No More Daylight Savings Time. What?!

I am opposed to Daylight Savings Time. We need more music of the night. How about Night Savings Time?

This is true, baby. It is night time when you hear the beautiful music. The world’s great concert halls and the symphony orchestras that pour out the banked up work of our musical geniuses of the centuries do not happen at mid-morning.

The great music of the night goes off after dark.

The jazz player will tell you that it’s damned hard to get the creative juices going at noon. We go hear jazz after dark – at night clubs! That is when it happens! Right? Count Basie’s Band was built playing this schedule at the Reno Club: start at 9 pm and play until 4 am.

A lot more than the music happens after dark, you know. You look across the table and search deeply into her eyes and there is a thing in there that causes you not to be able to look away for she is giving you something you have never known before and you don’t know what it is yet, but whatever it is you are not nearly as likely to see it at the coffee shop at 7:30 am with the hard sunlight blinding you through the plate glass.

No, this kind of thing, and every human hungers for it, almost always happens at night. For the night is when we drink the fine red wine in the delicate bowl-shaped stemmed glass. And we also drink up what she is saying with her eyes. All this stuff that goes into the big container we label “romance” happens almost always at night.

To get down to it – the love-making is not going to be happening at mid-morning either. At least, not much!

How about the candle light, the great dinners, the phases of the moon, the searching of the stars in the heavens? I can go on. You get the idea.

At mid-summer, we jazzers start up the first hot tunes at 8:30 pm and it is still daylight at the night club. You know, we set our clocks back to make the daylight stretch. But we all know the good stuff happens after dark. Maybe more daylight is what some of us want. I think it is a bad idea. It just happens to us, and I’m not sure anybody much thinks about the why of it.

They say it started during the World War II when the country was absolutely back-to-the-wall desperate for more production. But the war has been over for 65 years!

Why are we so anxious for more daytime hours? What happens in the day anyway? Most of us struggle and beat ourselves up in the traffic and feel bad and are not in happy moods and work frantically, talking constantly on our cell phones and driving while we do it. In the daytime, we eat standing up, sling down one more cup. The only music we might hear is on the car radio, or if you are a kid you may have it pumped through “Apple” gadgets straight into your ears. This is between text messages, and you’re certainly never hearing it straight from a Stradivarius as the practiced master’s hand guides the bow across the double stops, the perfect intonation making the violin speak with a soft growl.

Now, I am not saying that making it get dark earlier will fix everything so that we prioritize for music and for love.

No, I’m not saying that. But I am saying that if we didn’t mess with the clock and hold off the night, life might be a little more fun and that is worth a lot!

Maybe we should move the clock the other way, so that it got dark even earlier.

If we did that, life just might, in a generation or two, get to be a lot more fun with more of the good stuff such as real jazz bands playing in night clubs.

How about it? What do you think?