Your Jazz Interlude

I never got around to adding a post last week. There were multiple things I wanted to talk about, but I couldn’t get my desires out through my fingers. That’s not entirely true. I couldn’t out my ass in a chair in front of a screen. Maybe I’ll get to some of that stuff this week, but it’s all pretty ponderous which likely explains my defensive procrastination. All the bullshit going on in Texas, for instance. The full-on transformation of education into marketing, self-promotion, credentialism. The fetishization of “choice” as the ultimate arbiter of existence, but only if you can live within the paradoxes of that fetish. All this stuff was going on before I went to prison, and it worried me then, but coming back into the world now, I feel as if it has shaped every moment of daily existence for millions more people. It all leaves me to say, “Why that fuck happened?” I have no satisfactory answers, so I shy from the page.

Yet this kind of dismal American mindset isn’t new, either. Thank God my music playlist has (I like to fantasize) some kind of consciousness. To placate my panic, the playlist spun up for me Eddie Harris’s and Les McCann’s ever-smoking version of “Compared to What” from the Montreux Jazz Fest, recorded on June 21, 1969, and written by the underappreciated Gene McDaniels in 1966. This same song also was in the regular rotation of one of the DJs on the local jazz station I listened to while incarcerated. Maybe it’s just kind of my song now.

I remain unsure whether it’s comforting or despairing that a song as old as I am expresses many of my own frustrations, but transmutes them into joy via the musical jam, but that’s the power of music. I won’t analyze right now. Instead I’ll leave you with the lyrics and a video of one of the greatest live jazz recordings ever man. Enjoy your jazz interlude.