It has been nearly a year since I was last on this thread. I'll add a little piece I wrote on jazz.-Ron
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JAZZ:
A commemorative compendium of prose and poetry in memory of Dizzy Gillespie
Preamble:
I put together the following compendium of prose and poetry in memory of Dizzy Gillespie who died 22 years ago this month. John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie(1917-1993) was an American
jazz composer, trumpeter,
bandleader, and occasional singer. Gillespie was a trumpet virtuoso and
improviser building on the virtuoso style of
Roy Eldridge. But he added layers of
harmonic complexity previously unheard in jazz.
I met Gillespie in his hotel-room in Perth Western Australia circa 1990 several years before he died, and gave him a prose-poem I had written. I was just at the beginning of my own creative and literary life, a literary life in which improvisation has been a central factor in my work. The following package of poems was also inspired by watching the 9th episode of Ken Burns' documentary,
Jazz. In particular it was the emphasis placed in that episode on improvisation in the history of jazz from the mid-to-late 1950s to the early 1960s when I, myself, had become seriously interested in the Baha'i Faith.
Phrasing is a very important part of jazz players' set of improvisational skills. Instead of just playing a collection of notes that would work based on the chords, and harmony, among other features of musical expression, the player builds an idea, often creating solos that superbly demonstrate musical phrasing, and lead the listener to a logical and memorable conclusion. Great examples of this are found in classical music. In Beethoven's fifth symphony the first idea is played and then again with a slight variation.
Dizzy Gillespie, a Bahá'à since about 1970, was one of the most famous adherents of the
Bahá'à Faith. This Faith helped him make sense of his position, his fame, and his life-narrative in a succession of trumpeters; it also helped him turn his life from a knife-carrying roughneck to a global citizen, and from alcohol to "soul force". These are the words of author
Nat Hentoff who knew Gillespie for forty years.
Gillespie's conversion was most affected by
Bill Sear's book
Thief in the Night. Gillespie spoke about the Bahá'à Faith frequently on his trips abroad. He is honored with weekly jazz sessions at the New York Bahá'à Center in the memorial auditorium. This Faith also helped me make sense of my life, my life's narrative, and the tests and difficulties in my path. It has also been at the basis of a certain solemn consciousness in my thought and manner, a consciousness which is itself the wellspring of the most exquisite celebratory joy.[SUP]1[/SUP] -Ron Price with thanks to [SUP]1[/SUP]A letter from the Universal House of Justice to all National Assemblies, 3 April 1991.
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Part 1:
Jazz was a 2000
documentary miniseries, directed by
Ken Burns. "If one considers the 10 DVD-set a story of jazz until the 1960s, Ken Burns has delivered a valuable introduction. With 75 interviews, over 500 pieces of music, 2400 film stills and over 2000 archive film clips, the 19-hour epic is not that bad," wrote one reviewer. It was released in 2001 with chronological and thematic episodes providing a history of
jazz. That history emphasized innovative composers and musicians, and
American history.
Swing musicians
Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington are the central figures, "providing the narrative thread around which the stories of other major figures turn"; several episodes discussed the later contributions of
Charlie Parker and
Dizzy Gillespie to
bebop, and of
Miles Davis,
Ornette Coleman, and
John Coltrane to
free and
cool jazz. Nine episodes surveyed forty-five years (1917â1961), leaving the final episode to cover forty years (1961â2001). The documentary examines the impacts of racial segregation and drugs on jazz.
During the dozen years, 2004 to 2015, I watched all ten episodes. Last night I watched the ninth episode[SUP]1[/SUP] covering the years 1955 to 1961. I knew nothing of jazz in 1956 when I was only 11 and at the start of my 8 years adolescent baseball and hockey careers. Those eight years, though, were eventful ones in my young life. They were years when the core of my value-system took its first shaping, when I joined the Baha'i Faith, and settled-in to the start of my long and complex academic life.
