(Blue) Noted Passing

"I don't care much about music.  What I like is sounds." - Dizzy Gillespie

"Clouds float in the same pattern only once." - Wayne Shorter

"When people believe in boundaries, they become part of them." - Don Cherry

"Play what you want and let the public pick up on what you are doing, even if it takes them fifteen or twenty years." - Thelonious Monk

"Don't play the saxophone.  Let it play you." - Charlie Parker

"I'll play it and tell you what it is later." - Miles Davis

"You can have tone and technique and a lot of other things but without originality, you ain't really nowhere."

Lester Young

*

Without being hip to the fact at the time, each of the cats quoted above, in his own way, blew a eulogy for Ornette Coleman.

Ornette was "out".  He was different.  He 'couldn't play', yet "rewrote the language of jazz" (no small feat in a musical landscape of perpetual innovation (once), and the ethereal dissipation of improvised note bursts nightly, on a 'moment's notice').  Maynard Ferguson thought O.C. had "bad intonation, bad technique".  Miles Davis, judging by the sounds Ornette's axe made, concluded that "talking psychologically", he must be "all screwed up inside."  Another trumpeter (oddly), Roy Eldridge, thought Ornette Coleman was "jiving, baby."  And even kindred free musical spirit, Thelonious Monk, likewise known for "playing wrong right", was heard to exclaim, "Man, that cat is nuts!".

One of the few who seemed to 'get' Ornette was Charlie Mingus, who, another kindred musical spirit, was able to recognize the "organized disorganization" of Coleman's (non)playing ... yet at some point complained, "he can't play it straight."

Now as everyone acknowledges, and some admit (vehemently), there is a lot of jazz garbage out there.  There are the Spoogers, just gacking out notes for no reason ... the Noodlers, annoyingly poking, inserting ... the Vocalists (most of them), entirely disrespecting the "songbooks" they pillage (not to mention audiences' time, patience, money) ... There are literally people "performing" who shouldn't be.

"Hell is full of musical amateurs."  - George Bernard Shaw

I myself am no musician.  I don't capably play any instruments (yet?  One of my biggest regrets in life, so far), and I'm no authority.  But I do know well and appreciate jazz:  its humor, its sense of chaos, its combustible spontaneity ... and above all, its take it or leave it, 'is what it is' ethos, too often exploited because, Hey! It's Jazz!

"Jazz is the type of music that can absorb so many things & still be Jazz."- Sonny Rollins

... For better or worse.

Unlike many (rabid) fans of the genre, I am not hagiographic.

But I don't get the sense that Ornette Coleman was spooging (or noodling, or ever "jiving").  I think he was onto something bigger than jazz ... Not only taking the invisible music -- silences and "mistakes" -- received and famously transmitted by Monk, to inevitable next levels (albeit on every tune!) ... but also culturally prescient, in foreshadowing our present day aversion to "labels" - to being labelled, (mis)categorized, (mis)identified ... this rejection of easy, or 'normal', classifications, indeed a 'shape of jazz to come';

and in being cool with imperfections -- perhaps, limitations -- yet rightfully expecting to be accepted, at least heard.

*
"It was when I found out I could make mistakes that I knew I was on to something."

"I think that every person, whether they play music or don't play music, has a sound - their own sound, that thing that you're talking about." - Ornette Coleman
1930 - 2015

Gifts and Ripoffs

"Thanx to all the cats ... in our brotherhood." - Boris Koslov

I was digging around some old notebooks the other day, looking for a phone number I knew I'd scrawled - an old (212) number from 'back in the day', before telephone land lines (or spiral notebooks, for that matter) became obsolete ... and I was struck by what a fan I'd been.

In learning the craft of writing, and of becoming (more or less) myself, I seem to have tuned into a few of the biggies ... certain manna, and ticks and inflections of theirs, picked up by my young and thirsty antennae, all bursting with needing to take it all in.

All words and text below are mine (by Jeff Glovsky), as they were written -- sometimes thirty (!) years ago -- in the (sometimes overtly) sampled stylings of ...

John Lennon: 
Taking a might bath arggh, wee Bob?  I'll go ant pack me baggies!

Bruce Springsteen: 

Crucifix Jemina crossed me off the sidewalk.   Didn't have a leg to stand on anymore.

Charles Baudelaire: 

This city, even under the weight of fat tourists, reeks of thirty years ago:  all the noise and crime and ghetto-blasting; drugs, ill-tempered ugliness ... Its beauty become horrible, its awfulness old hat.

Henry Miller: 

New York now is dozens of little acceptances, all at once working to keep you down.  You're not a success, for one example -- or even taken seriously -- if you're not shelling monthly, say, two thousand for your hellhole.

Jack Kerouac: 

It's Tuesday, 10:15am ... What job to go, to do all day?  Resumés - Too many in the past too many each weeks.  Yet the phone's as sick and dead as soul.  Now she won't call.

There's been Steinbeck and Steely Dan, Dylan and Ginsberg, Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain ... and, when needing to take Mathers into my own hands ... a little Eminem even enters my prose mix.  I've got a work-in-progress with a title Charlie Mingus might be proud of, and I reference Mingus (Mingus, Mingus) often ...

... the Clown's Afraid Too

All of these influences have shaped and informed not only my writing, but my disposition as well.  While certainly not "sunny" overall, I can make (and sometimes take!) a joke, and efface myself on a regular basis; overall, though my life has sucked at times, it's a blessing to be in for an eighty year plan - which, if I ever do happen to become "sunny" (or in the parlance of DeathClock.com algorithmics, "optimistic"), might convert to 90+.

Thus simply, if not moronically, assured, I was strolling through Greenwich Village last night and I ran into a bass player I've known for the past ten years.  Boris is a valued member of the New York-based Mingus bands, all of the various configurations officially sanctioned by Sue Mingus, the Yoko Ono of Jazz (in a good way) ... in addition to playing out with his own groups and projects.

As we were chatting and catching up (I'd been a sound engineer for the Mingus Big Band), a woman came up to us and asked if we knew where Beyoncé was playing.  Totally rando (as the kids say) - having nothing to do actually with what the jazz bass player and I were discussing ... nor with the jazz bassist or myself at all.  Beyoncé and her (substantial) slice of the music universe light years beyond and away from the both of us, it was nonetheless common ground for the woman to approach, introduce herself and begin sharing her own dreams and small histories in entertainment ... Connecting in a way that only artists know how, because like attracts like, but we're all attuned:  to different stations, perhaps, but all with thirsty antennae and the radio on ...

Now if I could only find that phone number.

Don't Be Afraid

... the Clown's Afraid Too

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©Jeff Glovsky