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f3aff04
|
"Don't we look suspicious, the three of us just sitting here in the car?" Borden asked. We'd look a lot more suspicious if we were all three making out in the car," Jazz said. "What?" she added, when Borden turned and gave her a wide-eyed look.
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|
devil-s-due
jazz
|
Rachel Caine |
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56bbd33
|
"Do we not each dream of dreams? Do we not dance on the notes of lost
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|
sex
shakespeare
magic
rain
poems
romance
sacrifice
death
dreams
music
songs
life
carrack
cityisle
cityspire
desolate
fedora
haunts
horace-walpole
mannequins
phillip-k-dick
puddles
specters
spectre
amnesia
androids
haunting
greek-mythology
waking
damnation
count
emily-dickinson
magick
tempest
apocalypse
reflections
storms
masquerade
empty
science-fiction
gothic
jazz
ships
ghosts
water
piano
|
Nathan Reese Maher |
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368ea92
|
"To be a jazz freedom fighter is to attempt to galvanize and energize world-weary people into forms of organization with accountable leadership that promote critical exchange and broad reflection. The interplay of individuality and unity is not one of uniformity and unanimity imposed from above but rather of conflict among diverse groupings that reach a dynamic consensus subject to questioning and criticism. As with a soloist in a jazz quartet, quintet or band, individuality is promoted in order to sustain and increase the creative tension with the group--a tension that yields higher levels of performance to achieve the aim of the collective project. This kind of critical and democratic sensibility flies in the face of any policing of borders and boundaries of "blackness", "maleness", "femaleness", or "whiteness"." --
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|
unity
social-justice
individuality
critical-reflection
jazz-freedom-fighter
improve
jazz
|
Cornel West |
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d78c0be
|
"I have sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject could do. I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear. They told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones loud, long, and deep; they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with bitterest anguish. Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains. The hearing of those wild notes always depressed my spirit, and filled me with ineffable sadness. I have frequently found myself in tears while hearing them. The mere recurrence to those songs, even now, afflicts me; and while I am writing these lines, an expression of feeling has already found its way down my cheek. To those songs I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery. I can never get rid of that conception. Those songs still follow me, to deepen my hatred of slavery, and quicken my sympathies for my brethren in bonds. If any one wishes to be impressed with the soul-killing effects of slavery, let him go to Colonel Lloyd's plantation, and, on allowance-day, place himself in the deep pine woods, and there let him, in silence, analyze the sounds that shall pass through the chambers of his soul, - and if he is not thus impressed, it will only be because "there is no flesh in his obdurate heart." I have often been utterly astonished, since I came to the north, to find persons who could speak of the singing, among slaves, as evidence of their contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears. At least, such is my experience. I have often sung to drown my sorrow, but seldom to express my happiness. Crying for joy, and singing for joy, were alike uncommon to me while in the jaws of slavery. The singing of a man cast away upon a desolate island might be as appropriately considered as evidence of contentment and happiness, as the singing of a slave; the songs of the one and of the other are prompted by the same emotion."
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|
music
frederick-douglass
jazz
|
Frederick Douglass |
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e17fd53
|
"There is a stillness between us, a period of restlessness that ties my stomach
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|
sex
shakespeare
magic
rain
poems
romance
sacrifice
death
dreams
music
songs
life
carrack
cityisle
cityspire
desolate
fedora
haunts
horace-walpole
mannequins
phillip-k-dick
puddles
specters
spectre
amnesia
androids
haunting
greek-mythology
waking
damnation
count
emily-dickinson
magick
tempest
apocalypse
reflections
storms
masquerade
empty
science-fiction
gothic
jazz
ships
ghosts
water
piano
|
Nathan Reese Maher |
|
b5947f7
|
"When her muzzle grew more white than brown, the chipmunk forgot that she and the squirrel had had nothing to talk about. She forgot the definition of "jazz" as well and came to think of it as every beautiful thing she had ever failed to appreciate: the taste of warm rain; the smell of a baby; the din of a swollen river, rushing past her tree and onward to infinity."
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|
love
infinity
jazz
|
David Sedaris |
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ce48d68
|
The Angel Gabriel disappeared once for sixty years and they found him on earth hiding in the body of a man named Miles Davis.
