Death Jazz rant

Someone on the telly said something about "Death Jazz" and into my head popped this rant. Doesn't mean anything but I imagined this angry hoard of pensioners devoutly clinging onto their jazz for dear life whilst the young upstarts trashed all that was traditional (and even bebop!)...

The upstart Jazzheads cult have claimed another victory over the massed hoards of enraged pensioners flocking to the now smokeless mill hill jazz club deep in zimmer country. “We’ve waited far too long for this” said one octogenarian high on the fumes of a charred Acoustic Ladyland CD. Not that this is even at the sharp end of the latest jazz fad. Acoustic Ladyland are tame by comparison to some. Meanwhile, the millhillians opponents, jazz’s youngest aficionados, parade their death jazz feast of dissonance and claim that jazz is dead, long live jazz! “The elderly have held jazz for way too long in a vice-like grip of rigor mortis proportions. Now is the time to rise up and purge jazz of its colostomy bag and triple heart bypass. Most of the good die young. Parker was cool in his day but so many as poorly improvised versions of the original exist that he’s become a pastiche of all that was avant garde.” So said one jazzhead member whose grasp of a good tune, so the pensioners’ claim, died before he’d left the womb. From beyond the grave one man’s voice rings out - Jazz isn’t dead it just smells funny – Frank Zappa.

New myspace music and jazz poetry update

Having wrestled with myspace in the first place even to get a site up and running (it must be one of the most unwieldy formats ever) I have discovered that I can't add sound to the site without having a 'music' myspace site. Doh. So, very shortly I will be opening my 'music' myspace and asking friends to join me there instead of, well, there, if you see what I mean. Thankfully (sad person that I must be), I don't have many friends. (You may shed a tear on my behalf.)

The idea behind this is so that I can upload some of my jazz poems which will shortly be recorded with the band.... and so, to the gig. Sometime in the new year writer Jack Stanley and I will be doing a gig to combine our jazz poetry with some fabulous jazz played by a great little band called Special Edition. The members of this band have been around for years in one guise or another and further information on them will become available when I've got the other myspace site up and running properly.

Jack Stanley, my literary collaborator, is an American who has seen a thing or two in his time, has a passion for jazz, and writes a mean tale, and together we will be crafting a show that will enlighten, amuse and entertain. In the the first instance we hope that the gig will take place at the Hornsey Library, a long time venue for the prestigious writing group Word for Word (whose accolades have come from the likes of Fay Weldon and Romesh Gunesekera), as a Word for Word special, but plans are afoot to take it to other venues such as the Poetry Cafe in Covent Garden and (hopefully) The Vortex. Of course if anyone knows any other venues where it might appropriately air, please let us know, bearing in mind that Jack is getting on in years and neither of us can travel to Outer Mongolia!

Tonight - Word for Word's Festive Performance Evening

Yes, tonight is the writing group Word for Word's festive performance evening at the Crouch End library. 7.30 pm start until around 9.30. Entrance is free. Drinks, nibbles, poetry, prose, a tune or two and lots of conviviality. I will be 'doing' my poem/song Summer Heat, which is posted on the blog a bit lower down somewhere.