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November 19, 2006
i wanna write jazz
been watching the ken burns documentary jazz. i've been waiting years to own this film. and finally, it sits on my shelf. i'm very happy...
if you've listened to any of billie holiday's original recordings (and i hope that you have...), then you have heard lester young and his tenor sax...
i remember reading toni morrison's jazz and feeling out of sorts by the end. it was beautiful and difficult--the way that many things are, and i think i remember reading somewhere that morrison was going for that sense of things being unsettled and unbalanced but perfectly in order and in tune at the same time...just like jazz.
lester young died penniless. he was drafted into the army and was not assigned to tours of duty that allowed him to continue with his music...unlike glen miller or artie shaw. after his time in the army, drugs and alcohol became a constant. it was said that he was never the same...
he died in march '59. billie died four months later.
quote of the day
Toni Morrison
Jazz
But there is nothing to beat what the City can make of a nightsky. It can empty itself of surface, and more like the ocean than the ocean itself, go deep, starless. Close up on the tops of buildings, near, nearer than the cap you were wearing, such a citysky presses and retreats, presses and retreats, making me think of the free but illegal love of sweethearts before they are discovered. Looking at it, this nightsky booming over a glittering city, it's possible for me to avoid dreaming of what I know is in the ocean, and the bays and tributaries it feeds: the two-seat aeroplanes, nose down in the muck, pilot and passenger staring at schools of passing bluefish; money, soaked and salty in canvas bags, or waving their edges gently from metal bands made to hold them forever. They are down there, along with yellow flowers that eat water beetles and eggs floating away from thrashing fins; along with the children who made a mistake in the parents they chose; along with slabs of Carrara pried from unfashionable buildings. There are bottles, too, made of glass beautiful enough to rival stars I cannot see above me because the citysky has hidden them. Otherwise, if it wanted to, it could show me stars cut from the lamé gowns of chorus girls, or mirrored in the eyes of sweethearts furtive and happy under the pressure of a deep, touchable sky.
Posted by emnorris at November 19, 2006 10:36 PM
Comments
I keep telling myself that I need to revisit Morrison's Jazz. I read it when I was just finishing my senior year in college and needless to say I wasn't ready for it then. I think striving to write jazz, to write would be a little like writing with complex simplicity. It would be nice to see that in more academic writing.
Posted by: gwendolyn pough at November 20, 2006 09:05 AM