Part 2:
This episode began with John Coltrane's composition
Giant Steps. West Coast Cool and young musicians who wanted to go beyond Bebop are presented and, in 1955, Ray Charles'
I Got a Woman started the period of soul music. Then came Elvis Presley and jazz was never again at the center of popular music. Sonny Rollins, Duke again, Miles Davis, Clifford Brown, a clean musician who tragically died in a car accident, Sarah Vaughan, Satchmo once more, Art Blakey and Horace Silver with their Hard Bop Jazz Messengers are presented.
The highlight of this segment comes from the CBS live program "The Sound of Jazz" with Billie Holiday performing
Fine and Mellow, accompanied by Lester Young and Ben Webster. Cannonball Adderly and Bill Evans are other stars presented. Last but not least comes Miles Davis'
Kind of Blue, the best selling jazz album of all time. The treatment of John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman and his free jazz adventure is very basic.-Ron Price with thanks to [SUP]1[/SUP]"The Adventure",
NITV, 9:30-10:30 pm, 24/1/'15.
You give your life for
what you are doing in
that new jazz world of
improvisation with the
Ornette Coleman Quartet
and opening 40 years of a
kind of jazz that would be
the background for my life,
my working life '59 to '99,
little did I know in those
four decades of my life
from the age of 15 to 55,
& an early retirement, a
sea-change, during which
I could watch that history
of jazz with its biographical
focus,[SUP]1 [/SUP]and continue with my
many literary improvisations.
[SUP]1[/SUP] Ken Burns is a talented
biographer, and his films are most effective when he is able to present an overarching narrative in terms of the biographical detail of that narrative's participants.-Charles Paul Freund,
"Epic Jazz",
Reason magazine online, January 8, 2001
Ron Price
25/1/'15.
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WRITING IS JAZZ
[h=1]
Writing is jazz....words roll and spin and jive.....a collection of letters and spaces, commas and periods, semi-colons and colons. -From Writing is Jazz, An Internet Blog: John M. Flores, 11 April 2007.[/h][h=1]
Jazz improvizing and poetizing [/h][h=1]
share much in the game of life.[/h][h=1]
They are both fun and help their[/h]
practitioners get to the purpose
of life. To be in the moment---
drawing on the past, anticipating
the future when time seems right.
Often the process is effortless as
if I am some sort of instrument:
semi-analytical, semi-emotional,
semi-performance, semi-trailer:
carrying the baggage of life down
the road in the darkness of night
with headlights showing the way
into meaningâat least for me if
not for others on the road of night.
Yes, there is joy and tranquillity,
the preparation has been my whole
life: the payment and reward has
nothing to do with money, simply
can not be bought or sold or chosen;
it comes because of who you are and
what you want as you go about finding
your way in this slough of despond.(1)
(1) This prose-poem was written after listening to an interview with Sascha Feinstein on
ABC Radio National, 15 October 2008 at 10:05 a.m.
Ron Price
1/11/' 08 to 25/1/'15.
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SWING
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...one view of the history of jazz
Part 1:
Ken Burns' doco was broadcast on
PBS in 2001 just after I had retired from a 50 year student-and-employment life, 1949 to 1999. The chronological and thematic episodes of the series provided an interpretation of the history of jazz rooted in biography. I have seen the series twice during the years 2004 to 2015 on television in Tasmania Australia. Jazz has always been on the periphery of my musical experience since the earliest days of my life in the 1940s. This series brought jazz closer to the centre of my life, although I would never be a jazz aficianado, connoisseur or expert.
Part 2:
Like all histories of all subjects, there are many ways of writing the story. Ken Burns and his crew gave viewers one of these ways of dealing with a century of jazz. Many enthusiasts were waiting for Burns' take on jazz knowing, as many did, that Burns is one of the best doco producers. The swing era, also frequently referred to as the "big band era", was the period of time from about 1935 to 1946. This was the period of WW2, and when my parents met and married, and I was born.
During this period
big band swing music was the most popular music in the
United States. Though this was its most popular period, the music had actually been around since the late 1920s and early 1930s, being played by black bands led by such artists as
Duke Ellington,
Jimmie Lunceford,
Bennie Moten,
Cab Calloway, and
Fletcher Henderson. There were also the white bands from the 1920s led by the likes of
Russ Morgan and
Isham Jones.
