The Cry of Jazz (1959) Part 1 of 4

 

 

 

 

 

TRANSFORMATIONS
The Power of Black Music

Samuel A. Floyd Jr.

 

The Negro Renaissance: Harlem and Chicago (Part 3)

 

Fletcher Henderson & Band

 

 

                                     Ironically, however, it was jazz and the blues that provided the movement's asthetic ambiance. Bands such as Henderson's and Ellington's were playing dance halls and floor shows; classic blues was ascendant, having first appeared in Harlem in the 1910s and now being recorded by female classic blues singers such as Mamie, Trixie, and Bessie Smith. When W.C. Handy arrived in New York from Memphis in 1918, the blues had been there for years among southern immigrants, and female professional entertainers from southern minstrel and vaudeville shows were already important in entertainment circles.

 

                                      Singers such as Trixie, Mamie, and Bessie Smith, Chippie Hill, Lucile Hegaman, and Ethel Waters mastered the twelve-bar blues form and made it speak to the more sophisticated urban audiences. All these women sang the blues they had heard and learned in southern jooks and tent shows, songs they had composed themselves, and songs written by professionals such as Handy. Handy's songs were not strictly in the standard twelve-bar form. They were mostly Tin Pan Alley-type songs into which the structural and expressive characteristics of the blues were carefully set and integrated. Handy's work was both different and familiar enough to make a strong and positive impact on the popular culture of the time; his blues songs became part of the classic blues repertory.

 

                                        The blues tradition, with that of the spiritual, provided the basis for some of William Grant Still's work in the 1920s and 1930s. Throughout the 1920s, he heard many blues, spirituals, and African-American secular folk songs. He absorbed the styles, made them part of his emotional and compositional arsenals, and experimented with them in works such as "From the black belt" (1926) while making his sketches for the Afro-American symphony-the first symphony composed by an African American. That work, completed in 1930 and first performed in 1931, effectively mirrors the ideals of the Harlem Renaissance. Still realized those ideals not by using existing folk songs, but by cereating stlized imitations of them, which he cast in conventional and not-so-conventional classical musical forms. The Afro-American Symphony is of two lineages--African-American and European--and these two lineages shine through the entirety of the work. The afro-American symphony effectively realized the goals of the Harlem Renaissance, with Still vindicating the faith of the movement's intellectuals and establishing himself as the first black composer of a successful symphony.

 

                                          Stride piano was also flourishing in New York, and the amazing keyboard feats of James P. Johnson, Willie "the Lion" Smith, and Fats Waller were enthralling and stunning the cabaret-goers, house-rent party revelers, and sophisticated white social set of the day. When Luckey Roberts (1890-1968) reigned as king of the Harlem ragtime pianists, the eastern school of ragtime was at its peak. and his "Nothin" was "the last work in cutting contests from 1908" (Jasen and Tichenor 1978). Known especially for his composition and performances of pieces such as "Spanish Venus" and "Pork and Beans," the latter of which was published in 1913 and recorded by him around that time, Roberts was without equal in Harlem's gladiatorial cutting contests.

 

                                            Around 1918, Roberts was succeeded as "king" by James P. Johnson, who broke with eastern ragtime and moved stride toward wide acceptance with his stunning performances, especially his recording of his own "Carolina Shout" (1921), a fast-moving, celebratory piece inspired by shout culture that was quite unlike any of the works of Scott Joplin, Eubie Blake, Jelly Roll Morton, or the other ragtime composers and pianists of the period. After "Carolina Shout," Johnson, Smith, and Waller--the "Big Three" stride pianists--went on to revolutionize jazz piano, smith with his wonderful two-hand melodic elaborations and Waller with his two-fisted, cadenza-like Signifyin(g). The lyric, expressive side of stride can be heard in other works by the Big Three--for example, Willie "the Lion" Smith's rendition of "Tea For Two," recorded much later, in an interview session.

