Our new release is a tune I wrote for my father Cal Leonard Martin. I didn’t really know him. I was not quite 4 when he died from a head injury. He was just shy of 29 years old. The cause was a fight, in the wee hours at Compton’s Cafe in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. The altercation most likely happened after playing music and/or being at one of the many music clubs. Alcohol was involved.
The little I do know is that he was born in Greenfield, Monterey County, California. He flew a crop duster airplane called “Buttercup” in the Salinas Valley, (one of the most productive agricultural areas in California). He played trumpet and clarinet and he worked in a music store in nearby Monterey before he enlisted in the Marine’s to fight in World War II at 17 years old. After the war he opened a Radio and TV repair shop in SF on Haight Street, a block from Asbury Street. The address on my birth certificate is a few doors down.
I figure what musical DNA I have, some of it, for sure, came from Cal. My mother had a sense of design and photography, but no musicality. Oddly, of my three sisters, I was the only one who got the music gene. So, though my father didn’t live long enough to know me, he gave me music. This tune is my thank you to him for that.
When the Mad Maggies first recorded Cal’s Waltz in 2006 we played it at a rather clippy 148 bpm which gives the tune a country waltz feel. In this new recording, we play it at a more grand ballroom tempo of 110 bpm. It’s nostalgic, with a touch of sadness of what might have been.