On Jazz Music & Henry Miller

Email to the Buffalo
08/08/08 5:50 AM Bersone:
coincidentally the radio popped on this morning to John Coltrane and Miles, not exactly the same quintet you mentioned, no cannonball, but I was struck by the piano player hitting notes just behind coltrane, which must have taken close anticipation to know so unerringly. like fucking, but better, in a way, I mean, no comical cleanup, like my first whore, in Kansas city that morning, the sun coming in through the yellow shade of the tenderloin hotel, jumped onto the corner sink in the room and vigorously washed it out, her wet soapy hand making a sloppy popping sound that caused the romance to abate somewhat although a deft piano player may have been able to play sweetly behind her.

08/08/08 6:54 AM Buff :
Jazz is an interesting art form where there is no time to think - what a relief. In a group such as the one you mentioned the form is collective spontaneity on the highest level. It takes discipline, hard and persistent work, dedication and a mastery of craft to get there, and then you forget all that, empty your mind, open your ears, ignore the ego and disappear into the flow. When you reach that place, in that moment, the music is playing you. What a wonderful feeling that is - not unlike flying in a dream. We used to say that if we can reach that place for only just one moment a year, it is worth all the gig, travel, ego bullshit that it takes to get there. Miles, Coltrane, Bill Evans, these guys get there every time they pick up their horn. It is an astounding accomplishment. Movements, responses such as you mentioned happen automatically in that place of sweet and utter surrender to the music. It is marvelous to hear, and when the listener has learned to empty the mind, open the ears, and give up the ego, he, too, can fly through the dream. It was Clifford Brown who brought me to that place for the first time, though I had been listening "at" jazz for several years. When I heard his sweet sound and lyrical lines I fell into his flowing energy like a leaf falling into a river. It changed me forever, and most likely saved my life.

And yes, for sure, no sloppy clean up. :)

08/09/08 11:50 AM Bersone:
No time to think! That's the relief; suddenly you can surprise yourself with what you didn't know you knew. When I was working at the bank that second or third time, driving home with Maria Cooper, that finely shaped black girl, I remember being awakened by a billboard, which I later learned was part of an art project, of a pair of hands holding some burning oranges. It caught my eye immediately, and I watched it over the next few days, wondering what commercial message they would attach to it. Nothing appeared, just the image. I ran across an old notation this morning, as I was cleaning things out, with that image, followed by another I picked up on a documentary of India, which I'll append to this missive at the end.

I was leafing through Henry Miller's days in Paris, that big picture book of yours, and he was talking about feeling so much like an outsider in this country, that he felt so outside America emotionally -- and that was back in the sixties.

I've got to simplify things. That life Henry described at Big Sur when nobody was there sounds good. I've been told Portugal or Croatia and cheap and beautiful. Re-read Words for the Wind, a Roethke poem that's been going through my mind for a couple of weeks:

... mad in the wind I wear
myself as I should be
most lovingly: I breathe

our musical ruminations are helping me, and I'll take Monk to the lake. ruby, my dear, quite tender -- apparently an adolescent love.

ceremonies

cupped hands proffer
burning oranges
on a billboard

floating candles burn
in rocking coconut shells
at night, on the Ganges --

to acknowledge the paradox
that the Monsoon gives
and takes life

I bet that reality you describe in which the music plays you is described somewhere as a profound Buddhist reality. What the great thinkers and artists and social visionaries have been getting at.

08/11/08 8:24 AM Buff :
I have this thought about Henry feeling outside America emotionally:
Aren’t we all, and mustn’t we all be? If we were to fall in step with the political and social consciousness of the day we would be stepping back in time 100 or more years! That sort of consciousness moves at the pace of the lowest common denominator. The artist necessarily rushes ahead to the rim, the outer edge of human experience and pushes, pushes against the force that holds us in. We want to pop the bubble and run headlong into the dream without a safety net. The artist is not concerned with survival, self preservation, the so called “future”. We know instinctively that there is no future; this is it, and we want to know it all. Henry emerged at the time of the birth of capitalism, which is one of the many bastard children of fear and greed. We have emerged at the time when capitalism is exploding like Fourth of July fireworks, shattering like a supernova, shuttering in its death rattle. We cannot waste our time dawdling in all this social drama. We must, by the will of our deepest instincts, fly ahead, beyond, into the unchartered space of the ultimate. We are the shooting stars of this galaxy and it is our job to shine high in the sky beyond the reach of the land lubbers who wallow in their daily mud. We are dreamers, my brother. It is our destiny to dream. Henry was our forefather; now is our time.