                                        

                                                      

                                          

                                           

 

  

Jean Toomer Wrote the novel Cane          Walter White wrote Flight (1926)

(1923)

 

         

Langston Hughes wrote Not Without Laughter   Zora Neal hurston wrote "Sweat" (1926)

(1930)

 

  

Alain Locke edited the New Negro    Aaron Douglas painted allegorical

(1925)                                               scenes

 

      

Archibald Motley painted Syncopation(1925)         Palmer Hayden painted Schooner(1926)

Stomp(1926) & Spell of Voodoo(1928)     & Quai at Concarneu (1929)

 

Eubie Blake                                          Noble Sissle

Both wrote the musical Shuffle Along (1921)

 

 

James P. Johnson wrote Runnin' Wild     he and Fats Waller wrote Keep Shufflin (1928)

(1924)                                                          

 

                  

Donald Haywook wrote the operetta Africana        Paul Robeson acted in Simon the Cyrenian

(1933)                                                                   (1920), All Gods's Chillum Got Wings                                                                               (1923). The Emperor Jones(1925) and

                                                                               Showboat (1928)

 

 

                                        With prodigious talent and technique, the Harlem striders remained ascendant until Art Tatum arrived in New York in 1931. According to a witness, Tatum spread his hands out over the keyboard, feeling out the instrument. Finding the tension of the keys to his liking, he nodded ever so slightly and rippled off a series of runs. He played around with effortless grace for a short time, gaining speed and tempo. A Breathtaking run that seemed to use up every note on the piano led to a familiar theme--"Tea for Two." But something strange had happened to the tune. Just as suddenly as he gave them the melody he was out of it again, but never far enough away from it to render it unrecognizable.  Then he was back on it again. The torch had been passed. In this performance--reminiscent of the Signifyin(g) symbolism of Br'er Rabbit and Br'er Mockingbird, by the way--Tatum, with his new melodic and harmonic ideas and his superior technical ability, demonstrated his inimitable synthesis of ragtime, boogie-woogie, and stride piano, revealing his debt to Waller, Earl Hines, and the Chicago Boogie-woogie men.

 

                                            As the 1920s progressed, jazz became, for Renaissance leaders, the most acceptable of rthe secular vernacular genres. Before the Renaissance, the earliest recognized general manifestation of jazz, New Orleans jazz, had been a collectivel improvised, out-of-doors music, played primarily at "parades, picnics, concerts, riverboat excursions, and dances" (Gridley 1983). Drawing from the rich reservoir of the ring, it had spread quickly in the second decade of the century to most of the nation's major cities and to points in Europe (note, for example, Jelly Roll Morton's and Freddie Keppard's sojourns in California, King Oliver's permanent residence in Chicago, and the European tours of Sidney Bechet with Will Marion Cook's Southern Syncopated Orchestra).

 

                                             In the Renaissance period, the challenge of maintaining in jazz the continuity of this African-American aesthetic expression within the framework of new and expanding technical resources as well as restraints was first faced, seriously and effectively, by Fletcher Henderson.

                                                                                                                      

                                     

TO BE CONTINUED!!

  

 

 

 

Count Basie Orchestra - CornerPocket (1962)

               

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

Obituaries

Milwaukee barber Frank Gay doubled as jazz musician

Journal Sentinel files

Hubert Humphrey visited with Frank Gay in 1972 as Gay worked on a customer’s hair at his Grand Barbershop on Milwaukee’s north side.

Jan. 20, 2012

Frank Gay was a north side barber who played jazz trumpet as a young man and whose King Drive shop was known for its camaraderie and a great jukebox.

He grew up in a generation of Milwaukee musicians who went on to jazz careers, some of them gaining regional and national reputations. And as a trumpeter and member of the musicians union, he played with some of the greats who visited town - including Lena Horne, Dizzy Gillespie and Billie Holiday, his daughter said.

Gay died Jan. 13 of bone cancer. He was 83.

