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Edgar Cool's "Number One" Miles Davis is my choice for "Jazz Cat" of all time. His tone,depth of feeling and inovation, sends us to Jazz Heaven in a cool stretch limousine that has room enough for all the "Cats" in the band. With Miles we say "So What" to the world. We can deal with the world. We are "Miles Ahead". Miles, you are still here when we are "Kind of Blue" or when the "Blue in Green" is "All Blue", when "Stella by Starlight" meets "Freddy the Freeloader" on "Green Dolphin Street" we have a "Two Bass Hit" or "Miles of Smiles". "Someday My Prince Will Come". It will be a "Miles Stone". Playing our axes we do a "Flamenco Sketch". It's a "Willo the Wisp" in the "Summertime". "I Loves You Porgy". "Bess You My Woman Now". "I Don't Wanna Be Kissed". "Quiet Nights" Blow cool, Miles! "Number Two" Lawrence Lipton in his book about the Beat Generation "The Holy Barbarians" stated: "Before the invention of printing, poetry was still largely a vocal art. Ever since its beginnings in the ritual drama, when the poet was prophet, seer, shaman, priest, judge, bard, singly or in varying combinations, poetry was something to be spoken, chanted, or sung with music and often as not, with dance." In the written form, poetry can be incomplete. As Lipton quoted Harry Thornton Moore: "The sound of poetry is part of the meaning." In the 1950's Rexroth and Ferlinghetti brought their poetry to public performance accompanied by jazz. This reflected poetry in its oral tradition. The sounds and rhythms of jazz and the sounds and rhythms of poetry yield another ancient & contemporary art form. The rappers of today continue the marriage of rhythm words and rhythm music. All these forms express their beliefs & how they live. Sometimes it's for the bread. But usually it's a communication of their space and time talking to those who listen and try to understand. In jazz and poetry together in performance, there is room for creative people to express the great and not so great truths in a better way. Freedom allows us to say it and play it. Can you dig it? "Number Three" Is that the jazz alarm warning the smooth jazz players on stage that they have come to close to playing jazz? Smoothies have no worry! The place is sprinkled in case of cool or fire. The multiple smooth stations of elevator jazz and their profitable formula are protected. No insult to a musician's paycheck is intended. My friend of "smooth", Thelonius Paycheck, can send his kids to jazz camp and when they return can counsel them on "smooth". In an interview I asked Thelonius: "Hello, Thelonius this is Edgar Cool! Is it true that we are approaching a "Neo-Jazz Age" now that Ken Burns has shown us the light? Yeah man! Wouldn't it be swell if the "computer barons" liked jazz and built an interactive, virtual, cyber jazz hall of "hot and cool"? Yeah man! "Was Billie really "I'm all for you body and soul"? Yeah Man! Thelonius left our interview for his time share in sunny Palm Springs where he was to participate in a celebrity golf tournament. I told him to be aware of "fouled foot paths". Jazz on ! My next stop is "the Coney Island of my mind. "Number Four" "A while back, if I remember right, my life was one long party, where all hearts were wide open, where all the wines kept flowing," said Arthur Rimbaud in the opening to "A Season in Hell". He ended "Season" with ..."and now I'll be entitled to enjoy the whole truth." The jazz experience of the player or listener can go the way of the "Bohemian" life style of Rimbaud. Seeking truth and to live life to the fullest, the twenties "Jazz Age Generation", to the fifties "Beats", the sixties "Hippies", on to "Generation X" and the "Cyber Pilgrims", find their vision. In the freedom of jazz, the improvisation, comes from "the wide open heart", with a vision of truth played to others in the "groove", followed by response and reply. This is jazz and art. "More Museings" Henry Miller said in his
preface to "The Subterraneans" : "Jack Kerouac has done something to our
immaculate prose from which it may never recover. A passionate lover of
language, he knows how to use it. Born virtuoso that he is, he takes pleasure
in defying the laws and conventions of literary expression which cripple
genuine, untrammeled communication between reader and writer. As he has
so well said in "The Essentials of Spontaneous Prose", "Satisfy yourself
first, then the reader cannot fail to receive telepathic shocks and meaning-excitement
by the same laws operating in his human mind." |