Music is your experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.
CHARLIE PARKER1
For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.
JAMES BALDWIN, “Sonny’s Blues”2
I suppose that jazz listening and prizefight watching are my two most passionate avocations, and this is largely so because the origins of my aesthetic urges are in the black working class. At times these avocations are a bit difficult to reconcile: boxers like to train in the early afternoon and jazz musicians like to jam late at night. But I think they are, on the whole, more deeply related than one might suspect. They are such direct expressions, not of emotion, but rather of emotive power, and they are such risk-taking endeavors. The most vibrant memories I bear from my childhood are of my uncles crowded around a very small black and white television, drinking beer and watching the Gillette Friday Night Fights; my aunts would be in another room listening to old jazz records such as Lionel Hampton’s “Flying Home” and Billie Holiday’s “Don’t Explain.” The men would join them later to play Charlie Parker records and lots of rhythm and blues stuff. I liked those Friday nights as much as I have ever liked anything.
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