Somewhere there's music

I entered behind the beat, two days late and wailing, born into a family of social radicals and pleasure seekers. The folks swung and danced through three or four major decades of the music. Throw in some lead belly and lightning and the ears OF a hungry innocent were fed WITH profuse Profundity.

Jazz players were my heroes. I idolized and was awed by them. As a young boyish man, I stood in line at the clubs unknown to most so that I could experience first hand the inner pleasures of beauty, the linear intelligence, the liquidity, and the release.

The first of the heroes who became real and simply human, was Mr. Five by Five, Jimmy Rushing. Prompted by a high school project I ventured into New York and found him at Colombia Studios. I interviewed him as to his life, photographed him, and left. Four years passed before I would see him again.

I was shy and frightened, a combination which conspires with relational discontinuity. He was singing at the Half Note on Hudson Street and in between sets I approached him. He looked up. "Hey little man where have you been? Why haven't I seen you sooner." Mr. Five by Five was as big as love is and listening to his voice is an experience that lightens the heart, deepens the soul, and projects positive emotional avidity in the best of all ways.

It becomes clear that I could write a multitude of short stories about the music and the musicians. Short stories, in a life long with story, but I won't. This book is an offering of my absolute moments in a whirlwind of subjective layering and relativity. The music, all music, from low-brow (what-ever that is) to high-brow (whatever that is), is created by humans from the surrounding energy and the heavens above. It is the way of momentary transcendence and it is an intel-ligence that supersedes literal thought and rational cognition replacing it with lyric intuition and rhythmic cadenzas pulsing from the heart.

The book is not meant to be thorough, it is not comprehensive, it is peppered with favoritism, all of the historical insufficiencies are not of design but expediency. The images reflect where I have traveled, what I have seen and heard. They are visits and revisits with people whom I developed relationships with, some simply because of the music and some through personal attraction and receptive affinity.

Music, foul and growling, dark, round and tranquil, long and clear. It is for me the river of life. It feeds me on the deepest level. I wish to share with all, the majesty of being witness to sound.