Life is a lot like jazz. It's best when you improvise.
It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing.
Most of what I listen to now is mainstream jazz from 1935 right up to and including early bebop and cool jazz.
Growing up, I'd already decided I wanted to be a beatnik. A Bohemian poet, I thought. Or a musician. Maybe an artist. I'd dress in black turtlenecks and smoke Gitanes. I'd listen to cool jazz in clubs, getting up to read devastating truths from my notebook, leaning against the microphone, cigarette dangling from my hand.
Jazz is smooth and cool. Jazz is rage. Jazz flows like water. Jazz never seems to begin or end. Jazz isn't methodical, but jazz isn't messy either. Jazz is a conversation, a give and take. Jazz is the connection and communication between musicians. Jazz is abandon.
I suppose it was later on that I realized that there was some reaction among the musicians themselves, some of whom resented the success of cool jazz in California, and that broke down into the white guys against the hard-blowing black guys in New York.
the beauty of America, neither cool jazz nor devoured Egyptian heroes, lies in lives in the darkness I inhabit in the midst of sterile millions
or simply:
