Snakes & Jazz

Quickly settling back into Albany, which is, or can be, somewhat unsettling. Labor Day weekend — even after having lived for some 25 years in this country, I still cannot conceive of the first weekend of September as “Labor” Day. Labor is & will always remain associated for me with 1 May. Well, at least this year teaching didn’t start before Labor Day… Yesterday, on the last weekend before the U kicks in again, and for Miles’ 14th birthday I took a gaggle of teenagers to the movie of their choice: Snakes on A Plane. Easily the worst movie of the year or the decade — no redeeming value, social or other, whatsoever. (Well, some of the snakes have a certain beauty about them, a natural beauty, however, misused thoughout. ) The teenagers gasped & giggled their way through. When afterwards I mentioned to Miles that I found it totally pointless, he responded by saying that all movies are essentially pointless. Which I know he doesn’t really believe, as he is continuously busy thinking up & shooting movies himself. Finished the evening more pleasantly at our local jazz place, Justin’s, listening to one of the best Albany based groups, Sonny and Perley. Perley’s voice soothed the soul, draining any snake poison that may have infiltrated my system.

Back home had enough energy left for a few pages of a superb book that had arrived over the summer while I was away: Steve Lacy : Conversations. Edited by Jason Weiss (Duke University Press) Robert Creeley (it is one of the great pleasures of my life to have been able to introduce him to Steve back in the early eighties) is quoted:

“There’s no way simply to make clear how particular Steve Lacy was to poets or how much he can now teach them by fact of his own practice and example. No one was ever more generous or perceptive. . . . Steve opened a lot for me in the most quiet way. Music was only the beginning.”

While I blurbed the book as follows:

“Steve Lacy is a superb interviewee, extremely articulate in terms of his music, of the history of jazz, and of the cultural situation in Europe and the United States. Lacy’s witnessing to his age is an essential document in the history of post-bop jazz, and in the wider sense, as Lacy’s work is profoundly boundary-breaking, of music in the second part of the twentieth century. Jason Weiss has done a superb job gathering these interviews. The range is breathtaking and the chronological arrangement allows the reader to experience the evolution of Lacy as a musician and a thinker. All subsequent theoretical/critical thinking about Lacy and his music will need to refer to this book.”