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Brian O'blivion Sep 2013
mccoy tyner
played piano
in the john coltrane "classic"
quartet in the
1960s
he is still
alive
today
Mateuš Conrad Aug 2016
as with any plaster work, or draping muscles and bones and
organs in skin - i knew i reached a zenith of some sort:
forever introspective, that chance momentum
that never reaches a museum of retrospective
finalised banalities -
and with that's happening in America,
i get a chance glimpse into that part of the world
so bogus, so *****-like, so haphazardly
put together - the chance to see the rats (artists)
jump ship and head to Tangiers, Paris, London
(for the pillars of the movement to come,
London especially, but might i suggest Edinburgh?
the capital of the offshoot that's to come
from Scandinavian novels?) -
i wouldn't suggest heading to Prague -
or Budapest - never to tourist hot-spots, obscurity is
what you need - Edinburgh out of season,
then the theatrical circus isn't there -
***** poetics: poncy monologues and Annabel
art-house flea markets... but that's the beauty,
flea markets in France, charity shops in England...
but i did exhaust this one musical avenue,
i dropped the ᚱᚢᚾᛖᛋ - it got boring after a while:
all that charged up mythological feeling -
the way we always wanted: myths to feel with,
to eat, rather than the sterile scientific facts...
i've learned enough to later ditch them,
even a Professor of Chemistry will have a postcard
of Edward Hopper's painting by his desk,
that window to view the world that doesn't
necessarily encompass sun moon and constellations...
how anyone would be foolish to scrub off
some inspiration from such things bemuses me,
the lowest of the low of poetic expressions is
sung to things that manage too much: the moon
and the sea tides, the sun and the seasons and
phototropism - it's a double edged sword...
only from one art to another do we get to see
our labourers of attention, else the same old deficit:
god... who in his glee took offence at anyone
having more awe-inspiring sense to please such
things... no alone can you master contemplating
both the beauty and the utilisation behind such
objects as a single man... however well...
it's impossible... you're sharing the bronze platform
with those that simply wrote of the shallow
beauty, and those that found these objects
were not simply aesthetic, but meaningful in
the machinery of things... it was never up to
us to find that electric genius of combining the aesthetics
with the machinery as one...
for in that sense god is a form as fraction
of 9/1, 8/1, 7/1, 6/1, 5/1, 4/1...
the fraction of wholeness... a complete set to start with...
man has already proved the limit as a fraction
with the base 3... 9/3, and that didn't really end well...
at best man is composed of a fraction base of 2...
by sharing the world through marriage to a woman,
or through a learned devotion, a crumb of what a woman
is, a philia (love) of his interests, a soloist voyage...
some just say: you will either take to being faithful
to philology and yourself as its devotee,
or you'll take up a wife... oddly enough chemists are
defilers of marriage having any purpose other than
to distract... but as i said: you can rarely write
decent things when trying to admire celestial spheres...
more ambition comes from the distraction of the zodiac
"prophets" and astrologers... a poem about the moon
is just a poem that is levelled with a poem
about a dustbin... but hey... Top Cat lives in the dustbin,
Neil Armstrong bopped along the lessened gravity
surface... but which is easier to acquire for a smile?
Benny... cue the violin theatrics of lamenting to a comic
end.
well... we have to juggle each other's impressions,
taking at hacking the raw meat will not give any of us
medium-rare barbecue steaks marinated...
taking the moon as something else is: nice...
and you know how nice things end up as... as tacky
suburban *******... if you're going to tackle the
thing with all the rawness... i'd first spend looking
looking at that thing of your attention in a graveyard...
just to get the feel to the idea: well... my fellow daisies
sniffed from the roots up would probably have
said something sulky similar.
but it's like that, you get to exhaust certain musical avenues...
i'm currently at a period where i have enough
stash of jazz records to rekindle my interest in it...
on today's menu? the real McCoy (McCoy Tyner,
Joe Henderson, Ron Carter and Elvin Flynn -
Flynn makes his mark, even though not the star
of the album, Art Blakey has a match) -
then onto the tragedy of Sonny Clark with his
cool struttin' alongside Art Farmer, Jackie McLean,
Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones...
