Listening to jazz…the highs, lows and smooth in-betweens, the notes slide and sway this way and that. Ah, Jazz. Horace Silver, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Fats Waller, Duke Ellington and ah yes, Ahmad Jamal sounds that make you shiver and wish there was a man of the hour to love.
Listening to jazz….ah, that sweet all authentic American sound….words like compelling and absolute wonder as someone says it feels as though you are ease dropping on private moments, love serenades, blessed waltzes, cherished times that fade too quickly.
Listening to jazz….soulful meandering melodies sweet and thick as molasses oozing forth from the mouths of true American beauties mothers of a nation of black folk, Sarah, Billy a strange fruit a sickening sweetness speaking of life at its rawness, its uncompromising lonesomeness found only in shared experiences that make you nod and agree.
Listening to jazz....the rap, tap staccato spells casted over sin sick souls lost in the wild wilderness of dark allies, dank corners, seedy hotels a musty smell so thick it can be cut with a knife or pierced through a hardened heart as though by a found .38. Stale liquor that is the life mixed with the unmistakable smell of horse trot, nod .
Listening to jazz….conjuring up a history long past. Slave times and rhythms from Congo Square. The pulsating heart beats of broken black men. Lester Young never really understood. Magical compositions springing forth from a dark and brooding soul. A pain, a heart broke from much too much and yet never enough. Still a black man in a white world. One could not live one without the other and there’s Billy…God bless the child.
Listening to jazz….ooo, John Coltrane take me there! That blow man, blow, transcending all things in the natural making it prayerful in the spirit world. Music breaking the blues boundaries. No wrong notes just every everything that’s right …that makes you feel something in a world that would like you to forget and numbed. Ah, jazz a few of my favorite things.
Listening to jazz…..free to be Arnett Coleman…..free floating sounds against a rhythm as old as time slapping bass and deeply hearing new discoveries of what goes with what.
Ah, jazz.
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