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heard garrison keillor read this beautiful poem this morning. made me think of my father, who is currently in Africa. he gave me a love of trains. but not jazz. i'm not sure if he has ever listened to jazz. i can't honestly say i ever heard it in his company. i've always found jazz intimidating. as if it some secret language i do not understand. will maybe never understand. jazz lures me and yet leaves me feeling left out of the world. without fluency.
the sound of a train has always brought comfort. clackety clack has a constancy. no surprises. no detours.
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it would have been my mother's 61st birthday this past week, were she alive. i wonder what i would have gifted her. i cannot remember the last gift i gave her, on her 52nd. strange the things one remembers and the things one does not...
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also heard on the writer's almanac today:
Writers are like jealous lovers. I just want you to think of me.LB
- Ian McEwan
Well I'm thinking of you, if that's any good :-)
ReplyDeleteCuppa this week? I might even come to Sanctus Boscus...
S/W xx
jazz is strange, I always wanted to 'get' it more than I ever did..others seemed to gain so much from it I could only imagine...yet I believe them.
ReplyDeletethoughts sent your way..
RD, X
RD
ReplyDeletei endorse believing them...
LB
for me, it seems that jazz can be a celebration of life when life seems to insist that there's nothing worth celebrating. a sort of "f*ck you" to the darkness that presses in on all sides. Jazz from folks like John Coltrane in his later works is extremely hard on the ears at first, but it is what the soul's longing to make contact with God would be expected to sound like...Coltrane's soul is crying out to touch the hem, and he will accept nothing less than real contact, even if it destroys his self in the process. I've never heard such urgent longing for spiritual reality and experience expressed in music before. at least that's what I make of it. and then there's the calm cool (regardless of the storms making noise all around) of things like Miles Davis' Kind of Blue...the awareness of life's heavy realities that makes all that demands our immediate attention fall by the meaningless wayside... the man who gave us the birth of cool...like Penny Lane telling William to "be cool". (as a side note, I think that accepting one's "uncoolness" is, well, pretty cool...). And then sometimes the sound is simply addicting, regardless any meanings or interpretations one might glean from its mind-expanding power.
ReplyDeletesmoking pot probably helps too...
;-)
nice thoughts, Brook. you sold that well.
ReplyDeleteby coincidence, i had the opportunity to be played a load of jazz by an encouraging, and more to the point graciously patient, enthusiast the other week (mostly hard bop i think it was called) and can now say with some confidence i like stuff with 'deep pockets'. at least, i think that was the correct term... for the stuff that i described as "less claustrophobic and where there is space between the instruments (for me at least) to breathe."
i used to be married to a saxophonist and heard quite a lot of both coltrane and davis over the years. charlie parker too.
i'm definately more comfortable with the 'calm cool'. the inside of myself is all too often 'stormy' - and i think that's why i'm somewhat resistant to fits and starts at the more avant garde end of the jazz spectrum. i'm not really in the market for any more jarring blasts of dischord and syncopation than i already have in my head.
so one enjoyable evening of a lesson later and i think i'm starting to see the light beyond a frustrated "i just don't get it..."
thanks for sharing - enthusiasm for realness and art is always welcome here.
LB