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jazzjazzjazz

"An important idea to consider here is that blues was predominantly a blues-based music. The blues timbre and spirit had come to jazz virtually unchanged, even though the early Negro musicians using European instruments had to learn to play them with the strict European march music as a model. The "classical" timbre of the trumpet, the timbre that Creoles imitated, was not the timbre that came into jazz. The purity of tone that the European trumpet player desired was put aside by the Negro trumpeter for a more humanly expressive sound of the voice. The brass sound came to the blues, but it was a brass sound hardly related to its European models. The rough, raw sound the black man forced out of these European instruments was a sound he had cultivated in this country for two hundred years. It was an American sound, something indigenous to a certain kind of cultural existence in this country."

--Amiri Baraka,
Blues People

[goin' steady]

They're all my boyfriends. Whether they know it or not.

All the jolly old bums who hang around and make fun of each other in Jackson Square, calling me names like sassy and caramel.

And the freshly dressed brown boys who skateboard the streets of the French Quarter in packs, never giving any woman (including myself) so much as a wink.

Cashiers at corner stores who work to fit as many lame jokes as possible into our 2-minute interaction.

The bar hosts standing out on Bourbon Street holding large menus, working to corral groups of tourists into overpriced restaurants. Hosts who reach out for hugs when I pass them after I get off work. Hosts who offer to buy me dinner at restaurants much nicer than their own.

And every last trombone player. They're all my boyfriends.

And how about the high school boys trying to act tough on their walk home from the school bus, yelling to each other extra-vulgar in order to compensate for their matching uniform slacks and tucked in polo's.

The traveler kids playing washboard, banjo, and fiddle in doorsteps for cash. Wailing old folk songs up over my head and to the moon while I dance and we pass around a brown paper bag of grain alcohol.

Shoot, even my actual boyfriends are my boyfriends.

But so are the tour guides who stop into the shop where I work, just to shoot the shit a little bit before leading big groups of imbiciles from all over the country around the Quarter, enchanting them with their exaggerated historic fables intermingled with ghost stories.

The cute barista guys who get all shy when I toss a dollar in their tip jar.

The young rapper boys in the neighborhood who don't know how to talk to women and get caught off guard by my intolerance for bullshit. Boys who shout out "Simi-Automatic! Pop pop pop!" From blocks away when they see me pass. Boys who commission me to record verses about money, cars, and clothes onto their tracks.

I love them. All of them.

Especially the hot dog vendors, in all their ridiculousness.

And the tragic looking white boys skulking prettily on their porches every day -- the ones who smile-wave, but don't say hello, just look on longingly at everything that passes them by.

And the old, seasoned, mind-blowing jazz musicians playing on the corner in hopes of catching a few five-dollar-bills in their cases. I see them every day -- some times I sit and listen, other times I bring them a beer in exchange for an on-street music lesson, but most times I just zoom on past, skivvies showing under a little dress atop my cruiser bicycle because I'm late for work.

And yet I go home to nobody, no one, except my guitar, and we keep each other up late singing one big love song to the whole damn city of New Orleans.

This girl. Her head. Her heels.

Who knows!

the hood

My neighborhood, Faubourg Marigny, was rated 2nd best in the country.

That's only because the APA is trippin' and hasn't yet realized that it's THE BEST PLACE IN THE ENTIRE WORLD.

Also doesn't hurt to have a new resident who's this freakin adorable. Hey.

so I never made it back to minnesota.

I'm still just as here as ever.

today's horoscope

"Is the electron a wave or a particle? Physicists had to conduct thousands of experiments to arrive at the definitive answer, which is that it's both. In other words, the solution to one of the fundamental questions about the nature of reality is a paradox. I think this strongly suggests that the correct response to many other riddles about the ultimate truth might be two seemingly opposing explanations. Could the Unitarians and Buddhists both be right? Socialists and capitalists? Mystics and scientists? In the upcoming days, Aries, you will be offered lots of practice in adopting this approach as you deal with a personal dilemma that's very much akin to "Is the electron a wave or a particle?"

Is reality Minneapolis or New Orleans? One of the two has just got to be a breach.

I'm about to hop on a plane with an empty suitcase. I'm about to go home and fill it.

It's been over a month since I first left for New Orleans, expecting to stay for a week, have some good times, and then keep traveling. And now, 6 weeks later, I'm reluctantly heading to the airport make a visit to the very bizarre other-world where I grew up. I'm leaving behind friends, plans, music, my job, my house, and all of the things I had initially packed in the suitcase that I've been living out of.

Reality has relocated. My dreams even take place here now.

I'm nervous about finding myself in Minnesota and suddenly waking up from this amazing dream that has just flown by. In weeks I've lived lifetimes here. I'm afraid to put this lady of a city on hold and interrupt the endless, gaseous, go-go-go she has so generously showered me in.

I really am excited to get some love and some grounding by my beautiful people at home, who I know now more than ever are to be people I will absolutely ALWAYS love.

But I can't say I won't be daydreaming about her sweltering afternoons, her street parties, her lackadaisical rhythm, her neighborhood characters, and her catfish po'boys the whole time. . .