Gay's kids described his King Drive barbershop, which he opened in 1965 and operated 30 years, as a Milwaukee institution, full of talk, laughter and music from a jukebox loaded with jazz music.

"It was like going to a club, being at that barbershop," said his daughter, Christina Gay.

Gay grew up in Milwaukee and graduated in 1948 from Lincoln High School, where he played in the marching and concert bands.

Many others came out of Lincoln playing jazz and made names for themselves in Milwaukee or even nationally - including Willie Pickens, Frank Morgan and Bunky Green. Singer Al Jarreau graduated from Lincoln about 10 years later, but his brother Alphaeus was a year behind Gay and remembers the future barber as an excellent musical interpreter.

Gay was also a good reader of music, and he joined the musicians union in his teens because of that ability - a connection that got him gigs with the stars then and later.

Pickens, a jazz pianist who moved to Chicago in 1958 and made a national name for himself, said there were two musicians unions in those days - one for black performers and one for whites.

John Schneider, who wrote a fact-based play in 1999 for the old Theater X company called "Jazz: A Milwaukee History," relied for a large part of the play on an interview with Gay.

In the interview, Gay listed some of the north side clubs where jazz could be heard when he was playing in the 1940s, '50s and '60s - the Pelican, the Celebrity Club, Thelma's Back Door, the Jam Room. He bemoaned the loss of those clubs, and the old Bronzeville neighborhood around W. Walnut St., to urban renewal and freeway construction.

After high school, Gay served in the Army, where he played in an Army band at Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indiana, his daughter said. When he came back to Milwaukee he worked at construction jobs but continued to play music.

He got a master barber's license and a certificate in business administration in 1960 from what's now the Milwaukee Area Technical College. He opened a barbershop at 2543 N. 3rd St. in 1965 and named it Grand Barbershop, after a Detroit jazz venue, Club 20 Grand.

Like many barbershops in the black community, his became a major social gathering place. One of his former customers, Journal Sentinel columnist Eugene Kane, remembers him saying slugger Hank Aaron was once a regular patron - though Kane quoted Gay as saying he didn't like baseball because of how black pioneer Jackie Robinson was treated.

His longtime companion, Mary Jo Avery, said Milwaukee Bucks and Green Bay Packers players were also among his customers, and politicians often stopped in, including Hubert Humphrey, the Minnesota senator and vice president who ran for president as a Democrat in 1968 and competed for the nomination in 1972.

After his retirement in the mid-1990s, his daughter said, he was an avid golfer. "I bet he played four days a week," Christina said.

Gay's three-decade marriage to the former Mary Jane Wiley ended in divorce in the mid-1990s. Beside his ex-wife and his daughter, he is survived by sons Monty Shadd and Glenn Gay, five grandchildren and Avery.

A service is set for 11 a.m. Saturday at the Northwest Funeral Chapel, 6630 W. Hampton Ave.

   

                                                 TRANSITIONS MADE:

 

