They went driving in the rain.
They watched it fall down
on jelly-eyed twenty-eight-years-olds in gold paisley coats,
side-burned thirty-seven-year-olds in suspect camping gear,
fit fifty-year-olds wearing thick, graying furs plucked from cardboard boxes.
Early on, almost at the very first beat,
the rhythm section took their jackets off.
Red shirt, tan shirt. Suspenders. Brown towels in easy reach.
About an hour later, the piano player followed suit,
folded his coat up neatly, leaned over,
laid it to rest during the drum solo.
And now here they are — the whole gang.
They’re lighting flat matches in dry marble corners.
Thigh-high boots over too-bare skin.
Balds heads, stylized facial hair.
Then a busload of high school band kids
hauled up from San Diego
pours out all over the sidewalk.
Clarinet players. Trumpets players. Sax.
And the aged. And the infirm.
Oxygen tanks.
Wooden legs.
All rolled in to hear
some jazz sincere
on a wide stage.
jazzy. link to sound? favorite jazz artist? Jazz was a hybrid of musical influences from the rhythms of Africa brought into New Orleans by slaves to the refinement of that natural sound by early 19th Century classically trained black composers.
i liked ‘flat matches in dry marble corners’ and ‘stylized facial hair.’
“I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.”
—Duke Ellington