Dear Jackie Cain--you inspired me

She was part of the great jazz duo Jackie & Roy, Mr. & Mrs. Bop. She died last week and it was a personal loss for me since she and her late husband Roy Kral opened the door for me to sophisticated, hip music. I was just 14 when I heard them do “East of Suez”; no lyrics just perfect, energetic scat harmony, the way they would do other jazz classics like “Pent Up House” and “Whisper Not”. I grew up in the era of tin pan alleys' demise: “How much is that doggie in the window” and “Mama will bark” The sounds in my home were tangos and the Ink Spots and my parent's comment that the music I liked was “noise”. Of course I also listened to the gold standard: Ella, Sarah and Billie, an admirer of Jackie who said of her, “She's my girl”. Jackie & Roy recorded more than 400 songs including “You inspire me”, “Darn that dream” and the witty “So it's Spring, so what?” where Jackie includes my favorite Russian word “nichevo”. I met them in Toronto, LA and San Francisco, a charming and uniquely talented couple. In Aristotle's treatise on rhetoric he says the lives of the young are about imagination and expectation, the old live by memory rather than hope. Jackie & Roy helped me crystallize my youthful hope for a creative and adventurous life which led me to live in three countries, travel the world and experience life to the fullest. Jackie & Roy are both gone now. She was 86 and I'm 79 but when I hear her sing we're both young again.