more and more realizing that Duke Ellington is the only Jazz musician i enjoy listening to...
oh well okay...sometimes Davis (typical), sometimes Brubek (go Concord!), sometimes Mingus (but mostly Money Jungle which is actually listed as an Ellington record)...
i think i started disliking Jazz as a genre when i started seriously writing poetry...had to sit through too many bad Jazz poems...it started to affect the way i listened to the music...and then "spontaneous bop prosody" which is great...i just hate hearing hippie-folk talk about it...
a bad Jazz poem of the prototypical ilk:
Mingus on the strings
while the Duke
strokes his keys
i smoke a cigarette
after a cigarette
and imagine this life
without JAZZ
imagine this JAZZ without
life...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
oops...i forgot Nina Simone...who i love...got to see her at Davies Symphony Hall in SF before she died...
John, Do you know Nate Mackey's poetry? It's kind of like if Susan Howe decided to get into jazz and fertility rites. I agree with you about jazzy poems. They really bother me. Mackey's great though.
ms
okay you're totally right...forgot i read parts of his Song Of The Andoumboulou a couple semesters back and loved it...what an ear!
...also, a close friend of mine, Steve Dickison (with David Meltzer) edits an amazing Jazz review called Shuffle Boil...i love reading it even though it's a fan-boy zine and is mostly over my head...but it's written by poets so there's always something there to be had...
Post a Comment