We have been given so much. From our ancestors both in blood and in brother- and sisterhood. Louis, Dizzy, Art, Miles, but also Mary Lou, Billie, Ella and Big Mama. In this music, we’ve been gifted with a sublime combination of the physical, the emotional, the logical, the lyrical, the profound and the profane. In sound. In spirit and Insanity. Keys to your freedom. 88 keys to be exact!
How else do you deal with a world stacked against you?
You create stacks o’ recorded wax, a testament to resisting the attacks on Blacks. Knowing haters always fail (like trying to contain freedom within the Birmingham jail). Are you listening? Hear the cries which arise from between freedom’s thighs.
The sweetness contained within the heart of Jazz, a miraculous thing like a bird on the wing. Bird arrived to tell us it ain’t no thing, just do your thing be the thing that they can never kill. You’ve already paid that bill.
As in our yesteryears, our fathers faced evil, with guns and butter-smooth swing. We perpetuate that love/labor working against hate (or an apartheid state). Ambassadors of Jazz wielding sheets of sound that neutralize bullies who come around to spread their hate. Too late! We Don’t Take the Bait!
The essence of this music is NOT just for your entertainment! It is about preserving the sanity and integrity-of-spirit of those who suffered mightily to bring LIFE out of the bowels of despair into the light of hope with a will that nothing short of transcendence can deny.
This music is NOT JUST BLACK MUSIC. After emerging from the African American experience, jazz expression became a vehicle for the human heart to find resolution.
I’ve described conditions of contention, injustice, and oppression which were part of the matrix from which this music emerged. However, my friends, never forget the other important component which make this music so strong, yet so graceful. Like the strength of high-tensile steel, Jazz endures all the tests of heat or hate because its soul consists of LOVE. Love so deep that it can transmogrify that hot hate into cool love, baby.
Al Young was appointed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to be California’s Poet Laureate in 2005. Al and I joined forces (me as his bassist, guitarist and co-scat singer) to do concerts in San Francisco, Sacramento and Marin County. He was the author of some great works of poetry which readers here would appreciate.
Dancing: Poems. Corinth Books. 1969. ISBN 9780870910579.[18]
The Song Turning Back Into Itself. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 1971. ISBN 9780030866920.[18]
Geography of the Near Past: Poems. Holt paperback. Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. 1976. ISBN 9780030138768.[18]
The Blues Don't Change: New and Selected Poems. Louisiana State University Press. 1982. ISBN 9780807109786.
Heaven: Collected Poems: 1956-1990. Berkeley, CA: Creative Arts Book Company. 1992. ISBN 9780887390692.
The Sound of Dreams Remembered: Poems 1990-2000. Loveletter Editions. 2001. ISBN 9781427601148.
Coastal Nights and Inland Afternoons: Poems 2001-2006. Angel City Press. 2006. ISBN 9781883318734.
Something About the Blues: An Unlikely Collection of Poetry. Sourcebooks MediaFusion. 2008. ISBN 9781402210648.[7]
Performance Notes:
The performance of the Miles Davis composition All Blues was captured at the Conference on Democracy an annual event produced at Marin Academy in 2005. It features Al Young, Poet - Art Khu, Pianist - Dartanyan Brown, Acoustic bassist and scat singer with the great Sly Randolph, drums.
Please take advantage of a transcript which should be available for you. Al’s poetry is as fun to read as it is to listen to.
More later…
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