Jazz Reductio
A corona of sun is blistering on the otherwise black horizon as my Japanese fighting fish engage in the ancient art of war. An ornamental pair of weighted cloisonné balls, idyllically painted with the mythical Phoenix Dragon, rotate harmoniously in my palm as I channel the eternal resonance of the chi (a thing of vital import when suspended in midair by one’s diametrically stretched out legs which bridge the span of two petrified stumps spaced approximately five feet in distance). It is in these moments that I’m most clairvoyant.
Suspended here I listen to NPR, moreover Fresh Air with host Terri Gross. She currently lobs softballs to a lackadaisical Branford Marsallis: one of notable jazz and Leno lineage. It’s an acquired taste, this jazz - like martinis, or Harpo Marx. It’s a sound I’ve not been able to wrap my generally ajar head around. It’s a sound I regard with the same fervor as long division. And I’m not referring to the readily damnable whitewashed redux jazz of the Kenny G’entrification genre. I’m talking about the origin cool. The rim-shot fueled blue fire of bohemians, hipsters and literati alike.
Perhaps ignorantly I regard jazz to be overly emphatic on function over form. I find it to be calculated background static; unlyrical and solo-strewn drum and bass and saxophone drones of cacophonic desolation, instilling the marginal passion and sullen void of barroom ghosts and junkies. While I’m all for a little smoke-lit, back alley Beat romanticism, this musical vehicle of general association leaves me with a sense of a nonplussed collapse, much the same as a convertible stalled along an open stretch of American highway. Potential energy in a kinetic funk. Pendulums rusted by the drizzle of rains.
The esoteric equations, guised as melding collisions, are more effective, and subsequently affective, when sparsely entwined amid an emotive harmony in a movement like, say, Astral Weeks. For in the celestial words of Freidrich Nietzsche, you must have chaos to give birth to a dancing star. (rim-shot!)
Jefferson’s two cents: Ain’t nuthin’ funny ’bout that one.
Suspended here I listen to NPR, moreover Fresh Air with host Terri Gross. She currently lobs softballs to a lackadaisical Branford Marsallis: one of notable jazz and Leno lineage. It’s an acquired taste, this jazz - like martinis, or Harpo Marx. It’s a sound I’ve not been able to wrap my generally ajar head around. It’s a sound I regard with the same fervor as long division. And I’m not referring to the readily damnable whitewashed redux jazz of the Kenny G’entrification genre. I’m talking about the origin cool. The rim-shot fueled blue fire of bohemians, hipsters and literati alike.
Perhaps ignorantly I regard jazz to be overly emphatic on function over form. I find it to be calculated background static; unlyrical and solo-strewn drum and bass and saxophone drones of cacophonic desolation, instilling the marginal passion and sullen void of barroom ghosts and junkies. While I’m all for a little smoke-lit, back alley Beat romanticism, this musical vehicle of general association leaves me with a sense of a nonplussed collapse, much the same as a convertible stalled along an open stretch of American highway. Potential energy in a kinetic funk. Pendulums rusted by the drizzle of rains.
The esoteric equations, guised as melding collisions, are more effective, and subsequently affective, when sparsely entwined amid an emotive harmony in a movement like, say, Astral Weeks. For in the celestial words of Freidrich Nietzsche, you must have chaos to give birth to a dancing star. (rim-shot!)
Jefferson’s two cents: Ain’t nuthin’ funny ’bout that one.
posted by Chris Elzinga at 10:25 AM
2 Comments:
we waited this long for you to copy and paste?
I'm with Jefferson on this one
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