Duke Ellington said if you know, you don't ask; if you ask, you don't know. Jazz is a true world music and a word music too. The talking drums of Mother Africa transposed into a new key and a new kind... [more]

Duke Ellington said if you know, you don't ask; if you ask, you don't know. Jazz is a true world music and a word music too. The talking drums of Mother Africa transposed into a new key and a new kind of slang... a "vernacular Americana" later fused with the southward syncopations of Cuba and Brazil. Spread by the percussive poly-rhythmic song of the African Diaspora that merged with a multi-ethnic American folk aesthetic, itself informed by ballads from the British Isles; and later hybridized with impressionist compositional forms, jazz realized the kind of synthesis only dreamed of in America's social order. The pulse of spoken extemporaneous poetry is its breath, inspiring instrumentalists from the brass to the bass to make song and speech by blowing, bowing, plucking, and slapping the strings and skins and horns of jazz. When Ella's stunning linguacrobatics liberated phonemes and morphemes from sense, they touched truth instead -- creating a divine cryptophasia of tone and vibration. What Stravinsky borrowed from Dixieland, Debussy gave back to Bird... Schoenberg and the chromaticists may have unhinged harmony but it took Coleman and Coltrane to launch it way beyond to whatever cosmos Sun-Ra came from. What is improvisational jazz but a wild exclamation -- an instantaneous broadcast from the ethers... a transmission of joy, sorrow, reverie, political unrest, racial tension, universal fraternity, longing, hope, despair... ...Cajun slang for "speed it up," shorthand for "jism," once called "jass" before it was hep to be hip... say it out loud" [show less]