It's a little strange to see this Sonny Rollins footage mainly because he's stuck on a variety show attempting to play the crowd pleaser, but rather reluctantly. The other thing that seemed to draw my attention was the difference between Rollins with his crisp delivery and the somewhat slack soloing by Don Cherry, an otherwise brilliant improviser. These two paired offer a glimpse at the subtle chasm that existed between those who became more known as free players and those who relied more on harmonic structure and were more a part of the previous well-established tradition--bebop.

Klactoveesedstene

My friend, the poet Steve Halle, asked me via e-mail the other day about Ornette Coleman’s album “Sound Grammar,” and I remember hearing bits and pieces of it online a while ago. It’s a great album, but I found myself really thinking about it again because of Steve’s comment, so I dug around online a bit and stumbled upon this Slate article that raises an even larger question. I really like this article (sure it’s a little dusty but who cares) because of its embedded links. Putting these two riffs side by side is genius (one of Charlie Parker laying down a long solo in the song “Klactoveesedstene” and Ornette Coleman playing nearly the same but in his unique way). [Here’s an interesting side note found on a Portuguese jazz blog about theories as to what “Klactoveesedstene” might mean.]

Listening to both shows how different Ornette’s sound is, even in 1958. Not being a musician I can’t define it in musical terms, but I’ve always thought that Ornette’s solos seem to spread out instead of building. Ornette uses sound in a really nonlinear way, and not to just fill space in a song. His solos don’t rise to crescendo or logically unfold, they burst forth in rivulets—fits and starts. It’s obvious that the journey itself is the destination. One reason that Ornette doesn’t often play with pianists in his combos could be that the piano, as defined in those rough terms, is limiting to a certain extent. There are spaces between the keys on a piano whereas the saxophone is a much more liquid instrument. Even so, Ornette paired with a player like Thelonious Monk would seem to make sense, but Monk’s playing was also much more angular and structured, though in an offbeat way.

I'd never seen the above photo of Charlie Parker before, so I thought I'd post it.

In other news, Stop Smiling has put out a relatively recent, jazz-theme issue and I've just found out that the headliners at the 2008 Chicago Jazz Festival are Sonny Rollins and Ornette Coleman. Thank you, Chicago!

Yakov Lotovski's The Sound of Jazz translated from Russian by Dimitri Lotovski at Exquisite Corpse has some interesting imagery.





"There is also this huge saxophone.
It sounds like a piece of antique oak furniture that’s being moved.
There is a man attached to it.
Serving."

Much "jazz poetry" doesn't fit the bill. In the sense that Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg, Mina Loy, or Hart Crane could be considered "jazz" poets because they made reference to it in their work, which isn't the same as producing work that enacts the rhythms being described or uses imagery that evokes convincing portrayals of jazz artists and their compositions, we'll have to come up with a more useful definition. Many writers of the Jazz Age (i.e., 1920s) wrote about the decadence or instability of the times but their writing wasn't jazz influenced per se. True poets influenced by jazz take language and make of it something malleable and molten. Poets such as Amiri Baraka in "Ka'Ba"

call across or scream or walk across
defying physics in the stream of their will[.]

Ray Bremser, Jack Kerouac, and Ted Joans wrote poetry with an oral component that sometimes mirrored the syncopated rhythms of jazz. Poets such as Bob Kaufman often wrote lines that verged on the nonsensical in his flights to mimic the sounds he heard in jazz. In the experimental "Crootey Songo" he wrote,

Derrat slegelations, flo goof babereo
Sorash sho dubies, wago, wailo, wailo

Or, as he wrote in "Jazz Chick"

From the alabaster pools of Jazz
Where music cools hot souls.
Eyes more articulately silent
Than Medusa's thousand tongues.
A bridge of eyes, consenting smiles
reveal her presence singing[.]