Currently viewing the tag: "jazz"
Rob Lawson – R. A. Lawson (Ph.D., Vanderbilt, 2003) is a historian of American culture whose new book, Jim Crow’s Counterculture: The Blues and African Americans, 1890-1945 is available from LSU Press. His retrospective on the field of blues scholarship, “The First Century of Blues: One Hundred years of Hearing and Interpreting the [...]
You can hardly call it nostalgia: I was not yet one. Yet all I listen to these days is the jazz of that bygone time. In ’58 alone: Coleman Hawkins, out of fashion, but still blowing strong.
O the difference
between dialogue and harmony—
how I understood
in one blue moment
to give myself to water
Take four steps left & four
steps right, my daughter sings
as she draws her new
dance on the wall’s white
board—bluegrass to blame
for it all:
Yeah, so we all get born, we die,
the nights are dark between
the two. So what. The room
is dimly lit and I’m no expert on the blues,
white girl sitting here cozy dreaming
of her own gone dad, but hey—
we all pass this way, nights now
Song I listened to the summer I turned fifteen: Radiohead’s “High and Dry.” I was studying writing for six weeks at Andover and there was a boy with a guitar singing beneath a tree on the quad. I still remember his name: Jeff Agia. He introduced me that day to Radiohead. What a crush I had. What a silly girl I was. He never knew I existed.
Rain for weeks, Biblical,
the streets slick
as licked gray sticks of gum.
Merciless sluice
over the windshield–
When does it dawn on you that you want to play the piano? When your mother keeps dragging you off to see her best friend, Dame Myra Hess? When the toy piano you got for your fourth birthday is the only thing you managed to save from the earthquake? Or is it when you pass a musical instruments store, suddenly begin trembling, go inside, sit down at the first bench, and, without knowing how, spin off what the astounded salesman identifies as Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue?
Morgan City, Mississippi–The Delta isn’t pretty by picture postcard standards. Desolation and despair lick every stick and brick of human habitation. Creeping vines choke abandoned shacks, the tendrils of nature reclaiming the detritus of culture. The suffocating flatness stretches as far as the eye can see. It’s a lonesome lick of land that looks like it was lifted whole out of a parched African plain and dropped in Mississippi by mistake.
But the swamps wear a haunting iridescent coat of green, and even in late November, unpicked cotton balls dangle in the fields like orphaned slow flakes. Churned up by the foaming mouths of the Yazoo and Mississippi rivers, this soggy triangle effused the Blues, that bittersweet blend of half-remembered griot chants and plantation field hollers filtered through the parched throats and plucked on the broken heartstrings of the sons of slaves. A moaned anthem of survival, whetted with whiskey, lust, anger, anguish and longing, the Blues are the half brother of Jazz and granddaddy of rock n’ roll, and, arguably, America’s greatest homegrown musical gift to the world.
Driving through Morgan City—an abbreviated urban sprawl of bare cinder block dwellings and immobilized mobile homes that never quite got started—I pulled into a combination gas station-convenience store. Two bone-thin, old black men sat out front gently rocking on straw settees not originally meant for motion. They suddenly stopped rocking and turned their heads as one as I climbed out of the car, wary of my white face like an invading chess piece from the far side of the board.
So, there you are, Tina, blowing bread
at Small’s, reaching right through another Night
in Tunisia. Jimmy Smith, Lou Donaldson,
Eddie McFadden, and—on tubs—the great
Buhaina. And this side side-winds me back
to the snake-filled sound of April 7,
1958, each clinking glass saying
New York is enough, saying, this, the night
before my wife’s birth. Lemon rinds
as a cervical cap?