i must admit that after watching the film whiplash
my ear-buds staged a coup to move from a certain
type of music into this... and even though
i already said that the climate in America at the moment
is very a second attempt at a Beat movement...
it's very much different... i guess jazz makes all the sense
in a pure urban environment...
jazz and urbanity, the hipster parties where wine flows
like poetry and people get to do their wild marijuana
******... but Bukowski changed everything
by bringing a taste of the classical into the scene...
it feels just like that these days...
there's no jazz on the radio...
going back to watches and radios, mono-utility things
that are the glamours of the inoffensive cluttering of a room...
no digital screen... the radio position at the back
of my head, behind me, the little fly-eye Rubik cube
ahead of me...
that's the odd thing with coming with jazz these days...
it's like Bukowski in the shadows of the beat movement
back when it was the beaten track...
so i said that jazz and urbanity are perfect partners...
well... take jazz from an urban environment and put it
in a outer-suburban environment, in a place
about 30 minute walk from farming fields with bulls
and horses... foxes the thieves rummaging in people's
trash... and... as classical music took to
teaching us the language of celestial bodies,
Holst... in this kind of environment jazz does the same...
jazz becomes equal to classical music with celestial
bodies... i'm just wondering if there are enough
instruments to arrange the solar system...
Mercury the Trumpet...
         Venus the Double Bass
Earth the Piano
                       Mars the Drums
Jupiter the Tenor Sax                                   (comparatively,
                Saturn the Soprano Sax                using a Holst
                                                           ­        schematic, the reverse,
                                             yet citing Jupiter, not as a planet,
                                           well, the bellowing voice of paternal fury)
Uranus the Clarinet
                                           (takes sheer magic to play that thing)
so that just leaves us with an Neptune as either
   Alto Sax or Trombone...
but that's how jazz morphed since it last came across
poetry... someone stole it from its urban environment
of busy streets and ugly manners and quick quick snappy
and the millionth time i could compare it to a spontaneous
encounter with someone in a bar... jazz lost its cool there...
people said the same thing about jazz
as Kaiser Joseph II did of Mozart... "too many notes"...
translate this urbanity into an outer-suburban environment
and put it against that kind of backdrop?
well... personally, there are just enough notes in each piece...
you looked outside the window? you could hear
a **** from a mile away and no tree would even sway
in nodding approval even with a galeforce wind slapping
them... jazz lost its synchronisation with the urban environment
it emerged from... but in so doing, it managed to mature
like good wine on the outskirts of large cities,
where it literally became the only thing that could ably
make a Kandinsky moment from semi-detached houses.
NEWSFLASH... what is this concern about art being
subjective? i don't see where these arguments go...
i thought art was about revealing the intimate,
not revealing the objective shallows of a method...
of limited scope like any philosophical systematisation...
if Christopher Columbus ever did things
objectively he might have discovered Lisbon or the Canary Islands...
art can't be objective... trying to argue that art is
"only a subjective" expression... well, if it was to be
a "greater" expression objectively, an artist would
walk into an art gallery, take all the paintings from
the canvases, and turn to the public and say:
now let's see your subjectivity, otherwise go ponce
off the art critics to take something they said to your
date about how: the light contorts the features of expressions
blah blah blah blah blah... the point of art being
superior as a subjective vehicle is so that i can feel someone
else's feelings... as opposed to thinking someone else's thoughts...
art is the sensual, not the premeditated dogmatic funeral -
which all philosophers attend: they're objective to the
point that they're afraid of having a personal attachment
to their outputs - they will hardly ever want to invite
a criticism of their objectivity, because they're such emotional
paupers - they fear criticism of their subjectivity to such
a point, that you can simply look at their pronoun usage
strategy, they really do use these words like kings -
but when Mozart is criticised by the Kaiser... he thought
nothing of it... he actually thought, nothing of it,
perhaps his vanity was wounded, but his virtue wasn't...
which is why he remains with us...
for the fatal wound incurred is not that of virtue,
but that of vanity... and true virtue is unafraid of criticism,
there's this cognitive blockage that enriches the
heart and leaves the mind blank... the sort of blank
that accommodates the Pyramid of Vanity:
bishops, priests, doctors, kings, queens, portrait artists,
Versailles... such things are so ****** void of anything
but scare-mongers, sycophants, leeches and finally tourists...
for whatever you take from the realm of Hades,
there's a stamp-duty on each precious element from that
realm... each thing is stamped: worthless...
you couldn't extract penicillin from Hades...
changing gold into a ring is worthless if such symbolism
of a union of monogamy end with the ring being
nothing more than a thing disputed over the divorce settlement.
