“Impossible Music/ 6”
He wouldn’t listen to me so I dumped our water out in the desert. As you know, any performance is never the same performance, it’s all contingent on interactions. The key is to listen and be heard. He treated me as his accompaniment. I watched way too much TV in the motel rooms, a cheap room every Thursday to watch Lost. A duet is what I wanted, and a television show is as close as we got.
I missed other people. Performing “Brother” in duo with baritone saxophonist Roger Lewis of The Dirty Dozen Brass Band in New Orleans. The trio in Buffalo—whose names I don't have at hand—bass, drum, tenor sax. We passed through Hattiesburg, Mississippi—stayed with a woman named Happy Oasis. No, that was in Arizona.
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When I was little I lived with my father in this hotel on 8th Ave. and 48th Street, right near the old Madison Square Garden…So I'd just walk down there and listen. My father taught me jazz licks on our baby grand. We weren’t well off, but he inherited it from his father who died of AIDS before I was born. I don’t know about the piano—where I would put it or how it would make me feel.
It was a railroad storage shed, torn down now for student housing. I brought that sensibility, that relationship to language to the jazz poem. I liked the idea of doing it on the spot. I smoked my first cigarettes—clove cigarettes—at The Warehouse in Tallahassee, sitting cross legged on the floor, taking in Jean Valentine’s words and presence.
Every night, it was either jazz or poetry. Or writing about the music in ways that was equally a work of art.
[source text in italics from interviews in Rain Taxi and FoundSF]
-Morgan English