The era's beginning is sometimes dated from
Benny Goodman's performance at the
Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles on 21 August 1935 bringing the music, as it did, to the rest of the country.[SUP]2 [/SUP]By the last half of 1935, millions waited for the next war only four years away.-Ron Price with thanks to [SUP]1[/SUP]
Wikipedia, and [SUP]2[/SUP]
Scott Yanow and Paul Du Noyer,
The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Music, first edition, Fulham, London: Flame Tree Publishing, 2003, p.128.
Part 3:
[/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
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[/TABLE]
I could not help but see
the remarkable tie-in, a
synchronization, betwix
the origins, development
of the Baha'i teaching &
administration programs
with the history of jazz
going right back to 1917![SUP]1[/SUP]
This was especially true
of Benny Goodman in a
performance at Palomar
in Los Angeles, the same
time as the Baha'is of the
USA and Canada planned
their first systematic Plan
to implement those Tablets
after a hiatus of twenty years,
in the year 1937 and the Plan
went to '44 with two years of
waiting to begin the next Plan.
Those last 40 years to 2001,
the beginning of a new 21st
century, and the opening of
those Terraces on Mt Carmel
just topped that amazing and
wondrous synchronization
beginning in 1917 with the
revelation of those Tablets.[SUP]1[/SUP]
[SUP]1 [/SUP]Abdul-Baha completed His writing of the
Tablets of the Divine Plan in 1917. Those
Tablets were the foundation document for the Baha'i teaching program organized within and by Baha'i Administration. It is a program I have now been associated with for more than 60 years.
Ron Price
30/5/'14 and 25/1/'15.
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A DANCE TO A DIFFERENT DRUMMER
Clockwork Orange in a Personal Context
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By the mid-to-late 1930s jazz had become the defining music of the generation, the generation that was then coming into its teens. Jazz seemed to unleash forces and energies like rock 'n roll did twenty years later. Like rock 'n roll, too, jazz possessed a definite physicality; it released pent-up emotions; it was pure pleasure; it was a form of escape and it was entertainment. As jazz emerged so, too, did Baha'i Administration. In 1937 Baha'i Administration had developed from a small number of groups to possess and enjoy a national consciousness. This development led to a systematic teaching program entitled the Seven Year Plan.
Between Benny Goodman becoming that generation's icon of popular music by playing at Times Square to a packed house of teenagers in the Paramount Theatre in March of 1937 and his band's contest with Chick Webb's band at the Savoy Ballroom in May of 1937, this Seven Year Plan began. -Ron Price with thanks to "Episode Five: Jazz: Pure Pleasure,"
ABC TV, 9:30-10:30 pm, 27/10/2001.
It exploded, completely unknown,
overnight, or so it seemed to the
generation who began that Plan in
'37. In reality, it had been slowly
developing in theory and form for
nearly a century.....if you go back
to that magic year of 1844 when
the first message went across that
telegraph wire with" What hath God
wrought?"...and He had wrought....
Jazz was becoming popular in
the way we would have liked
to be popular, but our Plan
was a slow-release model,
an experimental disposition,
a dance to a different drummer,
with the light, lyrical, exquisite
touch of an Eddy Wilson, often
sad, slow pace of a Billy Holliday
or a Glen Miller popular romantic-
swing, yes, those were swing times.
Men and women working together,
composing on-the-spot, everyone
in harmony, moving toward elegance
and joy: that was one way of defining
what our aim was too in those early
Baha'i Groups and Assemblies at the
start, beginning in those first-days-of-
form, those days of an Administrative
vision when we started our dreaming,
dream-time, our dreaming, yes, yes.(1)
(1) When Duke Ellington was asked what he was doing when he was playing jazz on the piano, he said "I'm dreaming."
Ron Price
3/12/â10 to 24/1 /'15
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married for 47 years, a teacher for 32, a student for 18, a writer and editor for 15, and a Baha'i for 55(in 2014)