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|
humor
miles-davis
jazz
|
Christopher Moore |
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e821b61
|
"After a noticeable silence, he'd recently published a book of technically baffling poems, with line breaks so arbitrary and frequent as to be useless, arrhythmic. On the page they look like some of Charles Bukowski's skinny, chatty, muttering-stuttering antiverses. Impossibly, Mark's words make music, the faraway strains of an irresistible jazz. It's plain to any reader, within a few lines--well, go read the poems and see, Marcus Ahearn traffics with the ineffable. He makes the mind of the speaker present, in that here-and-now where the reader actually reads--that place. Such a rare thing. Samuel Beckett. Jean Follain, Ionesco--the composer Billy Strayhorn. Mark calls his process "psychic improvisation" and referred me to the painter Paul Klee; the term was Klee's. "You just get out a pen and a notebook and let your mind go long," he told me."
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|
poetry
writing
klee
psychic-improvisation
jazz
|
Denis Johnson |
|
958e952
|
"After a noticeable silence, he'd recently published a book of technically baffling poems, with line breaks so arbitrary and frequent as to be useless, arrhythmic. On the page they look like some of Charles Bukowski's skinny, chatty, muttering-stuttering antiverses. Impossibly, Mark's words make music, the faraway strains of an irresistible jazz. It's plain to any reader, within a few lines--well, go read the poems and see, Marcus Ahearn traffics with the ineffable. He makes the mind of the speaker present, in that here-and-now where the reader actually reads--that place. Such a rare thing. Samuel Beckett. Jean Follain, Ionesco--the composer Billy Strayhorn. Mark calls his process "psychic improvisation" and referred me to the painter Paul Klee; the term was Klee's. "You just get out a pen and a notebook and let your mind go long," he told me." --
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|
poetry
writing
klee
psychic-improvisation
jazz
|
Denis Johnson |
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2cb476e
|
"History doesn't start with a tall building
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|
sex
shakespeare
magic
rain
poems
romance
sacrifice
death
dreams
music
songs
life
carrack
cityisle
cityspire
desolate
fedora
haunts
horace-walpole
mannequins
phillip-k-dick
puddles
specters
spectre
amnesia
androids
haunting
greek-mythology
waking
damnation
count
emily-dickinson
magick
tempest
apocalypse
reflections
storms
masquerade
empty
science-fiction
gothic
jazz
ships
ghosts
water
piano
|
Nathan Reese Maher |
|
0d333ab
|
Jazz is the music of the body. The breath comes through brass. It is the body's breath, and the strings' wails and moans are echoes of the body's music. It is the body's vibrations which ripple from the fingers. And the mystery of the withheld theme, known to jazz musicians alone, is like the mystery of our secret life. We give to others only peripheral improvisations.
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|
music
life
jazz
vibrations
|
Anaïs Nin |
|
ff9a09a
|
Black women were armed, black women were dangerous and the less money they had the deadlier the weapon they chose.
|
|
women
toni-morrison
jazz
|
Toni Morrison |
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3461d70
|
"Don't make a career out of underestimating me." -- Claire de Haven"
|
|
l-a-confidential
red-scare
the-big-nowhere
underestimate
femme-fatale
fearless
noir
jazz
crime
|
James Ellroy |
|
6e9cbf3
|
"She leaves my side and heads deeper into
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|
sex
shakespeare
magic
rain
poems
romance
sacrifice
death
dreams
music
songs
life
carrack
cityisle
cityspire
desolate
fedora
haunts
horace-walpole
mannequins
phillip-k-dick
puddles
specters
spectre
amnesia
androids
haunting
greek-mythology
waking
damnation
count
emily-dickinson
magick
tempest
apocalypse
reflections
storms
masquerade
empty
science-fiction
gothic
jazz
ships
ghosts
water
piano
|
Nathan Reese Maher |
|
4c8d46b
|
"That's a stupid name! Whirly-gig is much better, I think. Who in their right mind would point at this thing and say, 'I'm going to fly in my Model-A1'.
