Bon(ed) Soir

"a musical wasteland of endless bass solos and fart-like runs ... "

 This was all I could muster after seeing Wycliffe.

I don't know if the music was lacking, it was the overall vibe of the Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors crowd (most of them there to see Randy Newman this night) ... younger now, but no less pretentious and trying-too-hard-seeming as when I used to live across the street and (barely) attended auld FU.

Or, have I finally stopped trying too hard to dig jazz?

When I used to immerse in the scene, in the clubs, eating cheeseburgers ... waitresses (swimming in sax!) ... with the crowing, old voices of jazz legends nightly, and Wryly Sardonix demanding I leave ... which I did one night, mid-set, when he yelled from the stage that he sounded "like shit" and the cause of that mess fell on my deaf ears ... WHAT!?

I stormed offstage that night before he did!  There's only one King, bitch, and I left the building!!!

... Where was I?

Oh, right.  So Wycliffe Gordon ...

I went to see James Brown once, back in the day when we lived in America ... and shuffling around the stage at Radio City Music Hall at one point with an RK-100, he launched into a noodling rendition of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" ...

Now don't ever let anyone try and tell you that James Brown, 'the Godfather', was NOT a show-stopper!  He stopped that show dead ... ground to a halt, as he strutted and poked on his shoulder-slung Korg, an eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth verse.  Of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame".

Really.

"The hell is he doing?" a guy behind me asked his date.  Something large and thrown fell just short of the stage ... A chorus of "boos" began, like an imagined cliché scene, and rose in cresecendo until filling the theater.

James Brown stripped to his undershorts and started kicking Rockette-like, as the curtain came down and there wasn't an encore.

Just kidding!  Nobody really threw anything.

But I remember that night well ... I hooked up with a girl who thought she had tickets to see Jethro Tull ... and experienced something like it last night seeing Wycliffe.

Or maybe I wasn't in the mood.

(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

Head, Refrain

On my musical LinkedIn recently, there was a question about jazz.  Specifically, whether or not the recent attention and flurry of words about the genre were helping to keep jazz "marginalized".

And Jeff Jumps In (Too):

I don't think Jazz is marginalized so much, as simply ignored by most. Much of this, unfortunately, has to do with overriding truths in the Justin Moyer Washington Post piece: a lot of jazz music today is perceived as "elevator music" (in the same way Classical is cast off as "stuffy" or "fusty") ... There continues to be an overreliance on the tried and true, but increasingly tired, "American songbook" comprising "standards" ... and along these lines, too much jazz is performed lazily, going through motions without any e-motion: smiling blankly, pausing significantly, "This next song...". Or the predicable 'insert bass solo here' live jazz moment.

Beyond this, there is the ridiculously furious circling of wagons whenever attention IS brought to Jazz. "Kenny G" mutterings, for example, if anyone inside gets too popular ... or admonishments, in no uncertain terms, to 'leave jazz alone!!' if anyone outside comes to play. Witness the Django Gold / "Sonny Rollins" New Yorker debacle (on which, incidentally, I also blew).

Frankly, I think I could've pulled that one off better than Django ... but I get what he was trying to do. Too many refuse to.

As long as Jazz remains disinterested in making an effort or expanding its appeal, it's going to keep being d(ism)issed ... Not "marginalized", because nobody's marginalizing Jazz except insiders - the jazz community itself.

"L'Esprit de Jazz", ©Jeff Glovsky

And Jeff Jumps In

A Prose Bopsody
on "Sonny Rollins" in The New Yorker

Jazz.

What do those four letters, that word, mean to you?

Say it ... like a smoke-filled horn player.  Like a bassist with a blues and mean streak ... a chord progressionist, stiff-fingered note dancer, porkpie eponymous soaring lover, man!

Spinning Afro-Cuban top ... An ah's flat, e flat, beepin' bop, a ballad ... songs that never stop ...

Say JAZZ.

That word ... means what, to you?

To some -- to most -- "jazz" just means tired.  It's become like classical music, or broccoli:  it's supposed to be good ... but I don't taste anything!

