Klezmer – Dreams are the poetic expression of the soul.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N45hYXNu12o

The Cannonball Adderley Quintet at the Lighthouse

Riverside Records

Alto Saxophone: Cannonball Adderley

Cornet: Nat Adderley

Bass: Sam Jones

Piano: Victor Feldman

Drums: Louis Hayes

This has always been one of my favourite live Jazz recordings. Back in October 1995, a few days after the verdict in the O. J. Simpson criminal trial, I was walking home after some shopping along the south side of Robson Avenue and back to my West End apartment at 878 Gilford at Haro Streets.

From behind, I heard someone yelling and calling out; the man sounded mad as hell. Artisan soul to the core, I was lost, deep in thought, of some idea construct or other.

I then felt a hand on my right shoulder that violently turned my body around and, though I dodged quickly enough, I ended up with a fist at the right temple. I swayed and soon there were other punches as I tried to duck and rush away. The guy, I recognised straight away; I had met him some weeks earlier. At the time, he was really keen on letting me know that he was Jewish and had been in Israel.

I hadn’t a clue what he was up to, though on the few occasions that I saw him, he seemed to aimlessly wonder about Stanley Park late at night time while I was off to go get my funk on deep into the woods; he had never once made it to the woods.

Soon enough, there were passers-by who formed a loose circle about the spectacle of me being beaten to within a breath of going unconscious. Not a soul said or did a thing. No one came to my aid as he violently punched at me while speciously accusing me of theft.

This was the hunt – the racial predator’s favourite sport of socially, aggressively feeding on Blacks which is always enjoyed with the same semi-feral hyena-like laughter and grinning.

From behind, I then heard a violent shout and soon, I heard the familiar voice of a local shopkeeper as he told the boor to get off me.

Grabbing me about the shoulder, his face warped with rage and pain, Bruce Day took me into his tiny little gem of a store, “The Little Hardware Company” which sat just east of Bidwell Street on Robson Street’s south side. Months later, the store would relocate around the corner onto Bidwell to make way for Robson’s further development.

I was so glad to have escaped the humiliation when retreating into Bruce’s hardware store; I had always slipped inside while waiting for a bus to get to work or just to buy some item or other. There, too, I had gone when paint-buying to turn my apartment into the right tones of warm colours to best display my fast burgeoning First Nations art collection.

Of course, he was a big strapping man with a more than passing resemblance to the actor, James Spader. Bruce also had the most beautifully warm smiling eyes. Casually, Bruce made conversation as though nothing had happened and as soon as the dark warmth of his tiny shop and his cool spirit had embalmed my very soul, I slipped out onto Robson and headed for home.

My busted lip healed soon enough; however, there was ringing in my right ear for long weeks afterwards.

On retiring to my apartment, this was the music that repaired my humanity – Sack O’ Woe.

Jazz is the music that prevents us from waging war with the racial predator who has yet to acknowledge that there is any such thing as the racial predator and that the racial predator is culpable of sweet dick-all when it comes to predatorily fucking with Blacks.

The Simpson trial was not about Nicole Brown Simpson, it was about the murder of Ron Goldman. To this day, it has never been satisfactorily explored what this man was doing where he was that fateful night. Either way, I was made to pay for a jury not having returned the verdict that they damn well ought to have.

Alas, music is the most expedient way to transcend the madness that is the racial predator in all his psychotic, violent manifestations. What pray tell do they know of Jazz when so consumed are they, the racial predatory, with a need to prey on us?

In having enslaved our ancestors and to this day remained hellbent on denying that insult, what more can be expected of the flawed, fractured and compromised collective psyche of the racial predator? They haven’t a damn clue how utterly dissembled their humanity remains.

Indeed, Jazz is not yours deems the racial predator. Jazz is too damn good for the likes of you; so along came a campaign of heroin et al to hunt down this affront to the racial predator’s sense of one’s place in the order of things and sure enough in little less than a century, there he sits smugly copping attitude when speciously declaring, “Jazz has its roots in Klezmer!”

Of course, the fool gave himself away when using the verb ‘root’ which is synonymous with and was coined by the very people who invented Jazz. Indeed, the very people for whom Jazz is an uneclipsed affirmation of their humanity and untrammelled nobility of spirit.

______________________________________________________________________________

Bass: Ron Carter

Trumpet: Jon Faddis

Trumpet: Roy Hargrove

Without doubt, the strongest Diana Ross live performance ever. Poignant. Moving. Those large beauteous eyes mirror a lot of pain and rage during its performance. Again, if you can’t sing it because you know damn well you can’t, why bother wasting the time on the likes of you?