Mateuš Conrad May 2016
i don't why, but it just happens sometimes,
one minute you're listening to Ryan Adams'
self-titled album with that pillar of
rock stay with me reading the Sunday Times
style magazine after having digested
the culture magazine and the Sunday Times
magazine, bobbing along to an article about
the singer Ariana Grande, seeing her almost
kissing a pooch on a skyscraper (*****,
that tongue's been up my ***, so said the pooch)
and you don't get Ryan Adams,
****'s a gridlock, a traffic jam, it doesn't
have a care for Pearl Jam and the wilderness of
Canada... so you switch listening material
to Herbie Hancock's cantaloupe island,
and suddenly you're in Philip Larkin territory...
it's funny to say that slavery of the africans
by the english to colonise the American continent
gave us fewer princes bored by Mozart
stating 'too many notes' - well jazz has enough
too many, notes, because there's this whole impromptu
going on; in my collection of the genre?
a decent list: sonny clark's complete works,
sonny clark's cool struttin',
cannonball aderley's somethin' else,
cedric 'im' brooks united africa,
booker t & the m.g.'s green onions (~jazz),
thelonious monk's monk's blues,
thelonious monk's criss-cross,
egberto gismonti's solo, eric dolphy's out to lunch,
donald byrd's royal flush, duke ellington's soul call,
terry callier's occasional rain, guru's jazzmatazz vol. 1,
miles davis' ******* brew / sketches of spain /
kind of blue / porgy and bess / the complete birth of the cool,
hurbie hancock's takin' off / my point of view,
steve kuhn trio's wisteria, joshua redman's back east,
freddie hubbard's hub-tones, john coltraine's blue train /
a love supreme, nina simone's nina simone at the village gate,
bobby mcferrin's spontaneous innovations,
chet baker's my funny valentine, dexter gordon's go!,
us3's hand on the torch, sonny rollins' ballads,
freddie hubbard's ready for freddie,
art blakey's moanin', kenny burrell's midnight blue,
chick corea's now he sings now he sobs,
mccoy tyner's the real mccoy, dianne reeve's i remember,
duke ellington's money jungle, horace silver's song
for my father, jimmy smith's back at the chicken shack,
wayne shorter's ju lu...
so with this mind, from bukowski the baton was
passed, don't get me wrong, i appreciate classical
music, but jazz is too much poetry,
not really the makings of coupling the two like
the Beats... just that they originate with a sentiment
best stated: 'what the **** was that?'
reverse aerodynamics: actually, no, proper
aerodynamics: you see the plane and then get the score
sheet... those European composers must have
been literally mad, so many instruments encoded,
pitches, larks, stresses of a violin's specific accenting
that wouldn't never sound like a nail scratching
blackboard... i know it's horrid to compliment
slavery... but hell... without it no jazz,
just stuck in a rut with classical whitey boys...
and no jazz no blues... no future rock or pop...
if there's anything to redeem the trade it's this music,
and, let me tell you, jazz is urbanity a soul of
frank o'hara's new york, it's amplified in
a suburban environment, never did suburbia
bordering on countryside feel so cosmopolitan,
but i'm adding this amplification to have been
aided by the number of birds i can spot, lazily
from my window...
and god, i love the fact that in jazz you can
have a specific bloom for each instrument used,
you can have a horn, a sax, a drum a bass solo
all in one go, so it's not as monochromatic as in
rock music (primarily occupied with
lead guitar solos, in the 1970s the drum solos
of john bonham) - all in one go i.e.
the tactful representation of each instrument,
the sort of football match analogy where every
player gets a touch of the ball / limelight.
Charles Sturies Jun 2018
Roy Nyers
Donald Byrd
Stanley Turrentine,
Wayne Shorter
McCoy Tyner,
Frank Sinatra,
Billie Holliday,
Gene Ammons,
Some I want to listen to
Like
Clark Terry,
Art Farmer,
and Yusef Lateef.

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