Lush Life, the first song on my father’s final album, runs eight minutes and eight seconds long. The live recording is billed as Kevin Toney and Friends, but this opening salvo is about him. Besides his adept command of the ivories, you only hear laughter as he improvises playfully in parts. Then, at the end, he speaks, his voice as confident and bright as his performance, like rays of morning sunlight. I’m listening to the whole album as I type this.
It’s the first anniversary of his death today. As clouds, cold, wind, and rain arrived in Los Angeles last week, so did melancholy. It has been nearly a week since I wrote in my journal, avoiding whatever emotion might escape from my fingers on the keyboard I’m most comfortable playing. I have been replaying last year’s events, imagining them as giant dominoes tumbling and unable to escape their path. I hear each block fall, the sound echoing in my ears, the shadow and threat growing ever larger. As it happened, I worried about the weight of it all. I worried so much that my body expressed it as ailments, first shingles and then appendicitis. However, when my mother called to tell me the news, I wasn’t crushed under those tumbling blocks; I was uplifted by the relief that his suffering was over.
Grief is a never-ending journey, however, and that weight has returned. There is so much uncertainty in the world, and it is the terrible realization that one of the things I am sure of is that Kevin Toney isn’t here to experience it with us. While he brought joy to so many through his music, I am mourning his absence in our family’s everyday lives. His exuberance for youthful delights and overt expressions of love are absent. We have our memories, and we may seek to substitute what he did and how he did it with our versions, but my dad’s way was his way, and there’s no replacing that, no matter how much we might want it.
My sister has entered the recording and is performing a jazzy rendition of her song I Can’t Take That. The song is about the end of a romance with the lyrics, “Hurt doesn’t go away, the memories will never fade.” Later, she vamps and riffs around the refrain, “It left me distraught.”
Tears aren’t easy for me, but this sadness is worth crying over. Yesterday evening, as the sun set and I sat in my car in a scene reminiscent of Monday, March 18th, 2024, when that fateful call came, I accepted my feelings and allowed them in. There was nothing to do but to be with that hurt and submit to its heft. I was neither crushed by the weight of that pain nor comforted.
I was, and grief was. I am, and grief is.
This morning, though, with light coming through my windows, there was something else: a desire to hear his voice and his gifts. Kevin Toney and his friends are performing Duke Ellington’s In A Sentimental Mood. There is one more song left on this live recording. My father is acknowledging Azar Lawrence on saxophone as the crowd cheers.
That’s it.
While I may be in a sentimental mood at this moment, I’m no longer distraught. Those giant dominoes have been replaced with the black and white patterns of piano keys, and with my dad at the helm, what emanates is never a threat.
Kevin Toney’s legacy is a sound of love.
