Homespun Jazz Thread

Follow the Hollow Monkeypod


show your colors
plume your feathers
plant your flowers-
hands in the mud
feet in the river,
does the train of thought
deliver?

bass clarinet and
cash register rings,
dark bowties cocked
sideways
as working girls
step lightly
under minor 9 chords-

its raining somewhere
always raining-
but no clouds hang
over cold mountain,

as
snowmelt
culverts barrel,
coming up for air again and again,
a certain vague
knowledge, just say when.

the water finds itself
year after year-
polishing rocks,
rusting locks,
broken glass now smooth
like gemstones unboxed.


Eric Dolphy
lays back,
and the backroom staff
pauses- dishes blended
like

History or
Mystery, the former and the harmonics

out under the midnite sun
spring fevered with delirious stars,
and the delicious
one-
with his code like veins on
such a bluehand

till the dance spreads
accidentally from the wind
to those violet fingers,

while tubby up from beneath vibrates the floor
of hearts
and knees knock
snares slap slap slap.

Minor 3rd above -the osprey
perfect 5th -the crow
Minor 7- the lucky dice.

Do you think
it rained triangles
when Thelonious played?
Danced himself
right off the bench,
angled sharp as his sound,
striding inside out
through the axis
of geometry.

Little Jazz hailed
from the bell,
beating screech
into rhythm higher
than Pops, a wild ride
from Dixie to bop,
a natural bridge
built over river blues

that always flows.
Blues carried them
along its changing
current.

Blues even when Trane
hurled it into sheets
of spirit storm. Ornette
froze it, cracked it to ice,
shooting measured discord
in shards of melody

Bird high.

Near its source
Prez barely rippled
his deceptively still pool
of tone, deep, but topped
with waves of grace
and joy swinging splash
at the songbanks.

cars like motel waves
hiss-
go, go now, grapple thru the spruce
and blackberry thicklet
closer to foggy street
with corner coffee dives
and clapboard drawings lining wistful avenue
one door 2 dimension 4 windows and a peak
and turn cross Quiet street
and now you cant tell the river
from the cars
up on
inspiration
turnpike.

Bus station, a shine crew, 55 gallon drum full of 2 by 4's
Smoke signals up and gone.

The gray lot has blues,
straight up morning cold,
frost and hat, gloves. I
hurry purpose. My goal--
for Jen to know
this
is business
I'm takin care of

muscles and limbs stretching
till that corp of gestalt
flesh and vein, all of it
settles in the skin
proclaims:

Fuck You Middle Age!

Although
I might as well eat mushrooms
until I'm enough something
to reach the key, open the door,
Richard, follow Rabbit Jen
to the Mock Turtle's race
in the fitness room.

You'll love the elliptical stepper
says Miss Enthusiasm.

My eyes widen, maybe roll
with the motion of this flying.

I feel slightly queasy.
The recumbent bike
looks good. I can
do recumbent. I know
that.

After about 40 minutes
the race is futile anyway.
The reward is steamy
snark swim natural
as a baby oyster, sunk
but no worries
of walruses or carpenters
or sleep.

'member that night
downtown Mon'real....
you said, "let's walk."

It was a basement
the sound leaping out.
Smoky and dark
we found a table.

That girl stood up,
so young -
she sang Summertime
and when she finished
you could hear
a pin drop.

Remember?

Windy City Blues

I had dreams
foolish schemes
of falling upon you
in a dark blue light
and dancing the night away
away with you
spinning to a saxophone
the mellow tones
lifting our spirits
and your skirt
as you spun
and weaved a spell
in smoke and song and sin
pulling me in
with your arms
and heart until the music
we heard was only ours

Re: Windy City Blues

tungtied2u said:

I had dreams
foolish schemes
of falling upon you
in a dark blue light
and dancing the night away
away with you
spinning to a saxophone
the mellow tones
lifting our spirits
and your skirt
as you spun
and weaved a spell
in smoke and song and sin
pulling me in
with your arms
and heart until the music
we heard was only ours

Click to expand...

go have a good time anyway ..enjoy ur family..and dance the night away with someone u can slip into like lotion..


really..have a good time k..we'll look after your castle!

Re: Re: Windy City Blues

BlueskyBeauty said:

go have a good time anyway ..enjoy ur family..and dance the night away with someone u can slip into like lotion..


really..have a good time k..we'll look after your castle!

Click to expand...

