Jazz Poems
JELLY WROTE
jelly wrote,
you should be walking on four legs
but now you’re walking on two,
you know you come directly from the
animal famulee
& you do. but dr jive
the winding boy, whose hands only work
was music & pushing
“certain ignorant light skin women” to the corner
was never animal
was never beast in storeyville, refining
a touch for ivory on pool green
with the finest of whorehouse ragtime; use even
for the “darker niggers music. rough,” jelly wrote
“but they loved it in the tenderloin.”
o the tall & chancey, the ladies’
fancy, the finest boy for miles around,
“your salty dog,” but with diamond incisors,
shooting the agate under a stetson sky
his st louis flats winked into
aaah, mr jelly
A.B. Spellman
from Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Chris White was born Christopher Wesley White on July 6, 1936 in Harlem, New York and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. In 1956 he graduated from City College of New York, and in 1968 from the Manhattan School of Music. Continuing his education six years later he earned his Master of Education from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In 1994, he did postgraduate Advanced Computer Study at Berklee College of Music.
An occasional member of Cecil Taylor’s band in the 1950s, he was credited on the 1959 Love for Sale album. From 1960 to 1961 he accompanied Nina Simone and subsequently he was a member of Dizzy Gillespie’s ensemble until 1966.
He founded the band The Jazz Survivors and was a member of the band Prism. Throughout his career he collaborated with Billy Taylor, Eubie Blake, Earl Hines, Chick Corea, Teddy Wilson, Kenny Barron, Mary Lou Williams, Duke Ellington, Sarah Vaughan, Carmen McRae and Billy Cobham.
Bassist, arranger, producer and educator Chris White, who was on the creative arts and technology faculty at Bloomfield College in New Jersey, died on November 2, 2014.
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Jazz Poems
COLTRANE, SYEEDA’S SONG FLUTE
For M & P.R.
When I came across it on the
piano it reminded me of her,
because it sounded like a
happy, child’s song.
COLTRANE
To Marilyn, to Peter,
playing , making things: the walls, the stairs,
the attics, bright nests in nests;
the slow, light, grave unstitching of lies,
opening, stinking, letting in air
you bear yourselves in, become your own mother
and father
your own child.
You lying closer.
You going along. Days.
The strobe-lit wheel stops dead
once, twice in a life: old-fashioned rays:
and then all the rest of the time pulls blur,
only you remember it more, playing.
Listening here in the late quiet you can think
great things of us all, I think we will all, Coltrane,
meet speechless and easy in Heaven, our names
known and forgotten, all dearest, all come
giant-stepping
out into some wide, light, merciful mind.
John
Coltrane, 40, gone
right through the floorboards,
up to the shins, up to the eyes,
closed over,
Syeeda’s happy, child’s song
left up here, playing.
JEAN VALENTINEfrom Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Christiaan Herbert “Chris” Hinze was born June 30, 1938 in Hilversum, Netherlands. He initially performed publicly as a pianist until the mid-Sixtiess, when he began studying flute at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague and then came to America and Berklee College of Music.
As a pianist, he played with Boy Edgar until 1966, but by 1967 was playing flute professionally with the bassist Dick van der Capellen. His first releases as a leader were issued in 1969, and in 1970, and was awarded the Best Soloist prize at the Montreux Jazz Festival.
The 1970s saw him forming his own ensemble, the Chris Hinze Combination, which included Gerry Brown and John Lee, which produced some success with arrangements of Baroque music in a jazz setting. He founded the record label Keytone Records in the mid-1970s.
In the 1980s, Hinze played for several years in a duo with Sigi Schwab and continued touring with a new version of his Combination. He began studying the music of Tibet and South Asia in the middle of the decade, forming a world music ensemble which shifted toward more new age and electronic music styles rather than jazz.
Flautist Chris Hinze continues to compose and perform.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Tony Oxley was born on June 15, 1938 in Sheffield, West Riding of Yorkshire, England. A self-taught pianist by the age of eight, he first began playing the drums at seventeen and was taught by Haydon Cook. While playing evening gigs with local dance bands at night, he was sacked from his regular job, at a cutlery-making company, for falling asleep.
During his National Service from 1957 to 1960 with the Black Watch military band he studied music theory and improved his drumming technique. After leaving the army he became a member of a dance band playing for passengers on the Queen Mary and made several trips to New York. When on shore leave Tony visited clubs and heard Philly Joe Jones, Horace Silver, Art Blakey. From 1960 to 1964 he led a quartet which performed locally back home.
1963 saw Oxley playing Saturday afternoon gigs with other aspiring young jazz musicians and working with Gavin Bryars and guitarist Derek Bailey, in a trio known as Joseph Holbrooke. Moving to London, England in 1966 he became house drummer at Ronnie Scott’s, where he accompanied visiting musicians such as Joe Henderson, Lee Konitz, Charlie Mariano, Stan Getz, Sonny Rollins, and Bill Evans until the early 1970s. He was a member of bands led by Gordon Beck and Mike Pyne.
As a sideman he appeared on the John McLaughlin 1969 album Extrapolation and formed a quintet with Bailey, Jeff Clyne, Evan Parker, and Kenny Wheeler, releasing the album The Baptised Traveller. Tony helped found Incus Records with Bailey and others and Musicians Cooperative. The label would go on to release more than 50 albums, received a three-month artist-in-residence job at the Sydney Conservatorium in Australia and joined the London Jazz Composers Orchestra and collaborated with Howard Riley.
Oxley wwent on to join saxophonist Alan Skidmore’s quintet, tutor at the Jazz Summer School in Barry, South Wales, and form the band Angular Apron, and start the Celebration Orchestra He toured and recorded with Anthony Braxton, and began a working relationship with Cecil Taylor. Over the next few decades he joined several bands, recorded a series of albums and ventured into electronic and acoustic percussion music.
Free improvising drummer and electronic musician Tony Oxley died on December 26, 2023.