Vernacular Spectacular
From the vast, the splintering shedding sleeping machine
that was—that exists—the 19th century, bled a new and ancient sound.
And long before—the craziest thing—in the creaking speaking floorboards and the scented salted breeze,
on the crackling falling hydrangea leaves amidst dusty downbeats of swollen time there was—there is—
the holy crescent city.
Here the melting pot—the first and real and trapped expatriates, born of the Proclamation—lays lies laughs together in its tragic missymphony of harassed miscolor,
on the margins of the vast and still splintering dining table of the only America, they were an easy and tragic mask over the unreal doldrums of the culture clash, a spiritual cacophony.
Jim Crow never did get so much
as he did from poor Daddy Rice.
“Jaunty, repulsive,
irresistible.”
Theirs was the quick and original,
that transcendence of noble limitation, and that raw intimidating
individualism
that is—
you guessed it—
jazz.
It came and it screamed and thumped beneath the streets, and in the shadow of the vast concrete narcissus they called
they called it civilization, it shouted to the panic of 1890 and to those wolves at Washington's door:
it shouted
No more hiding!
And I,
hardly sleeping hardly needing, quit the tragic subspace of adolescent angst when I found
a sterling stirring wooden sign in the polyrhythms of that startling time.
It read, extrinsic in its sovereign value:
“Souls For Sale.”
And I
found in the Blues, the shale and shift of music's shore and core, the melancholy offspring of which was Crescent's jazz, my first—and the world's only—
kill-free religion.
I am the false and shameless minstrel,
call this my new age blackface, then,
in the place of my misplaced facade of respect.
But here in Dixieland, beyond the dismal misperception of my own deceptive miscolor, I see that there's something just so subtly and bloodily American about this.
Hell-sent syncopation,
they called it. Just jealous of our jumping thumping ragtime dreams.
A seamless heartless rumble beneath the Jim Crow streets, it was
the harbinger of an American youth and an old and unlovely American past.
In between and all around and just a bit behind the cellar door of the turning century, in the putrid oils of animal byproducts and the stir and smoky progress of meatpacking, were the sounds of Sarah Martin and Papa Jack Laine and their
jass jass jazz.
1913
And the New York Herald calls my new age religion something symbolic of “primitive morality”, but perhaps those were the words they thought
from their dry marriage beds
without the lust and lure of what they called—
the “negro spirit”.
Blue and heady notes sing from the crackling scratch and pop of a phonograph—as of 1917—and the nation's dancers, the lindy hoppers and fox trotters of the night,
the youth is struck to the streets and to the clubs, forced e-motion, flooding into
Storyville, no more hiding, they talk the talk and walk whatever way
that Jelly Roll Morton's deadly black and ivory fingertips say,
just fearing
the approaching halflife of the riff, in anticipation of calling time
and back to the real, the unforgiving 20th century grind.
Jazz is my country
Or rather,
my country as it used to be;
A group of people, together in all the flaw of rumbling crumbling humanity,
can acknowledge a majority
and make a,
well,
make a change.
How could I, though, as profoundly and regretfully disappointed in my fellows as
I am,
of this that technicolor generation,
ever know what the blues is about?
Jazz slunk and grew, a lion and a waif, on the streets and fields
of a thousand places.
I've grown up
from my human incubation
in less than a thousand days.
But don't I find that fleet-footed
slapping clapping diverging convergent and swinging sweating beauty that is jazz
as well
as its worthy free-form victims of that lost and shattered age?
Jazz was the soundtrack to the modern world. To Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, to the Wrights and Big Business O,
Not born in the Battlefield with Louis Armstrong, nor in the bowels of Sinclair's packingtowns 'round good King Oliver. But
consummately, unnervingly
Sydney Bechet rolls the blues right off his lips
in the sour irony of my sorry steel-frame transit.
In my thin
and lachrymose grasp at understanding,
I feel the wheedling needling wheeze of the saxophone and the heavy bass and by God, that trumpet,
in my old and lonely heart.
The baritone shakes my foundations and fools me, on instinct, to try
and blink the sound from brown eyes and shake loose the zealous monsters grating on my adolescent conscience.
Jazz is the slaying of syncopation.
The first, the new, the kill-free culture of America. Why's it gotta turn to myth? This nation
deserves, it pleads and crawls for it, that innovation
that musical progressivism in the face of globalization. Let it walk, they say,
off the charts and off the roads. But if the blues was an underground movement before, it is so indefinitely more
today.
Eventually finally they say
simply it is “beautiful in an ugly graceful new way.”
This is my 21st century conviction:
I am the last—the very last and solitary of a race like lost religion—
I am the last
beatnik.
And when I'm finally sent on my deathless path to corpsification,
(Way down upon the Swanee River)
well,
I want nothing else but my three gospel chords;
my baggage is the blues.
(Oh, God, let me go.
