Cool jazz and Rite of Spring which qualifies as jazz, what say you, Ethan? - Poem: Miles' End

Well, Ethan's at UC Davis, with the Bad Boys, I mean, The Bad Plus, but he and the boys were commissioned to do their own version of Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps. I also thot that Beethoven's Sonata No. 32, Arietta movement, was a precursor of jazz.

B & N has 40% off all jazz titles, so off I went this evening driving down the b'ful flowering streets and parked near Heavenly Ham so I could get a lil exercise in.

Am listening now to Sketches from Spain bc it's the only one I can open. Amma (pronounced AH-ma) opened em all for me but they still won't open. I'll lay em outside for the squirrels to claw their way inside.

All five CDs cost $36 - 40 percent off plus 10 percent off from my inlaws' discount. When she said $36, I thot, Why don't I buy more?

But there was nothing else I wanted except iced coffee which I picked up on the way out.

At the Record Checkout there was Godiva candies. I mentioned I'd love some but that I'm a PWD (person w/diabetes) and gotta watch my sugar.

"Are you 1 or 2?" asked Amma.

"2," I said. "I've only had it for a year after my kidney transplant."

"My brother's 1," she said.

Amma explained that he had a bad case of the flu, after which he contracted diabetes. The doctors said he would've gotten it anyway, cuz it runs in the family.

Amma and her mother had to carry the 22-yo young man to the doctor b/c he was so weak. He's 25 today and doing well. Sadly, Amma is extremely heavy.

When I first moved to Philly I went downtown to see Yousef Latif. OH, I spelled it correctly cuz Goggle Blogger didn't put any wiggly red lines under Youset.

When we lived in Cleveland, my cousin Mark introduced me to the music of Miles. I just talked to his 94-yo mother, Aunt Selma, yesterday. She went to a couple of Passover dinners and was watching a Cleveland Indians game when I called.

She emphasized how important it is to have things to look f/w to.

Here's the late great Miles Davis. I was very upset when he died in 1991 at age 65, so I wrote a poem about him.


Here, for the first time, ladies and gentlemen, I present my poem on Miles Davis.

MILES' END

in memory of Miles Dewey Davis III (1926-1991)

After the lights went out
and the smoke
like gray ribbons of cloud
drifted into the other room,
he departed,
carrying at half mast
his horn,
much the way he did as a kid,
but this time not daring to
ask for even one more solo,
one more tumbledown sobbing arpeggio
clambering skyward,
leaving the stage instead for
more restless, wondrous countries
than ever his breath could tell.