Occasional Jazz Conjectures

“Profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful. In all the arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power. For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has [...]

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. [...]

[To be interpreted in a tweed-jacketed, drawn, quartered, and musty, dusty and heavily foot-noted and blustery, professorial drone] 
 
In our last lecture we looked at archetypes as they pertain to jazz — discovering that humans (or in this case The Musician) have a “preconscious psychic disposition that enables a (man) to react in a human manner.” These [...]

Jazz is rich in what filmmaker Arthur Jaffa calls polyventiality — multiple views, layered, and overlapping in rhythm, tone, and perspective. . .

Take One: In its early days jazz was an assault on the American dream of a simple morality. Along with alcohol and the movies, jazz boldy suggested (maybe for the first time in [...]

. . .delight the ear and eye
And bring mirth to the mind.
-Sima Xiangru (ca. 179-117 B.C.)
As musicians trundle out into the evening, filling corners (like so much Victorian clutter and ornament by Reverdian “lamplight taking shelter”) in foreign living rooms, rented halls, country clubs, or next to the cheese counters in the A& P, it [...]

“We’re here to have a ball” – Art Blakey
Drum on your drums. . .
Sling your knuckles on the bottoms of the happy
tin pans. . . go husha-husha-hush with the slippery sand-paper. . .bang altogether drums,
traps, banjos, horns, tin cans–make two people fight
on the top of a stairway and scratch each other’s eyes
in a clinch tumbling [...]

Years ago, jazz was dance music — into the bebop period, contrary to what many historians would have you believe — even after the demise of the big bands it still remained in the public’s consciousness as a form of social music. So what killed the dancing? As many will tell you, the economic realities [...]