Oh mister, let me leave.)
that was—that exists—the 19th century, bled a new and ancient sound.
And long before—the craziest thing—in the creaking speaking floorboards and the scented salted breeze,
on the crackling falling hydrangea leaves amidst dusty downbeats of swollen time there was—there is—
the holy crescent city.
Here the melting pot—the first and real and trapped expatriates, born of the Proclamation—lays lies laughs together in its tragic missymphony of harassed miscolor,
on the margins of the vast and still splintering dining table of the only America, they were an easy and tragic mask over the unreal doldrums of the culture clash, a spiritual cacophony.
Jim Crow never did get so much
as he did from poor Daddy Rice.
“Jaunty, repulsive,
irresistible.”
Theirs was the quick and original,
that transcendence of noble limitation, and that raw intimidating
individualism
that is—
you guessed it—
jazz.
It came and it screamed and thumped beneath the streets, and in the shadow of the vast concrete narcissus they called
they called it civilization, it shouted to the panic of 1890 and to those wolves at Washington's door:
it shouted
No more hiding!
And I,
hardly sleeping hardly needing, quit the tragic subspace of adolescent angst when I found
a sterling stirring wooden sign in the polyrhythms of that startling time.
It read, extrinsic in its sovereign value:
“Souls For Sale.”
And I
found in the Blues, the shale and shift of music's shore and core, the melancholy offspring of which was Crescent's jazz, my first—and the world's only—
kill-free religion.
I am the false and shameless minstrel,
call this my new age blackface, then,
in the place of my misplaced facade of respect.
But here in Dixieland, beyond the dismal misperception of my own deceptive miscolor, I see that there's something just so subtly and bloodily American about this.
Hell-sent syncopation,
they called it. Just jealous of our jumping thumping ragtime dreams.
A seamless heartless rumble beneath the Jim Crow streets, it was
the harbinger of an American youth and an old and unlovely American past.
In between and all around and just a bit behind the cellar door of the turning century, in the putrid oils of animal byproducts and the stir and smoky progress of meatpacking, were the sounds of Sarah Martin and Papa Jack Laine and their
jass jass jazz.
1913
And the New York Herald calls my new age religion something symbolic of “primitive morality”, but perhaps those were the words they thought
from their dry marriage beds
without the lust and lure of what they called—
the “negro spirit”.
Blue and heady notes sing from the crackling scratch and pop of a phonograph—as of 1917—and the nation's dancers, the lindy hoppers and fox trotters of the night,
the youth is struck to the streets and to the clubs, forced e-motion, flooding into
Storyville, no more hiding, they talk the talk and walk whatever way
that Jelly Roll Morton's deadly black and ivory fingertips say,
just fearing
the approaching halflife of the riff, in anticipation of calling time
and back to the real, the unforgiving 20th century grind.
Jazz is my country
Or rather,
my country as it used to be;
A group of people, together in all the flaw of rumbling crumbling humanity,
can acknowledge a majority
and make a,
well,
make a change.
How could I, though, as profoundly and regretfully disappointed in my fellows as
I am,
of this that technicolor generation,
ever know what the blues is about?
Jazz slunk and grew, a lion and a waif, on the streets and fields
of a thousand places.
I've grown up
from my human incubation
in less than a thousand days.
But don't I find that fleet-footed
slapping clapping diverging convergent and swinging sweating beauty that is jazz
as well
as its worthy free-form victims of that lost and shattered age?
Jazz was the soundtrack to the modern world. To Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, to the Wrights and Big Business O,
Not born in the Battlefield with Louis Armstrong, nor in the bowels of Sinclair's packingtowns 'round good King Oliver. But
consummately, unnervingly
Sydney Bechet rolls the blues right off his lips
in the sour irony of my sorry steel-frame transit.
In my thin
and lachrymose grasp at understanding,
I feel the wheedling needling wheeze of the saxophone and the heavy bass and by God, that trumpet,
in my old and lonely heart.
The baritone shakes my foundations and fools me, on instinct, to try
and blink the sound from brown eyes and shake loose the zealous monsters grating on my adolescent conscience.
Jazz is the slaying of syncopation.
The first, the new, the kill-free culture of America. Why's it gotta turn to myth? This nation
deserves, it pleads and crawls for it, that innovation
that musical progressivism in the face of globalization. Let it walk, they say,
off the charts and off the roads. But if the blues was an underground movement before, it is so indefinitely more
today.
Eventually finally they say
simply it is “beautiful in an ugly graceful new way.”
This is my 21st century conviction:
I am the last—the very last and solitary of a race like lost religion—
I am the last
beatnik.
And when I'm finally sent on my deathless path to corpsification,
(Way down upon the Swanee River)
well,
I want nothing else but my three gospel chords;
my baggage is the blues.
(Oh, God, let me go.
Oh mister, let me leave.)