A true mystery to me it remains why when one hates Blacks with such unbridled passion, one would end up squatting all over Black culture, Jazz, as though it were the latest Settler craze. More to the point, there are no racially predatory persons creating Haida or Inuit art… and with good reason; then again, neither are expressions of Black creative genius. Culture is a non-negotiable.

Alas, there is the racial predator aggressively overrunning the culture then turning around and acting as though to somehow include Blacks in Jazz – which after all one has already declared does have its roots in Klezmer – is tantamount to the Oscars where every 3/4 centuries or so, one will deign to consider tossing a best actress Oscar a Black female’s way.

The same Black female whom, in this the new age of minstrelsy, Diana Krall in her invisible blackface can never proximate. However, this is about market share and having the right look and simply getting the lion’s share of fame and fortune for being born of the womb of the racial predator. La Krall who in the pop idiom would have never risen stratospherically to the heights she has; certainly, she would never have had more than a second album.

She is a marvellous enigma – an icon in that sense for what she represents. “I can get more market share than you” and that’s that. She is cold and sterile like the gun that gunned down way too many young Black men – like the gun that set Ferguson, Missouri ablaze – whose lives clearly do not matter to some. To see what a true fraud La Krall is – she who seemed nothing more than a venereal wart on Oscar Peterson’s arse, an arse which was too good to be wiped by mere Blacks when finally he was parked in palliative care – just listen to her do a damn good Joni Mitchell impersonation on her current album.

Sitting there at the piano, botoxed within a breath of being on view in her casket, La Krall coolly cops that ‘phuch ewe’ swagger she owns so well – just as Eminem does. Yes, indeed, it is all about money and as race ever trumps either class or reason, there she drifts through life in Bentleys where others, the real McCoys, can hardly afford a Lada.

Again, why should we Blacks culturally settle for a Lada when we can, by right, damn well afford a Bentley? Alas, who knows whether Cassandra Wilson is dead or alive anymore?

More than ever, these pale imitators no more give a damn about Blacks or Black culture than the next Klansman. Roberta Gambarini is the best impersonator of Carmen McRae going… nothing more. There they squat, this elephantine, oppressive presence all over Jazz, pulling an Eric Garner thereby suffocating and stifling the very breath of Black culture. Seriously, who are Emilie-Claire Barlow, Holly Cole, Sophie Milman but mirrors of the grudging contempt for which one holds Blacks and Black culture.

Never once did I, or Merlin and I for that matter, manage to gain entry into Montréal Jazz Bistro when it sat on Sherbourne Street. Indeed, the one time, we made it to George’s Spaghetti house, having previously tried to without success, was as the guests of David Tipe; the evening was cut short after a stranger wondered over to the table where we sat and in the midst of making small-talk blurted out something about ‘niggers’.

Without the support from the moneyed classes, there can be no arts, no culture. Racism is economics and the result of the focussed economic oppression of Blacks – all fostered by the demonisation, marginalisation and dismissal of Blacks, in particular Black males, by a cinema/television culture, the architects of whom are the same persons who squat all over the culture and would be so smug as to blithely claim on live radio that Jazz has its roots in Klezmer. Some alternate reality that.

Thank goodness there was a strong Black middle class, little more than a century ago, without which there would have been no birth of Jazz. No Coltrane, no Ellington, no Mingus and on and on and on. There has been a steadfast erosion to near obliteration of the Black middle classes such that anyone today without an awareness of music history would think it incredulous that Blacks should claim to be the innovators of Jazz.

Naturally, of course, the same cinematic agendum that would keep Blacks all but invisible and extinct when not risible, violent and or marginalised has never once seen fit to have cinematically documented the lives of any of these true geniuses of Jazz which one keeps claiming is a true American art form, yet until Michelle Obama took up residency in the White House, it had never before been performed therein.

Black history month is about celebrating and most of all it is about never for a nanosecond losing sight of who the racial predator is and despite Nikki Yanofsky – the darling little Montréalaise with the bought career – claiming, “Oh Ella we love you!” well to channel the very spirit of Frederick ‘Mr. Hat’ Jones, I declare, “Bitch please. Ella don’t give no damn if you can turn piss into wine. We ain’t having it!”

Sing Strange Fruit or just go make country music; an idiom, I might add, where you never see Blacks claiming ownership thereof or time-wasting patronising. After all, Country is the music of the very people about whom Strange Fruit was penned.

Alas, your racially predatory animus is so intense that you can’t but squat all over the culture, with total disregard, and thereby make it your own. Besides, what do you care what we think?

Go on, go ahead, let’s see you sing Strange Fruit with all the pain and rage as Diana Ross… to say nothing of Billie Holiday.

______________________________________________________________________________________

Dreams are the poetic expression of the soul.

Tag: Klezmer

Sack O’ Woe.

Strange Fruit… The Gold Standard.