|
|
sex
shakespeare
magic
rain
poems
romance
sacrifice
death
dreams
music
songs
life
carrack
cityisle
cityspire
desolate
fedora
haunts
horace-walpole
mannequins
phillip-k-dick
puddles
specters
spectre
amnesia
androids
haunting
greek-mythology
waking
damnation
count
emily-dickinson
magick
tempest
apocalypse
reflections
storms
masquerade
empty
science-fiction
gothic
jazz
ships
ghosts
water
piano
|
Nathan Reese Maher |
|
f16bbd7
|
"In his book Real Presences, George Steiner asks us to "imagine a society in which all talk about the arts, music and literature is prohibited." In such a society there would be no more essays on whether Hamlet was mad or only pretending to be, no reviews of the latest exhibitions or novels, no profiles of writers or artists. There would be no secondary, or parasitic, discussion - let alone tertiary: commentary on commentary. We would have, instead, a "republic for writers and readers" with no cushion of professional opinion-makers to come between creators and audience. While the Sunday papers presently serve as a substitute for the experiencing of the actual exhibition or book, in Steiner's imagined republic the review pages would be turned into listings:catalogues and guides to what is about to open, be published, or be released. What would this republic be like? Would the arts suffer from the obliteration of this ozone of comment? Certainly not, says Steiner, for each performance of a Mahler symphony is also a critique of that symphony. Unlike the reviewer, however, the performer "invests his own being in the process of interpretation." Such interpretation is automatically responsible because the performer is answerable to the work in a way that even the most scrupulous reviewer is not. Although, most obviously, it is not only the case for drama and music; all art is also criticism. This is most clearly so when a writer or composer quotes or reworks material from another writer or composer. All literature, music, and art "embody an expository reflection which they pertain". In other words it is not only in their letters, essays, or conversation that writers like Henry James reveal themselves also to be the best critics; rather, The Portrait of a Lady is itself, among other things, a commentary on and a critique of Middlemarch. "The best readings of art are art." No sooner has Steiner summoned this imaginary republic into existence than he sighs, "The fantasy I have sketched is only that." Well, it is not. It is a real place and for much of the century it has provided a global home for millions of people. It is a republic with a simple name: jazz."
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|
criticism
jazz
|
Geoff Dyer |
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ac3314e
|
Mijn vader houdt van jazz en heeft een uitgebreide verzameling platen en banden waarvan hij vroeger als hij uit zijn werk kwam kon genieten. Hij kon met een rothumeur binnenkomen, maar als hij Dexter Gordon had opgezet en zichzelf een wodkacocktail had ingeschonken, ebde zijn stress snel weg en werd alles 'te gek, jongen, gewoon te gek.' Op het moment dat de naald op de plaat neerdaalde, maakt hij zijn das los en werd hij iemand anders dan degene die hij daarvoor was geweest, een conservatieve ingenieur met in zijn borstzakje een stel ibm-pennen met het opschrift denk na.
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|
platen
jazz
|
David Sedaris |
|
b1c7695
|
Inside McClintic Sphere was swinging his ass off. His skin was hard, as if it were part of the skull: every vein and whisker on that head stood out sharp and clear under the green baby spot: you could see the twin lines running down from either side of his lower lip, etched in by the force of his embouchure, looking like extensions of his mustache. He blew a hand-carved ivory alto saxophone with a 4 1/2 reed and the sound was like nothing any of them had heard before. The usual divisions prevailed: collegians did not dig, and left after an average of 1 1/2 sets. Personnel from other groups, either with a night off or taking a long break from somewhere crosstown or uptown, listened hard, trying to dig. 'I am still thinking,' they would say if you asked. People at the bar all looked as if they did dig in the sense of understand, approve of, empathize with: but this was probably only because people who prefer to stand at the bar have, universally, an inscrutable look... ...The group on the stand had no piano: it was bass, drums, McClintic and a boy he had found in the Ozarks who blew a natural horn in F. The drummer was a group man who avoided pyrotechnics, which may have irritated the college crowd. The bass was small and evil-looking and his eyes were yellow with pinpoints in the center. He talked to his instrument. It was taller than he was and didn't seem to be listening. Horn and alto together favored sixths and minor fourths and when this happened it was like a knife fight or tug of war: the sound was consonant but as if cross-purposes were in the air. The solos of McClintic Sphere were something else. There were people around, mostly those who wrote for Downbeat magazine or the liners of LP records, who seemed to feel he played disregarding chord changes completely. They talked a great deal about soul and the anti-intellectual and the rising rhythms of African nationalism. It was a new conception, they said, and some of them said: Bird Lives. Since the soul of Charlie Parker had dissolved away into a hostile March wind nearly a year before, a great deal of nonsense had been spoken and written about him. Much more was to come, some is still being written today. He was the greatest alto on the postwar scene and when he left it some curious negative will-a reluctance and refusal to believe in the final, cold fact-possessed the lunatic fringe to scrawl in every subway station, on sidewalks, in pissoirs, the denial: Bird Lives. So that among the people in the V-Note that night were, at a conservative estimate, a dreamy 10 per cent who had not got the word, and saw in McClintic Sphere a kind of reincarnation.
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|
ornette-coleman
jazz
|
Thomas Pynchon |
|
87ee051
|
Jusqu'a present, tu n'avais jamais pu supporter la danse ni le jazz, ce n'etait pas assez profond pour toi et maintenant tu vois que point n'est besoin de les prendre au serieux pour les trouver delicieux et charmants.
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|
légèreté
sérieux
jazz
|
Hermann Hesse |