Ode to Buddy Bolden

Play on! Buddy Bolden
with your sweet cornet
and the big fourth note
(ba-dum, bum, clack, Bee-AT!)

If only America had the chance
to hear you play again
or -- at least one more time.

Unrecorded and lost in time
they say you were the cool cat
who first played Jazz.

Playing in many halls in the very
early part of the Twentieth Century
You could play it ALL
and you could play it HOT!!!

Playing in the counter-culture Red-Light District.
In Storyville, New Orleans
the children head you eternally practicing
and quickly called you King.

If only we could hear you once more
we thought -- as you walked away from that
one parade -- and found yourself within
the pristine padded walls of the institution
we know as the mentally insane.

And America wept as we slowly
found out we would never hear your soulful sound
again -- in the Kasbah of North America -- or anywhere.
All that is left is one blurry picture
and a legend to last a lifetime.

And Resonating through your legend
are powerful heavy notes --
played loudly and unpolitely;
the new music of the soul.
It is simply what you did --
..and it was beautiful.

Take Five (Dave Brubeck Tribute)

Bass drum, snare and cymbal work together with percussive placidity to forge the beginning of a new song.

Soon blasts forth the syncopated piano rhythm in the feel of five-four.
Put your hand to its heart and feel its heartbeat.
A new voice is quick to join the romantic affair of harmony and melody.

In comes the smooth timbre of a sleek saxophonist. Poetry flows from the bell, telling us a story that only our imagination can remember.

The resonating boom of the bass strengthens the foundation upon which this romance is set:

-- all parts fit snuggly together as pieces of the puzzle, for this moment in time, music reigns supreme.

A fine diminuendo commences as lead drops out and only piano remains. We are graced by the sound of ivory keys jumping up and down to the elation of precise musicianship. The stage has been set once again for magic to take place:

Percussion takes the forefront, persuading us of our rhythmic endeavor – the chains of restraint are lifted and all notion of form ceases to exist -- The neglected rhythm generator becomes the untamed and a beast of the beat. We call it a Drum solo

Tonight: Jazz fills the air with its intoxicating aroma of pleasant perfume. Music holds our hearts in firm embrace as it reminds us of our humanity and our capacity for human expression.

We are all different as the instruments upon stage; as diverse as the notes to a harmony. Yet -- we all come together, and for one moment create something uniquely beautiful…


***



* Dedicated to Kriss Thompson, fellow music lover, lover of life and most importantly my friend. The world stops to hear the symphony of our lives – Richie Marrufo

The Open Road Revisited

I can be Jack Kerouac
and you can be Emily Dickinson --

together we can blow this joint
and hit the only open road yet to be traveled.

Overcoming our dichotomous anxieties
we will flow as Yin and Yang

A poet's heart, a poet's soul: you and I
build paper cranes until its time to nap.

Off we go into space -- the new frontier
tiered of squaresville and mundane bedrooms.

Off we go:

I can be Jack Kerouac
aand you can be Emily Dickinson --

Subversively singing soft mad lullabies
to our infant dreams: the children of the world.