow a year’s salary into transforming their cars into boomboxes on wheels, or their homes into Sensurround theaters, I content myself with what I can literally get between my ears — which means to say, whatever music I can put on my iPhone (doubling as an iPod) and pipe through my earphones.

I’ve always liked listening to music — back in high school, when earphones were a single pod the shape and size of an acorn connected to a transistor radio as large as a shoebox — I curled up in the crook of a jackfruit tree in our backyard, listening to the Dave Clark Five, the Monkees, Gary Lewis and the Playboys, and, of course, the Fab Four (whom I almost listened to live during their July 4, 1966 gig here, but that’s another story). The sound was tinny, but since you didn’t know any better, you had nothing to complain about. You could have something called Hi-Fi on a turntable — I could swear that those shiny records not only hissed and crackled but also bore this peculiar smell, but that was probably just all those hot tubes simmering inside the wooden cabinet.

Today, thanks to the iPod and its precursors and successors, everything you need will fit into your shirt or pants pocket. Where you had to raid flashlights for batteries in a fix, or crawl under tables to stick a plug into the wall, you can now carry whole orchestras and concerts in a matchbox and listen to them the whole day and half the night.

I’d actually forgotten what a pleasure it was to choose and listen to one’s favorite music until I started playing poker seriously (too seriously, for someone of my middling talent). If you go to a poker room, you’ll see that half the people at the table are wearing baseball caps, shades, and earphones —presumably to ward off any distractions, but actually to look like, well, serious poker players. I started wearing earphones, and — given my dismal tournament record — I think I forgot about the seriousness of the poker somewhere along the way and actually listened to the music. (It’s also hard to be taken seriously when the guys around you are wearing caps screaming “2007 World Poker Tour” or “Full Tilt Poker” and yours says “Discovery Travel & Living.”)

There are some singers, musicians, and composers whose music I can listen to all day and never tire of: Frank Sinatra and Barbra Streisand, naturally for a baby boomer like me, but also Lisa Ono and Luis Miguel, Earl Klugh, Michel Legrand, Burt Bacharach, and Broadway show tunes, not to mention, yes, Sharon Cuneta, APO, and ’70s-’80s OPM.

My tastes are unabashedly middle of the musical road, where things are easy on the ears; the rowdiest piece I have is probably the now-grandfatherly Rolling Stones’ Satisfaction. Most of the time, I’ll be chasing flushes and straights to the sound of Lisa Ono cooing a bossa-nova-ish I Wish You Love, Luis Miguel warbling Sabor a Mi, Joan Baez and the Indigo Girls essaying Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right, Jean Pierre Rampal’s flute weaving ribbons around Claude Bolling’s jazz piano on Sentimentale, Yo-Yo Ma romancing his cello on Doce de Coco, and APO wooing the sullen lover on Ewan.

 Speaking of APO, in the middle of writing this piece, I ran into and struck up a chat with composer, photographer, and fellow STAR columnist Jim Paredes, who turned out to be a huge fan of Brazilian music, and he gave me a list of names to look up, which I will: Dori Caymmi, Maria Bethania, Trio Esperança, and Joyce Moreno. Despite my paltry Spanish and nonexistent Portuguese, Latin — indeed, non-English — music accounts for a big chunk of my music library.

I’d always wanted to know what was being professed in La Vie en Rose, Sabor a Mi, Dein Ist Mein Ganzes Herz, and Non Dimenticar, and now that I do they resonate even more strongly, but I never could have imagined that “Amapola” was a poppy flower. So I’ve taken to looking up the lyrics to some of my favorite foreign tunes, so I could sing along or at least hum intelligently along to them, aware of the dramatic situation, especially to the operatic staples (no, I’ve never been to a live opera — another big hole in my cultural education, to which I should add, while I’m at it, a live ballet performance). I can now better appreciate the nuances of “Al alba, vincero” at the end of Nessun Dorma, savor the exoticism of Flower Duet, and cheer the pledge to undying friendship that the two friends make in the Pearl Fishers Duet.

For one reason or other, I can’t get duets out of my head — from People Will Say We’re In Love from Oklahoma and I Might Frighten Her Away from Lost Horizon to Richard Tan and Bambi Roxas on Kailangan Ko, Kailangan Mo. Indeed, when you see my noggin bobbing like a metronome from side to side, that’s probably me listening to Doris Day and Bing Crosby on Baby, It’s Cold Outside, with me mouthing the male portion. Once upon a time, before smoking seared my throat, I used to imagine myself as Rolf in The Sound of Music singing Sixteen Going on Seventeen to a virginal Charmian Carr, but at 57 going on 58, I’d sound like a pervert if I kept at it today.

When I’m not looking to get excited, I have a playlist I call my “Ton-Ton” music, findable in most catalogues as “New Age” — you know, those long tracks with birds chirping, brooks gurgling, and wind chimes tinkling in the background. I put it on when I go with Beng to our suki Ton-Ton massage parlor for our weekly foot rubs, before we hit the ukay-ukay next door; I’m snoring in three minutes, and inevitably I feel cheated when I wake up to find that a whole billable hour has passed without my having savored each individual toe pull.

And to think that I work all week so I can pay for these massages. I should win more often at the poker tables, but the music isn’t helping any.

* * *

E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.