A dove just flew straight into the window in front of me. You know that hurt. He darted off towards the porch. I expected to look over and see him lying on the ground in dizzy agony. They must have strong skulls. He seems to have just flown on. Oblivious to this head on collision there is a green mayfly that has stood stoically on the adjoining pane of glass for the last six hours. I tried, unsuccessfully to identify his specific species when I was up for a call at 5:00AM. He hasn’t moved since. Is he sleeping? Is he dying? Mayflies don’t live very long, do they? Perhaps he’s just considering his next move.
Yesterday two foxes showed. I hadn’t seen that before. My understanding is that foxes hunt alone. If they were smart, and inclined to share, they could presumably secure a lot more squirrel meat employing a coordinated approach arriving at the clearing from opposite directions, but then I’m thinking like a humanoid. These two stood uselessly beneath the juniper tree staring at the empty lawn. Perhaps this is a husband-wife team. My wife claims she’s seen babies, off in the woods between our place and the neighbors.
Enjoying some Earl Hines this morning. Have always known the name but can’t recall a time when I thought to reach for the man. Following the thread back from the boppers, to Billy Eckstine to the Earl Hines Orchestra. Hailing, like so many jazz luminaries from the Pittsburgh area, Hines’s Wiki page is peppered with so many salutatory quotes from Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, Errol Garner, Horace Silver, I realized I couldn’t place anything to do with his style in my mind’s ear. Continuing on I considered the Grand Terrace Café in Chicago for the first time. A club which Al Capone had a controlling stake in, where blacks and whites co-mingled, and everyone kept silent about what they knew if and when the police showed up. What the Cotton Club and Duke Ellington were for Manhattan, Hines and the Grand Terrace were for Chicago. And it’s refreshing to read that he had a long, productive career during which his greatest was acknowledged by presidents and popes. Listening to “Darkness” just now, recorded in New York in 1934, the year after Prohibition ended, considering the layered ways one could unpack that title, considering what a dance floor might have looked like would have looked like when darkness fell.
And “Darkness” suits me as no one is singing. Happy to enjoy the vocal tracks on many of these tunes, but not when I write or read or generally multitask. The words demand cognition in a way that melody and improvisation do not. I can swing with “Darkness” and still get things done. But when the next tune “You’re the One of My Dreams” hits the air I’m blocked the moment Walter Fuller puts down his trumpet and begins to sing. I advance to the subsequent tune “Swingin’ Down” which allows me to proceed, unencumbered. And now it’s “Pianology” which sort of brings it all together, his Basie swing, his Art Tatum fireworks, the percussive punch of Horace Silver. Earl "Fatha" Hines, indeed. The literature of the time has demanded I enrich my understanding of the tunes of the time, which had led me to the literature in the first place, so many years ago. I shouldn’t but I’m about to spend some time looking for clips of Earl Hines on Youtube. (there’s a trove.)
Monday, 7/13/20
No comments:
Post a Comment