The 2011 Musical Obituaries
Compiled by George Graham

Jan. 1 Charles Fambrough, jazz bassist, composer, 60
Jan. 4 Gerry Rafferty, singer-songwriter, Stealer's Wheel, 63
Jan. 10 Margaret Whiting, pop singer, 86
Jan. 17 Don Kirshner, rock producer, 76
Jan. 26 Gladys Horton, member of Marvelettes, 65
Jan. 26 Charlie Louvin, country artist, Louvin Brothers, 83
Jan. 31 Mark Ryan, member of Adam and the Ants, 51
Feb. 6 Gary Moore, rock guitarist, singer, Thin Lizzy, 58
Feb. 14 George Shearing, jazz pianist, composer, 91
Mar. 11 Jack Hardy, folk singer-songwriter, Homegrown Music artist, 63
Mar. 12 Joe Morello, jazz drummer w/Dave Brubeck, 82
Mar. 14 Big Jack Johnson, blues guitarist, singer, 70
Mar. 16 Melvin Sparks, jazz and soul guitarist, 64
Mar. 17 Ferlin Husky, country singer, 85
Mar. 21 Pinetop Perkins, blues pianist, 97
Mar. 22 Zoogz Rift, iconoclastic musician, wrestler, 57
Apr. 5 Gil Robbins, folksinger, The Highwaymen, 80
Apr. 9 Roger Nichols, recording engineer, Steely Dan, 66
Apr. 11 Billy Bang, jazz violinist, 63
Apr. 22 Hazel Dickens, folk singer, 75
Apr. 26 Phobe Snow, popular singer, 60
May 8 Cornell Dupree, jazz and blues guitarist, 68
May 11 Snooky Young, jazz trumpeter, 92
May 15 Bob Flanigan, jazz singer, Four Freshmen, 84
May 27 Gil Scott-Heron, musician, poet, composer 62
June 2 Ray Bryant, jazz pianist, 79
June 3 Andrew Gold, singer-songwriter, 59
June 8 Alan Rubin, trumpeter, Blues Brothers, 68
June 12 Carl Gardner, singer with the Coasters, 83
June 18 Clarence Clemons, saxophonist E-Street Band, 69
July 8 Kenny Baker, country and bluegrass fiddler, 85
July 9 Michael Burston, a/k/a Wurzel, guitarist with Motorhead, 61
July 11 Rob Grill, singer-songwriter, founder of The Grass Roots, 67
July 23 Fran Landesman, composer, lyricist, wrote with Bob Dorough, 83
July 23 Bill Morrissey, singer-songwriter, 59
July 23 Amy Winehouse, singer-songwriter, 27
July 24 Dan Peek, singer-songwriter, member of America, 60
July 26 Frank Foster, jazz saxophonist, 82
July 29 Gene McDaniels, singer-songwriter "Compared to What", 76
Aug. 11 Jani Lane, vocalist with band Warrant, 47
Aug. 20 Ross Barbour, jazz singer, Four Freshmen, 82
Aug. 22 Nickolas Ashford, R&B singer, composer, Ashford & Simpson, 70
Aug. 29 David "Honeyboy" Edwards, blues pioneer, 96
Sep. 7 Eddie Marshall, jazz drummer 73
Sep. 13 Wilma Lee Cooper, country singer, 90
Sep. 16 Willie "Big Eyes" Smith, blues drummer and harmonica player, 75
Sep. 22 Vesta Williams, R&B singer, 53
Sep. 26 Jesse Dixon, Gospel musician, 73
Oct. 1 Butch Ballard, jazz drummer, 92
Oct. 1 David Bedford, British composer and musician, 74
Oct. 5 Bert Jansch, guitarist, vocalist, founder of Pentangle, 67
Oct. 16 Pete Rugolo, jazz and film composer, 95
Oct. 18 Bob Bruning, original bassist in Fleetwood Mac, 68
Oct. 28 Walter Norris, jazz pianist, 79
Oct. 31 Liz Anderson, country singer-songwriter, 81
Nov. 12 Doyle Bramhall, blues and rock singer-songwriter, 62
Nov. 22 Paul Motian, jazz drummer, 80
Nov. 22 Kristian Schultze, German keyboard man, Passport, 66
Nov. 27 Keef Hartley, drummer, band played at Woodstock, 67
Dec. 2 Howard Tate, soul singer, 72
Dec. 2 Al Vega, jazz pianist, 90
Dec. 4 Hubert Sumlin, blues guitarist, 80
Dec. 6 Dobie Gray, soul singer, "The In Crowd", 71
Dec. 14 Billie Jo Spears, country singer, "Blanket on the Ground", 74
Dec. 16 Bob Brookmeyer, jazz trombonist, composer/arranger, 81
Dec. 17 Cesaria Evora, Cape Verdean singer, 70
Dec. 26 Sam Rivers, jazz composer and multinstru

 

 

 

 

  Re/Birth of a Nation

    