To others, Jazz plays b-ball (sort of).

To forty or so more -- this small but rabid core of devoted jazz music diggers -- it absolutely is the Word ...

Jazz -- the music, The Word -- is sacrosanct.

Django Gold found this out the hard way.  While touring his Onion-esque act in the big city, Django got into a cutting session with still-living legend, Saxxy Colossus ... you know who I mean, or would, if you knew ...

But if you're not so imbued, allow me to hip you to that purty one ... the magnificent one ... the one and ONLY one ...

Mr. ... Sonny Rollins.

(Whatever!)

Then Django proceeded to light up the page with this solo he said was played by Sonny ... except it wasn't Sonny, it was Django, dig?  And he ("Sonny"/Django) said he hated The Word ... felt he'd wasted his long life working to spread it ... and never knew what suit to wear!

Man, you shoulda heard the audience howl!  Those forty people, right?  "JUDAS!" one yelled - this cat, Howie Doodat ... hands all clenched in fists of rage, demanding support from the 39 others ... He got some.

I blew too:

"As a lifelong fan of jazz, and having worked as a sound engineer on the road and at most of the New York clubs, including the Blue Note (and regularly for the Mingus Big Band) … but also as a writer myself, and all around (I like to think) PHUNNY guy …

I have to say, I get it: the piece IS funny. Non-sequiturs ('I hate music. I wasted my life.') placed in an absurdist context (Sonny Rollins uttering them) … is funny. Absurdity is a foundation of satire, which of course is an element of humor … and humor is comedy.

Lighten up, people!

... (U)ntil ‘Sonny gets blue’ about it, why should we?"

Then I traded with Payton, who got all riled up and made terrible noise.  His bars had "race cards littering the table.

"Not at all what the original 'offending' piece was about."

I was disappointed to hear Payton blowing that way!  Not surprised though - it's out there, and always will be.

Anyway, the set ended for me when this cat, Howie Doodat, kept putting people down, man.  Thanking people for agreeing with him ... Otherwise, "Learn about life," he'd smirk.  "No wonder you're confused," he teased.  "'Django'" (in quotes), he kept chiding Django ... suggesting that can't be the cat's real name!

"I don't believe you," I finally said.  "You're a LIAR!"

... Took my axe, and went home.

A Year in Review

If you've searched me by name ... chances are you've wound up here. - Jeff Glovsky, "What's in a Name?", June 26th, 2013

Sometimes when I wake, sometimes in the dead of night, I ask myself, "Am I better off now than I was last year?"

This has been going on for decades.

I remember turning twenty, and bemoaning the fact that my teen years were behind me ... literally feeling "old".  At twenty!  But asking myself then, as I toiled backstage at a Rhode Island summer theater, Am I better off now than I was the previous summer, lifeguarding at a camp in the Berkshires ... sleeping with insects and rocking an orange tan?

Though the jury in my head is still out on that one ... I will say that the summer I spent doing theater nonsense did introduce me, through a production of Duke Ellington's Sophisticated Ladies, to a lifelong significant other in jazz.  Oh, would that I could play something!  The day (or night) I wake up and think to myself, Last year, I couldn't play an instrument ... is the day I'll relax, maybe stop assessing.

Or when it no longer needs to be a question.  When the current of my life, and each 365 days prior, in particular, are clearly moving forward, and not laterally (or back!) -- so I don't need to ask myself, "Am I better off now than I was last year?" --

Then I'll have achieved something.

In the meantime, I'll just keep obsessing ...

Last year, in 2013, I finally woke up from a 3-year coma.  In 2010, my name and reputation were destroyed ... maliciously, I'll maintain.  Needlessly.  Prematurely.  Criminally; for defamation -- calumny, vilification, traducement, libel, blasphemous slander -- is a crime.  If I'd known then how to protect myself from it happening ... with just the press of an "Enter" key:  with NO form of outreach, fact-checking or "rebuttal" offered until AFTER the damages already get done ... I would not have kept silent, shell-shocked from the bullying ... comatose, bent over and raped for three years.

