Soul

I grew up with Errol Garner and Oscar Peterson, and Miles Davis and Duke Ellington. Paul Desmond was my favorite musician before I discovered the brilliance of Charlie Parker and John Coltrane, and Dexter Gordon and Sonny Rollins and all those guys. I remember myself as a 10 years old kid in his room on a Sunday afternoon, playing his tapes on a Phillips portable tape recorder… playing Brubecks Time Out.

Jazz.

I remember someone, I think it was Wynton Marsalis, explaining that the word Jazz originated in the brothels of New Orleans -- one of the few places where black folk could develop their unique art in freedom -- as a eufemism for what men do with women in brothels. You could have worse asscociations, allthough in a puritan culture such connotations have a tendency to work against you. Many great musicians in fact resented the term.
But I grew up with Jazz, and it is still where my soul is. Only now am I starting to understand more about what music means, the depth to which it touches us, and what music means as a culture force: much more than a mere art-form. African-American improvised music is where my soul is, its where I’m at, its what makes my heart sing, and what cures my despair.

Jazz, of course, is also an artistic movement, or rather a stream of creativity that exemplifies some of the great tragedies of unrecognized genius and the creativity-destruction (self-destruction) dynamic that seems to befall so many truely creative spirits in our world -- myself included. Tragedy and beauty; such an ancient dialectic.