....and

Re: Re: Re: Windy City Blues

tungtied2u said:

....and

Click to expand...

fuck..do you need me to show you???


please don't drop your pants..lol

Raina rides the retroglide
Sandy shoes and a stick filled bucket,
A small puddle of mud like a target
At the bottom of the slide.

Avenue A out behind the
Rows of Camphor,
No one ever explained this plan
Clearly to her.
Beyond the Camphor
In Water Oaked woods,
No one did explain the musty smell
That she has remembered
since before she was born.

Jasmine.
Maybe Egyptian Goddess.
No. That seems traitorous.
There is frankincense
and myrryh, but it's too
Song of Songs though I
am black and beautiful, O I
am a daughter of Jerusalem
though there's always the danger
of slipping from the ancient
elegance of Esther and Ruth
to Aunt Zelma bitching
at the Sabbath table
about how misherable
life is while she passes the brisket.

I'm too subtle for Aphrodasiac.
Seduction begins with suggestion.
And Chinese Aphrodasiac
confuses me. How is it different
from regular Aprodasiac? Anything
I can think of is a stupid cliche.

I mistrust Sweet Rain and Exotic
Ocean, Mountain Morning. These
were complex scents before some
new age yahoo in Connecticut
strained them into bottles. Real
mountain mornings have smells
I don't want on my skin.

This leaves Vanilla.

I am so hopelessly
vanilla, sweet with a linger
of spice, an exotic
consideration or maybe
a long ago winter kitchen
safe baking day
which I just bet
will smell damn good
in the hollow
of my throat.

Do you tap your toe?
Do you nod your head?
Is your whole body involved?
Or do you just let it flow over
and around you?
Let it soak into your very being
being as you're a jazz fan.
That sax seeming to slink in
sidling past sentries of distraction.
The horn heaping helpings of hedonics
onto drum solos and bass riffs that
tear you apart.
I love to close my eyes but
it looks so affected that I
don't often do it.
I just tap my toe
unobtrusively.

it's not forlorn
it's just another day
we can walk it down
Hammond Street
to bagles and ale
or just take me down
to California baby
anywhere the air
blows freedom
somewhere our place
is safe and wider
than our smiles
curved high and clean
like the waves where
you surfed once
show me anywhere
you loved and I'm
there too because
life dips and rocks
so sweet with you
shhh blues heart
babysweet hurt
with minor chords
slide my arms hold
you whisper near
played fretless

John Cage and the typewriter orchestra,
Down the street from Bop sidewalks,
Stravinsky's banned work and he didnt smoke no reefer like
Jango and Charley Christian-

On the Left bank, or
Skipping stones across the Hudson River,
The riffle works its way across the rocky shallows,
Giving way to the bluest deep pool.

The wordless
The instant
The music in that ocean.

~ unfinished ~


The dance halls never were so lively.
The Funky Butt, the Rags and
Slides.
The words suit the sound –
raunchy and suggestive.
The singer’s black
and dares to meets men’s eyes
while she growls.

Long unisons,
a double blond bowed in deeply,
rattling manhole covers
while a minor third oboe
sticks up like a cat tail
and blows lint on the soprano streecorner where
reeds grow in droning creeks,
gutterways and mudseason dooryards.

Workers off somewhere within earshot
Provide percussion to get things started.

eagleyez said:

Long unisons,
a double blond bowed in deeply,
rattling manhole covers
while a minor third oboe
sticks up like a cat tail
and blows lint on the soprano streecorner where
reeds grow in droning creeks,
gutterways and mudseason dooryards.

Workers off somewhere within earshot
Provide percussion to get things started.

Click to expand...

damn.

Angeline said:

damn.

Click to expand...

Ditto damn!

Not mine- but fits here

Poem: "Theolonious Monk," by Stephen Dobyns, from Common Carnage (Penguin).