I would not have played dead, "hiding" in plain sight, while my name and reputation, friends and lovers, innocent family members suffered, then became destroyed and flat-lined like I pretended to ...

No, I would've risen and fought back, then.

In 2013, I started fighting back now.  Enough became more than enough, and to all the bandwagon jumpers, lazy strangers, simple googlers, problem tenants and out and out troublemakers who think asshole behaviors are somehow justified ... despite never even meeting me, let alone knowing what the situation may have been in 2010, and what you're talking about when you add insult to injury; when you reject, refuse, deny and/or extort out of hand, 'cause you think you can ...

"WANTED" ... Really?

Fuck you.  That's all I have to say to you, still.  Can't express myself differently than I've already done here, and here and here and here, over the past year ... Even flailing, coming close to admitting defeat, I am resolved to keep fighting, providing some balance.

... There are others, though.  Those of you who know me, and have known me, for many years.  Have done business with me, again and again.  Have entered into new business ... Have worked with me at Tier 1 financial institutions (where, obviously, I never would be if I were a "lifetime criminal and scam artist!" END QUOTE).

There are those of you who have chosen to be / stay connected ... Have rented apartments I own without incident, have swapped apartments, wholly and mutually on trust.

There are website owners who are not extortionate; there are people of reason, who have recognized the foulness and long-lasting damages of a false and defamatory online attack, and taken steps to help me restore my name - the name "Jeff Glovsky".

To all of you, I say Thank you.  Though to be honest, I shouldn't need to run around thanking people (however sincerely appreciated they may be) ... for doing their jobs, or not publicly defaming me!  To paraphrase Chris Rock, that's what's SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN!!

If you're on the fence through all this, or have no idea what to think ... after all, you don't know me.  Why should you think anything?  You've only 'stumbledupon' this post and might think I'm some wack job -- assuming you've even read this far --

I invite you to know me ...

The 'real' Jeff Glovsky

* * *

Song Without Music

für Elise Claudia

My biggest regret in life -- apart from wishing I'd spelled "recognize" correctly in the 8th grade spelling bee ... I'd have taken State!!  To this day, I think about that brain fart moment when I dropped the g, and puttered out "r-e-c-o-n-i-z-e" ... and the judge then, pausing significantly, completely ignoring me, turning to my opponent and intoning, "Recognize?".

... My opponent remembering the goddamn g!  Spelling "recognize" CORRECTLY, and setting off my lifelong descent into failure.

"Needless to say, you failed" ... my driving instructor also intoned to me, several years later, as I dinged a parked car while parallel parking.  I didn't get my license that day, my first try, at sixteen, and my piss-poor, abyss-diving life drove downward ...

Brother Theodore on Letterman:  all angsty pangsty, acting like he just burped up from hell.  Dark chords were struck, a bond was born, his shtick of torment, mine as well ...

-- but where was I?  Failure ... Regret!

The (second) biggest regret of my life is that I can't play an instrument.  Bopping sub tactilely, digging "the" jazz, doesn't qualify me as a Soundcloud "creator".  House all piano-less, tuneless fingers ... notes and tones just heard, unplayed.  Oh, would I spoke the languages of nature (plants) and music!  I can only see and hear ... Appreciate.

But not create.

And then, that one who got away.  You know who you are (Claudia) ... You 'got' me, understsood my Drang, my Sturm, und stood beside me.  You, who laughed at my suggestions, my sad efforts at suggestiveness ... You laughing, tousled hair and bird-like visage, made my losing less ...

Could we have played things differently?  If I blew notes, instead of all that air when we togethered??

Would we each be part of One, still?  How I wonder where you went!

But I digress ...

The parking meter's hungry.  I can ill-afford another ticket ... Traipsing out to feed her and I trip upon my laces, sprung undone because the shoes are cheap, like a bed in a hostel instead of a suite.

