Chauffeur

Mecca For Moderns; The Manhattan Transfer

I sang in the South Dakota Honor’s Choir during the summer of 1982. The South Dakota Chapter of the American Choral Director’s Association held the event on the campus of Augustana College in Sioux Falls. My roommate during the week of rehearsals, Brian S., attended Washington High School, also in Sioux Falls, and relished the opportunity to be away from home for a week, even though a ride home from the college would last only seven minutes.

Both Brian and I sang in the Honor’s Choir the following summer as well. We had different roommates that year, but it was nice to see my friend again. We kept in touch for a few years.

In July of 1984, after I graduated from high school, Mom got called for jury duty in District Court in Sioux Falls. Wary of big city driving, Mom asked if I could drive her to court for the first couple of days until she got used to the route. After dropping her off at the court house, I decided to spend the rest of the day hanging out with Brian. I found out upon my arrival at his house that Brian spends the first hour of the day reading the newspaper. So when I arrived, he handed me the USA Today while he read the Argus Leader. I had never seen nor heard of the USA Today before. Readership hadn’t found its way to small town South Dakota yet.

After newspapers, Brian told me about the concert that he and his parents had tickets to attend down in Omaha on the following weekend. “The Manhattan Transfer’s comin’ to town.” Who? “The Manhattan Transfer.” That’s what I thought you said. What’s that? “You’ve got to be kidding me.” Sorry. I don’t listen to a lot of pop music. “Haven’t you heard of ‘Boy From New York City’?” Oh. Yeah. Yup, I’ve heard of that one. “THAT’S Manhattan Transfer. They’re a vocal jazz quartet. I think you’d like them. You should check them out.” Well, I guess “Boy From New York City” is an okay song. “Actually, real Manhattan Transfer fans pan that song.” Why? “They tried to become more mainstream with that song, kind of abandoning the genre and the fans that made them famous in the first place. But they came back to the pack.”

His family owned four of their albums, so over the course of the next few hours, I encountered Manhattan Transferance. As it turned out, Brian knew me pretty well. With my love for close harmony, such as I stumbled upon in my barbershop quartet, and my penchant for lush, extended harmonies, like those that I adored in the music of Rachmaninoff and Debussy, this musical group only lived a few houses down from what I tended to listen to anyway.

So, the next day, after delivering Mom to the District Court House, I brought some blank cassette tapes to Brian’s house. And, after reading the newspapers for about an hour, we recorded the music of this exceptional ensemble onto my blank cassette tapes, until such a time as I could purchase their CD’s in order to burn them onto something called an iPod.

In October of 1984, I saw that the Carlton Celebrity Room in Bloomington, MN, had booked the Manhattan Transfer for a Saturday night concert. So, five of us took a road trip to hear this fantastic quartet. The high point in the concert came on the second encore when they sang “A Nightingale Sang In Barkeley Square”, completely a capella.

When we first drove into town, I called Cousin W. to let her know that we had arrived. She told me that she had just heard on the radio, a few moments before I called, the Manhattan Transfer on the Prairie Home Companion singing an original advertisement for Powder Milk Biscuits.

Credits: To the Carlton Celebrity Room in Bloomington, MN, now defunct, but who provided for many years, in the days before casinos, a venue for world-class musicians and performers to share their music with devoted fans. Now you’re a mall. That’s good, too.