'Scuse me while I do not kiss the sky but instead improvise...
Here's another bloke improvising...if only I could improvise word-wise as well as he does with the horn. He's just another dead, fat, chicken-lovin' ol' Jazz player, so feel free not to press 'Play'....
You don't need Charlie Parker - you don't need me. Correction: you need Charlie Parker, you don't need me...
Here's a picture of me at home listening to another another dead (aren't they all?) Jazz musician, Duke Ellington, whilst LJ asks if I'm comfortable enough, and can she hear Charles Mingus next, 'cause she's nuts for Mingus...then she asks why I didn't water the plants whilst she was away and threatens to break my legs and my Ellington CDs if I don't start tending to the precious lifeforms in our luxurious apartment, to which I reply: "But, darling, I've played them music all week-end! The aloe vera's leaves were vibrating to Mort Garson!" What happened next is a blank...
Reading The Wire's Invisible Jukebox book the other day I had to chuckle at Ali Farka Toure's contribution because 'I don't know this' is a recurring phrase and it heartened me to see someone else's ignorance exposed. He didn't know John Lee Hooker's 'Boogie Children', which I thought everyone knew, or Robert Johnson, or, perhaps most surprisingly, Bo Diddley (!) More than that, he'd never heard of Bo Diddley! By which time I started to think old Ali was havin' a larf, especially since his playing is supposed to be blues-influenced, the reason the tester played him a trio of Blues/R&B legends, presumably. Goes to show, you can't make assumptions about anyone's musical knowledge, or...
Talking of books and writing, I found this great quote by Hilaire Belloc the other day:
'The life of writing men has always been...a bitter business. It is notoriously accompanied, for those who write well, by poverty and contempt; or by fatuity and wealth for those who write ill.'
TTFN
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