It's raining, as I'm on the street ... Getting up 'cause a cop on his beat comes to greet me.  Otherwise, I'd die here ("lie" or "lay"?) and just forget you.  But I can't forget you, Claudia!  Feel you playing still, my instrument ... You taught me all the things I could've kept, to keep in time, you mine ... but me, I tuned them out, and we ...

Our concert's over.

Now I try my best to solo, but I can't create the music!

No, the biggest regret of my life -- beyond the lack of talent and the 8th grade spelling contest -- is that blue, I note our lost motif and recoGnize it won't repeat ...

Cold, War and Otherwise

Though spring has sprung in Deutschland, in the States, the cold weather's unrelenting and winter storms -- for some reason, christened like hurricanes now! -- keep howling and blowing.

Also howling and blowing is western media, every time there's a new "global conflict".  Usually so ridiculously narrow and self-interested, reporting breathlessly the "breaking" news of Oscar night parties, celebrity deaths (all too often, self-inflicted) ... and/or imperious, like dolts in a small town, poking fun at perceived foibles: "Sochi problems", for example, or an "inept" investigation (or the opposite: escalating random acts of breathing -- those naturally occurring, every day things we all do because we're supposed to, and most of us are wired that way -- into newsworthy, larger than life acts of "heroism") ...

Where was I?

Oh, right.  So usually the media, particularly in the US and UK, is carrying on this way, perpetuating its curious combination of smug isolationism and Big Stick condescension, the whole time relying on unpaid contributors to file "i-reports", in order to fill all the 24/7 content platforms) ... but Vladimir Putin "takes" Crimea, and suddenly, hot.cool.Sochi gets forgotten; the meaningful Paralympics all but ignored, and CNN and the US start clucking, 'What to do about UKRAINE?'.

Geopolitically speaking, the US should have nothing to do with Ukraine.  The people of Crimea are speaking, and they seem to prefer not to be part of 'the west'.  This (so far) peaceful expression of self-determination should be recognized, in fact, allowed.

Beyond this simple statement of what seems, to me, obvious, I offer no public opinion.  My thoughts on politics, like religion and like my home address, telephone number, love and sexual doings that actually matter to me, are private, and will remain that way ... at least until they matter less, and/or I am ready to "share" them.

Does this mean, though, that I can't opine?  I don't have a politcal thought, or opinion?

"Gloaming Looming", ©Jeff Glovsky

Once I was sitting outside a jazz club where I used to mix sound.  It was a beautiful spring night, and I stepped out of what was, at that time, the stereotypical smoke-filled room to gulp in some fresh air.  It was during a bass solo ... These always tended to go on forever anyway, so I figured I had a few minutes, at least, before the singer would come in again and start gesticulating (wildly) toward her ear, suggesting (none too subtly) that she wasn't able to hear herself, or the piano.

As I was sitting there, pleasantly digging the gloaming, this homeless guy shuffles up to me and says, "Nice night, huh?"  He sits down on the brownstone stoop beside me, and offers up something about the second Gulf War ...

Well, I'd always been taught, and took pains to adhere to, the common sense adage about not talking to strangers.  I took this literally, and to this day -- fast-tracking to fifty (!) years old -- I struggle with its application.  Innately shy, to the point of awkwardness, if not coming across as 'differnt' (as in, 'that boy ain't right!') in most social settings, I was struck even dumber by my new companion's next and final communication.

After commenting about G. Dubya Bush, our troops in Iraq and September 11th -- all still very fresh wounds at the time -- and receiving zero response from me, this homeless guys says, "Man, I thought you were an asshole, but you might just be stupid."

Then sneeringly, he shuffles off.

I go back inside the jazz club, not offended or defensive, but really struck by what the homeless guy just told me: that I was an asshole, but I might also be stupid.  I'd never thought of myself as "stupid".  Throughout my academic career, with the exception of some shaky punctuation, Geometry in high school and five years of college, it was always the opposite!

But as I made my way back toward my sound booth that night, noticing that not only had the bass solo ended but the first set as well ... that the house lights were on, the stage was empty (though an amp was buzzing) and people were standing up to leave ... it occurred to me the homeless guy was probably right.

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.