Occasional Jazz Conjectures

The poet Larry Fagin, a wonderful jazz observer among other things, is a major proponent of what’s called the “list poem.” According to Fagin, “Lists and catalogs are among the oldest written documents and occur in the literature of most cultures. The desire of the ancients to classify and memorize all of the world’s contents [...]

February 4, 1927: Stumbling out into the evening we nearly tripped over a drunken Hart Crane (acting conspicuously like Bix Beiderbecke) looking for his shadow, wildly asserting, “I am Baudelaire, I am Whitman, I am Christopher Marlowe, I am Christ.” Crane divined, “Let us invent an idiom for the proper transposition of jazz into words! [...]

When I first began to write about jazz it was, in a manner of speaking, my attempt at a naïve emulation of Whitney Balliett, the great New Yorker jazz writer, who died last week at 80 years of age. And in fact, for most of 20 years, I have carried on a “Letters to a [...]

When February 14th rolls around, I’m always reminded that nearly everything I know about elegance and savoir faire came to me through jazz. For years I played jazz in bars and restaurants every Valentine’s Day — subtly trying to “establish the scene of the crime,” as the great Jack McDuff used to say to me. [...]