“The blues, to me, is like, being very sad, very sick…or in the church, being very happy. There’s two kinds of blues: there’s happy blues, and there’s sad blues. I don’t think I ever sing the same way twice. I don’t think I ever sing the same tempo. One night, it’s a little bit slow, the next night, it’s a little bit brighter – it’s according to how I feel. I don’t know – the blues is sort of a mixed-up thing. You just have to feel it. Anything I do sing, it’s part of my life.” – Billie Holliday

Jammin’ the Blues is a 1944 short film in which several prominent jazz musicians got together for a rare filmed jam session. It featured Lester Young, Red Callender, Harry Edison, Marlowe Morris, Sid Catlett, Barney Kessel, Jo Jones, John Simmons, Illinois Jacquet, Marie Bryant, Archie Savage and Garland Finney.

The film, quite simply, looks like Jazz itself.

Smoke curling from the cigarettes, to the ceilings of dark rooms, the simplicity and purity of the music endures, it speaks for itself, to anyone who will listen. What it says and the why of it are for each listener to discern, because as much as each player brings his life to the instrument and the music, so too each listener. A communion of sorts, a moment in the dark becomes a path to a light of recognition; of pain and loss and above all else, of enduring, surviving, carrying on, of love.

The movie was directed by still photographer Gjon Mili, He was the first to use electronic flash and stroboscopic light to create photographs that had more than scientific interest. “Time could truly be made to stand still. Texture could be retained despite sudden violent movement.” he once said.

The film, shot by his friend Robert Burk, employs these techniques to enhance the music. Norman Granz was the technical producer for the session as he was for so much of what has become the music we know as jazz.

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We were sitting in the Drenched Beagle in Vancouver when a guy from the bar asked me, “Where are we?” “Here.” I said. Later he asked, “What time is it?” “Now,” I said. When he asked me if I was a writer, I guessed it was because I was sitting at a table in a corner with some writers that he had heard of. So I shrugged and said, “Sometimes I scribble after midnight but I ain’t no writer.”

He nodded and went away happy. I guess he recognized a writer when he saw one.

Jim Christy was sitting next me at the table. He watched him walk away, shook his head, took a shot of apple cider and started to tell me about a trip he would be taking to do an article on apple cider farms in the U.S. It would be hard to get the good apple cider there that you could get here, he thought. So I told him to take some apple seeds with him and think like Johnny Appleseed.

He laughed and said, “Scribbling after midnight, I like that. I’m gonna use it. Right after I plant some apple trees.” We had another drink or two and then went off to his poetry reading.

After the reading I went to another literary beer joint. My friend Gus was sitting alone at the bar, an almost empty glass in front of him. He was holding his hands out, studying them for clues as if he was looking for testimonials to their loyalty. His fingers are his marines, he once said, his first wave at the point of attack.

Clouds of gunmetal gray smoke frame his apparent contemplations. He is lost in the peril of his own strategy. It seems like he sees nothing in the mirror but the empty space surrounding him.

I had a couple of drinks with him. We talked about Dylan and Ginsburg. He loved one, hated the other. He told me he had written a new piece. He said he would email it to me. Just as I was leaving he grabbed me by the arm. “Can I borrow a couple a bucks? Writing sucks,” he said and turned back to the bar.

I read his piece early the next morning before I went out running. It occurred to me later that maybe he had seen everything he could see, at least for now. That maybe he was just passing through the writing, that for him it was safer and easier to hide in the here and now of the smoke and whiskey. As it is for all of us. Far safer indeed than to try to go back inside to the beginning, before conscious thought, to wherever it is that the words come from.

Photo Credits

Scribble courtesy Creative Commons

When I’m writing, like I was this morning, I am reminded that my father would probably hate the whole thing. Other people did that. Writers are important, but you, son… — he would have left the rest unsaid. He would have dismissed the writing, the words themselves, the subject matter, my attitude, my not having a real job, a useful job, all of it, every bit of it.

I imagine how he would raise an eyebrow at my talking about it even though I’m good at it, even though I work hard at it, even though I work at it every day just like a job. It is a job, a hard job. It’s my work. He would have dismissed all this as just plain fuzzy-headed.

He used to tell me when I was growing up that it didn’t matter what I did, just that I did my best at it. He was a guy who was good with his hands, could fix anything. In his world there wasn’t screen door or a window that couldn’t use a little “adjustment.” With all that, he was also a PhD, a community organizer, a teacher.

He used to say that I could be anything, a carpenter if that’s what I wanted, a plumber, just so long as I could saw straight and level on the level. I came to see that as a code. Maybe it was the remnant, or more accurately, the defining attitude of men who lived through the Great Depression. I figured it as personal shorthand for “you can be anything you want son just so long as you are a lawyerdoctorteacher with salarybenefitsreputation and a retirement package.” I hated that.

He is gone now. I get up everyday, long before sunrise, at just about the same time he did, to go to work. When the words are flowing, and even when they are not, I sometimes think he might be all right with all this writing stuff. When I get it right, I cut a straight line and get it level on the level. I think he would see that and I think he might smile a little at the possibility that I would be alright in the world, that he had done okay.

Photo Credits

“M. Mickey Lebowitz PhD” Photo provided by  Michael Lebowitz