My father liked jazz. He played jazz records on a music system constructed by his friends from local radio.
The monaural speaker enclosure sat in the corner of the lounge like a shipping container, nobody could move it.
Possibly concrete was involved.
I would hear his jazz records through the wall as I lay in bed at night, and such was the intensity, I was not only attacked through the wall, but from the floor underneath the bed as well.
The jazz he played was pretty much down the middle: Tommy Dorsey and Stan Getz rather than John Coltrane or Cecil Taylor.
Nothing out towards the edge.
He did go and see Thelonious Monk when he came to Dunedin in 1965, but returned home disappointed.
Monk was musically incomprehensible, he said, he could have been smoking marijuana.
My dad liked singers, Lena Horne, and her Waldorf Astoria album, sat proudly in the middle of his vocal line-up, with the hoarse larynx of Louis Armstrong at one end, and the crooning martini slur of Dean Martin at the other.
I preferred the English beat groups, but I did enjoy Dean Martin's TV show, the way he slid across the top of the piano, glass in hand, before sliding off on to the floor like a pile of laundry, mumbling everybody loves somebody, some time, as he went.
Akif Keskin, an original Dunedin restaurateur - The Istanbul - later opened a restaurant in Hollywood, and Martin was a close friend, a regular guest in his final days.
Akif recalled Martin as a very lonely man sitting by himself every night staring into his plate.
Nobody was loving Dean Martin by that time.
I have retained a soft spot for all three of those singers since my father's turntable - its Connoisseur arm absurdly weighed down by a cellotaped penny - ground its way through their Dynagroove albums.
And over Labour Weekend at the Queenstown Jazz Festival, I was reminded of the qualities of all three.
What was even more compelling was all this came from just one singer: Garrick Tremain.
Readers will know Tremain as a cartoonist, public speaker, painter and writer.
A scant few even know him as a golfer.
Talent flows from this man like a river.
But I was staggered to find on Labour Sunday that he is a consummate musician as well.
Ironically, I nearly missed Tremain's gig, as I was on Arrowtown's Buckingham Green watching The Bellebirds barbershop quartette when he came over.
He was working his way through the large crowd giving people money to come and see him play Dixieland jazz with The Journeymen later that afternoon at The Tap.
I gratefully accepted his cash, a man needs walkaround money in Queenstown.
It was also a real bonus being paid to watch a musical performance.
That hadn't happened to me since I was flown to Wellington for Fleetwood Mac in 1980.
I wasn't disappointed.
Tremain had it all down.
He gave a huge crowd Armstrong's sentimental croak, Horne's sultry pizzazz, and Martin's louche lizardry, often all in the one song.
It was like my father was playing three records at once.
And incredibly, he played the piano as well! I'm the last man on earth to evaluate a pianist, having only studied piano for nine years and listened to it for five decades, but I definitely heard some incomprehensible Monk in there: Tremain not so much tickles the ivories as tinkers with the ivories.
And this is the thing - he plays and sings at the same time! Ridiculous.
Think of your jazz icons.
Did Art Tatum or Jelly Roll Morton sing? Does Jack Allpress play the piano? No.
I left The Tap with a song in my heart.
Where would I be today had the music of Garrick Tremain been whanged through my bedroom wall between Chattanooga Choo Choo and Honeysuckle Rose? Jazz.
It really sets a man to thinking.
Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
He and Garrick Tremain are old golfing adversaries.
