On first looking into Adorno’s Jazz
The man lived through the passage of phrases
monastic intensity coupled with mindful pleasures
aesthetic concerns triumphant as a whip crack
it’s crucial to make certain playback is accurate
vital to know that one’s own concerns are met
impossible to write
poetry after death camps.
~
The world yes
the mélange of real and symbol and whim
the ‘world’
is surely – his world – surely dead.
So no
there is no
system that permits one to accept
two dirty notes as the new
and no fair trade
pan flute for a snare drum
smudge chords as you play
and welcome barbarism?
Music is too important to be left — far too imperative to be right.
~
Who was this hoodoo man
this voodoo princeling
this old bourgeois Marxian
this brilliant inheritor of German
musical economy
political psychology?
~
But Teddy there was tone
and melody
and structure
and time that would not submit
to 12-toned angels.
Incommensurate–
your knowledge and that jazz:
~
ColtraneDavis // EllingtonBasie // ParkerDizzy
~
You should have let the Angel play her game with history
in the mood for love
after kulture got gang-raped and gunned down
April in Paris
shaved heads and complicity
my melancholy …
so blown and squeezed into soft atonal slaps.
~
Herr Doctor all is forgiven in the text
and wrong on one score old sir
we can let that page blaze
and listen still in sore and torn amaze,
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Published in Rampike Vol 16#1 (Conceptualisms Issue)