Thelonious Monk

A record store on Wabash was where
I bought my first album. I was a freshman
in college and played the record in my room

over and over. I was caught by how he took
the musical phrase and seemed to find a new
way out, the next note was never the note

you thought would turn up and yet seemed
correct. Surprise in 'Round Midnight
or Sweet and Lovely. I bought the album

for Mulligan but stayed for Monk. I was
eighteen and between my present and future
was a wall so big that not even sunlight

crossed over. I felt surrounded by all
I couldn't do, as if my hopes to write,
to love, to have children, even to exist

with slight contentment were like ghosts
with the faces found on Japanese masks:
sheer mockery! I would sit on the carpet

and listen to Monk twist the scale into kinks
and curlicues. The gooseneck lamp on my desk
had a blue bulb which I thought artistic and

tinted the stacks of unread books: if Thomas
Mann depressed me, Freud depressed me more.
It seemed that Monk played with sticks attached

to his fingertips as he careened through the tune,
counting unlike any metronome. He was exotic,
his playing was hypnotic. I wish I could say

that hearing him, I grabbed my pack and soldiered
forward. Not quite. It was the surprise I liked,
the discordance and fretful change of beat,

as in Straight No Chaser , where he hammers together
a papier-mâché skyscraper, then pops seagulls
with golf balls. Racket, racket, but all of it

music. What Monk banged out was the conviction
of innumerable directions. Years later
I felt he'd been blueprint, map and education:

no streets, we bushwhacked through the underbrush;
not timid, why open your mouth if not to shout?
not scared, the only road lay straight in front;

not polite, the notes themselves were sneak attacks;
not quiet-look, can't you see the sky will soon
collapse and we must keep dancing till it cracks?

for Michael Thomas

coal miner, a
moonshiner
all bristle
in the
squawood fire

salted in
squalls,
salted
on the north side of trees-

one string and
a galvanized
bucket upside
down.

broomhandle
dancer
come out here
from town,
a car shot with primer
33 degrees top dead center.

Now you're just
a faded voice, a back-up
singer in a commercial,
a jazz cartoon hung
out to dry on the wall
of fame like a crucifix
sacrificing the twentieth
century, shrinking it
with iconography.
You never asked
the blind future
to forgive your sweat
and sentiment. You just
lived your life, but it's atrohpy,
time unraveling the shells
of factories, the ghosts
of Studebakers bouncing
on rutted memory, it's all
of one piece, you tiny,
reduced lto 78 rpms
of static, or homogenized,
strained through a scrim
for elevator palates,
while we march into oblivion,
too.

why all the jazz?
everyone asks. you
write and keep writing
more maybe it's a crutch
but you have to listen
and understand

when it swings hard
it's controlled madness
shrieking like loons
on the secret lake
of a private imagination
but you get to go there
and fly down to it and sail
across it in winged dips
and graceful spins
through the cool
liquid changes

when it cries soft
it's yellow fog curling
around your memory
like ghosts who live
always in the next room
but step in at times
to hold you faint as smoke
and whisper stories
just one more time

you have to listen
and understand
that it's a river, it
pulls you with its tides
and deep underneath
it's all blue minor sad
notes but enveloping
as peace low as life

you can stretch
yourself around it
let it move your limbs
carry you in a sway
of somewhere
you've never been
but for that space
of song

Sitting in jury duty
reading Bukowski's " Woman"
it makes you look at all the women there
crazy shit
flying always
next one, next one next one
and you love them all
in some ways
but the real ones get inside you
your head
and they hurt
you know
because deep inside
you know they're gonna leave
someday
and that first kiss
opens a little tear in your heart
where she gets in
and lays her eggs
and when she leaves they hatch
and they feed on you
hollowing you out
acid burning
cigarettes in your eyes
and ground glass in your sleep
and never again man
never

until that redhead says she likes Screamin Jay too
and your hear tears a little....

godamned monday night
bad oak floor and the trap set is
rattling the beer cans on the
ampheads while Doris the plant lady
swaggers on the floor and
sees god in a soundcheck-
distancing her feet from her brain
hitchin her drawers and
the plaid shirts
talk about furnace repair as she shakes her platinum hair.

one eye on that sugar
and a pile of quarters for the
jukejoint, dead as a can,
on a godamned
monday night

as the band clears the
tab with the man,
splits for the van-

my phone becomes disconnected
but my bills are paid.

eagleyez said:

godamned monday night
bad oak floor and the trap set is
rattling the beer cans on the
ampheads while Doris the plant lady
swaggers on the floor and
sees god in a soundcheck-
distancing her feet from her brain
hitchin her drawers and
the plaid shirts
talk about furnace repair as she shakes her platinum hair.

one eye on that sugar
and a pile of quarters for the
jukejoint, dead as a can,
on a godamned
monday night

as the band clears the
tab with the man,
splits for the van-

my phone becomes disconnected
but my bills are paid.

Click to expand...

that's a photo of you, right?