Papa Jo Jones

This made me happy.

Something I Wrote for KKJZ 88.1 in LA When They Asked On Air, "What Does Jazz Mean To Uou?"

It's tempting to start this paragraph with the word Jazz, but jazz survives its own annihilation. I think of jazz as the music that will be playing after the apocalypse. Classical music like that scene in the Titanic with the quartet playing as the ship is sinking, is the music being played during the apocalypse, but after the ego has been incinerated, what is left behind is a world of skeletons, gods and jazz. Embryonic in the dark altar in the heart of Africa jazz is bottled at the source where the universe is heard as one whole note. Jazz is the invocation and propagation of silence that binds all of us together back to a Higher Self. Jazz is freedom within imprisonment. Jazz is the volcano god whose muscle guts the hearts of people with the guts to unlearn everything they know, it's the dark feminine, the tornado, the against the grain of society power, aligned with the north star at all costs, worship of the terrifying moment stripped of all pretense, jazz is life and death, its firefighting, its wrestling the Marlin to ground zero, its a collision of planets, what a blessing we have created together, Africa, America, the whole universe of sound, truly I can see that the big bang, on the one, or the four if you're from New Orleans, is what started this amazing music.

Louis Armstrong's House

I'm on disk nine of the Ken Burns History of Jazz 10 DVD set. Even though it is a VERY mainstream slice of the highly dangerous and beautiful art form of jazz, one of the main things that I have taken from it is that Louis Armstrong is an American Bach. In the Court of King Oliver he is the successor of the throne. The improvisations and innovations of Armstrong spawned an entire art form, an entire way of understanding rhythm and melody.

Louis Armstrong is widely misunderstood as just a mere entertainer because of his showbiz aesthetic yet in fact he is a Patriarch of Jazz, a complete virtuoso and innovator on the trumpet, and a musical force so huge I now refer to him as the fountain head, or the Holy Grail.

I was in New York last weekend and I made a point to make a pilgrimage to his house in Queens. It was a sad tourist trap that should be converted into a temple/shrine and upheld with silence and reverence and yet it was still amazing to stand in his den and pay homage to the founder of jazz, the real King of Swing.

Here is a photograph that I took of his doorway because I was not allowed to take pictures inside. I think it is an appropriate metaphor somehow :)

Self Portrait after Jazz Night at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood

The Ride Cymbal is Santa

Today I spent 3-4 hours playing the jazz ride pattern. I am completely in love with John Riley's book "The Art of Bop Drumming." The main revelation so far is that the ride cymbal pattern, in the midst of it's triplet feel, should accent and fully drive a QUARTER NOTE pulse.

Previously I had played the pattern how I felt it; slightly accenting only the 2 & 4. If you accent all the quarter notes and get that relaxed rounded sound, it grooves so hard it feels like flying.  

I literally spent almost four hours today getting that ride pattern like a Brancusi bird :). Allowing the ride to EFFORTLESSLY be ABSOLUTE and INVINCIBLE (with hi hat on 2 & 4) is the foundation for exploring all the ecstatic complexities of jazz drumming and independence.

It's Christmas today.  The deepening of the knowledge of the music I love, the music of New York, the music of the bones, the music of smoke and ash, the music of destruction and from the shivering silence of the Primal Origin, endless resurrections of zero-gravity waves of blood-pumped sound, the one ingredient of the physical universe, is the perpetual intravenous Christmas presence of my life.

PROFESSOR MILFORD GRAVES

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It's about the master free jazz drummer, scientist, herbalist, martial artist, and tenured PROFESSOR MILFORD GRAVES

Milford Graves

Milford Graves is just beautiful. This video made me laugh out loud with the sheer joy of creativity.

Non Change

listening to 88.1 KKJZ
I heard a cover of Leon Russell's
"THIS MASQUERADE"
also covered by George Benson;
an album my dad had when I was a kid;
an album that was played a lot in our house
for some reason.
So I was familiar, very familiar
with the chord progression
It's one of those songs that is just in me.
I heard the sax player go through the melody
simply and recognizably
and after he had done that a couple of rounds,
you can hear the shift take place
where the storm comes
BUT THE CHORD PROGRESSION REMAINS.
And it immediately made me think of Job
what prompts him to say in Job 10:17
"Your forces come upon me wave upon wave"
Rilke said it in his poem "THE MAN WATCHING"

The Man Watching

by Rainer Maria Rilke

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can't bear without a friend,
I can't love without a sister

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it's with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestler's sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

Job got boils all over his body, lost his
possessions, and his children and his animals etc.
But through and because of his trials
there is a part of him that is unaffected,
an anchorage beyond the storm
a place of silence beyond the elements
and the layers of the mind
and he reaches the mindset of peace
anchored in his Higher God Self alone
in Job 40:13
"When the river rages, he is not alarmed"
and that right there is the true guts and origin of jazz
the chord progression being that place of anchorage
and then the improvisation on top the will of GOD
literally jazz mirrors the structure of life
the archetypal structure of the myth
the beginning the middle the end
and it got me thinking about how powerful
music theory is
how powerful it is to be able to feel where the music
is going no matter what is happening
I know this SONG
I know myself
I know this SONG of MYSELF
I know my purpose and where I am headed
and even if Ornette Coleman blasts an avalanche of atonal wizardry
the intelligence of silence
of trust in the invisible structure of music
is guiding the ship.
But then busting out of that anchorage
that necessity of a predetermined structure
or a predetermined melody
moving into the realms of free jazz
where the structure is spontaneous
where Brahman becomes the charioteer of all action
where telepathy fosters the radiance of self sufficiency
like Merce Cunningham and John Cage
collaborating in a state of sheer independence
navigating the storms and flows and harmonizations
while feeling the non-change as the temple and anchorage
like pouring water
into the dark soil of a plant
and seeing the leaves become greener
this is the life of jazz, eternal
based in the trees and soil
in the interaction of the elements
in the divine play of the universe
in ecstasy of its own entropy
dancing with the realm of perfect forms
in the collective abstract
all the way down to the void
that is the nectar
in our hearts
the empty room with no walls
and the best acoustics.