Coltrane: On Green Dolphin Street
Looking into jazz music in its pinnacle years is an exercise in peering into the web of silkworms and drawing out the resemblances and nuances of our soul – from sublime simplicity to great profundity, where it starts and where it ends is anybodys guess. But that’s the intense fun of it all – it’s the art form of those who enjoy the element of fantasy, crave the avant garde and hold an inner child waiting to come out. When listening attentively we let ourselves drift into the craft, into the mastery of the music carried on impulse and whim of consciousness. The emotion arrives so quintessentially that we needn’t a notepad and pen to ponder it later; we live in the moment of the movement and comprehend its universal language. Meanwhile the surface simplicity, with its infinite variety, probes us, programs us with its basic code. We know in the moment of the music – when snares fall, when the smoke rises into the air, when the whiskey swirls over ice-cubes, we imagine a bitterly cold evening where rain sweeps on sidestreets. In our minds’ eye, we imagine the scales yielding rapture, the hammering of ivory keys indenting notes in our hearts, bass lines tugging at time, reminding us, pleasantly, of the passing moment. Class, creed, race are suspended in an ectoplasm, replaced by the dissonant hum, lost in the rift of the sonorous song.
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Afghanistan’s Plee for Renaissance: Return to Modernity
It is the time, now, when black-clad shells fall from the sky, the mouths of rivers are skirted with dirt and stones and in place of roaring debate, bronze bullets shriek and pierce the wind. To a child in the neighborhood playground, this is likely a common nuisance and no reason to stop kicking the dust with one’s soles. What more can one do, when the municipal school has closed its doors for safety concerns or perhaps the teacher’s fear of pupil protection.
Sand-blasted, grey armoured automobiles, labouring its treads through the uneven stretch, drag an emotionally sodden platoon through the unknown, for the noble sake of chartering their cause. Meanwhile, the bodies of those deceased are hung out and left to dry by the roadway with absolute nonchalance. Perched upon the dividing line of tectonic plate, it is surely difficult to hear the last voice of resistance for Afghanistan’s historical significance.
For in the quest for stability, what little concern for a superpower, gathering and imposing their troops into a fraught hotbed of unrest, carefully trotting on eggshells as they attempt to reach a resolution for a constitution.
It is the voice of the quest for a return to Afghanistan’s Golden Age that has been squelched and suitably sutured by incompatible visions of a self-governing state. The many wounds of an already fragmented fabric of people is only brought even greater dismay by the glaring totem of death; drowning in images of hallowed crusaders walking upon blighted land.
While political insights and opinions might vary, we should be aid ourselves to look beyond and focus on the true victims of this conflict – the civilians and especially the children, who will grow up merely guided and reassured for the prosperity of things to come, by the stories and memories of fathers and forefathers.
“There was once a time”, I believe they would say, “where a University mall stood there, and a booming coffee shop operated beside it, choking with smoke and laughter. Next door to the opium den and beside the promenade and car-park was the city medical centre, where worldly wisdom and medicine were prescribed treatments as opposed to our present-day emergency rations and infinite squalor. Things will turn around, given time.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/weekinreview/18bumiller.html
Holiday & Meeropol: Taking Strange Fruit From The Poplar Trees
Responding to the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith – names and identities of African-American citizens left forgotten and unknown to the breakneck pace of a developing America – a Jewish schoolteacher known as Abel Meeropol related his horror and disgust in a published poem known as ‘Strange Fruit’, after a viewing of the photograph taken by a passerby. Once unknown identities of men are immortalised in an ailing ballad to the injustices brought against them. And here, in this post, a further commemoration of the efforts of the songwriter and the victims of a myopic act.
Decades along, the chilling lyrics, the sodden, melancholy notes touch our souls and bring our minds back to a time in our foreseeable past, that economic disparity, denigration of human rights in the richest developed country in the world should have fallen by the wayside. In the quest for progressivism – in science, in technology and in our pursuit of the arts and expression of debate, Meeropol was wise by his insight into our follies and lack of foresight of the inequities in our world.
In my mind, the possibility that a school child should witness such a poem fills me with joy and hope, but also an intense sadness. The vision of a teacher – realising the possibility of educating the next generation of citizens – is an inspiration for all educators of youth in our current generation and a reminder of the great deal of work yet to be accomplished in our quest for understanding and demonstrating compassion toward the myriad of human culture, facets, personalities.
I warn you, as a sympathetic reader, that this photograph is deeply affecting and if you should endeavour to find it on your own or to follow this link, be prepared for what you will see. The confounding lack of basic human respect and consideration, the distinct void of compassion and the stinging sign of pride by the instigators of a despicable racial hatred will cause you great sorrow.
Indeed, it was inspiration drawn from a gruesome black-and-white photograph – bodies hung perversely, listlessly from poplar trees and covered in scathes, wearing torn and burned and dirtied rags, with skin bloodied and broken at the neck – illustrating a proud crowd of onlookers, taken and brought to gratuitous applause by its receiving audience. African-American citizens did not deserve to have the same rights as White America, it was proclaimed, and those unhappy with the court order for civil rights equality brought the law and the name of justice into their own hands.
‘Those southern trees bear a strange fruit’, Meerpol begins, ‘blood on the leaves and blood at the root, black bodies swinging in the southern breeze’. Fraught, replete with sorrow, tattooed in searing ink by the images of subjugation, torture and death brought upon her race, Billie Holiday took to the stage and delivered the words and melody of ‘Strange Fruit’ – drowning in every word and sentiment embedded in the song – to an unsuspecting jazz-club audience. The club remained bone idle – not a fidget, cough or even a shift crossed the patrons, horrified and brought to awe by the brutal honesty and the actualisation of truth reaching their consciences.
Through economy of words, richness of tone, Meerpol and Holiday were a union unbeknownst of the lives of each other, but sharing equally in the daily fear of persecution, of harassment and discrimination to their families and them and the shared struggle for survival that we have now taken for granted, in our sheltering society.
Watch carefully and feel for the emotion drawn into Billie’s face and imagine the simmering pot of heat shimmering in her voice and carried like an aura in the air around her — boiling emotion, pent-up and culminated over the countless derogatory epithets and physical acts of abuse witnessed the entirety of her life. Billie clearly stood her ground and expressed, in her most dignified and poignant pose, the pent anger, the sorrow and confusion of a society brought to loathe her existence. This song captures my heart at the moment where her conscious presence on stage vacates, where tears well in the corners of her eyes and the neotenic lips, grimacing like a child lost of love, starving and distraught, curve to form words expressing a primal urge for acceptance and respect, owing to the unwarranted discrimination of her age, her sex, her race, her creed and even the caravan that housed her sleeping body. And as the rumour goes, though she persevered and penned myriad songs and inspired a generation of faithful and loving listeners that ultimately accompanied the ushering of civil rights, she died lonely and starving, with seven cents to her name.
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- Coltrane: On Green Dolphin Street
- Afghanistan’s Plee for Renaissance: Return to Modernity
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