Occasional Jazz Conjectures

“. . .oh Lana Turner we love you get up” — Frank O’Hara
White is about elegance, cooling, and a hopeful balm and simultaneously about blurring, burning intensity—like the polarity between Grace Kelly’s wedding dress and the sweat-and sin-inducing tear of Jimmie Lunceford’s big band playing White Heat (delivered at a blistering 364 beats-per-minute).
White can be […]

‘Could’ve been that it was just one of those “I-am-sweating-a-lot-by-now-and-thinking-
of-leaning-on-the-john-door-in-the-5 SPOT” Frank O’Hara moments. Or that the pianist was probing with such scampanatic, calthumpian aplomb one minute, Mal Waldron-ing me out of my head the next. Whatever it was–with a mixture of suppressed joy and hip, matter-of-factness (I’m a serious young man, you see)–I introduced […]