    Black Like Me

 

   Rest at pale evening,

   A tall, slim tree,

   Night coming tenderly                 

   Black like me.                              Langston Hughes 1925

                                                   by artist Winold Reiss

 

   Langson Hughes

 

          Although first conceived cira 1920, Ethiopia Awakening (cat.24) by the New England-based, rodin-trained sculptor Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller was art for the future. In spite of the sculpture's roots in early-twentieth-century Pan-Africanist thought, and in the part classical, part allegorical forms of Antoine-Louis Bayre and Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Fuller's vision of an ancient Egyptian noblewoman, aroused and emerging from the cloth and papyrus wrappings of the dead, was a spirited message of rebirth and self-realization: an artistic statement articulated by many african-Americans in the aftermath of slavery and the post-Reconstruction period, and one that clearly resounded with black modernists in the 1920s and 1930s.

 

           This figure, looming from a cocoon-like sculptural base, gave concrete form and signification to the uprooting and resettlement process experienced by blacks in the early twentieth century, whether African-Americans migrating in droves from the rutral South to the urban North or blacks from the Caribbean and Africa moving in ever increasing numbers to Paris, London and other European cities. This diaspora-wide arousal, akin to a reawakening, was the rediscovery of an African identity that had been submerged under decades of peonage, servitude and stultifying tradition, but was now freed from a chrysalis-like state in order to explore and interact with an inductrialized world and to see the self and other peoples of African ancestry in a new light.

 

            In a 1925 essay entitled 'The New Negro', Howard University Professor of Philosophy Alain Locke described this transformation as not relying on older, time-worn models but, rather, embracing a 'new psychology' and 'new spirit'. Central to Locke's preescription was the mandate that the 'New Negro' had to 'smash' all of the racial, social and psychological impediments that had long obstructed black achievement. six years prior to Locke's essay, the pioneering black film-maker Oscar Micheaux called for similar changes. In his 1919 film Within our Gates, Micheaux presented a virtual cornucopia of 'New Negro' types:from the educated and entrepreneurial 'race' man and woman to the incorrigible Negro hustler, from the liberal white philanthropist to the hard-core white racist. Micheaux created a complex, melodramatic narrative, around these types in order to develop a morality tale of pride, prejudice, misanthropy and progressivism that would be revisited by Locke and others.

 

TO BE CONTINUED:

 

 

   AFRICAN AMERICANS

                VOICES OF TRIUMPH

  

EARLY BLACK MOVIEMAKING

 

                Los Angeles's black community was thriving in the summer of 1915. The city's Central Avenue section boasted a Booker Y. Washington Building, a pair of hotels, two newspapers, and so many other enterprises that the black weekly California Eagle headlined: "Central Avenue Assumes Gigantic Proportion as Business Section for Colored Men." The community also had its share of movie houses, but the films were largely made by whites for whites; blacks, when they appeared, were mostly portrayed as menials or dimwitted comedy characters.

                     That would start to change the very same year, when African American actor Noble Johnson and several partners founded the Lincoln Motion Picture Company to make films about blacks, directed and acted by blacks, for blacks. Lincoln was one of many small companies throughout the country to make films with black casts in the years that followed. Tall, good-looking Noble Johnson was already a bit player in the movies. Brought up around horses in Colorado, the young man was working on a ranch in 1914 when a Philadelphia moviemaker on location needed someone to substitute for an injuired performer. Johnson did so well--in one scene driving a runaway four-horse stagecoach--that the company signed him up for further films, usually portraying Indian or Mexican characters. As the film industry moved west, he soon was in Hollywood playing minor roles for Universal Studios.

                     But Johnson had stronger ambitions. With a few backers, including black actor Clarence Brooks, and a white camerman named Harry Gant, Johnson started Lincoln Motion Pictures to create pioneering films in which blacks came across as real people. The company's first film was ready in 1916. A  short two-reeler entitled The Realization of a Negro's Ambition, it cast Noble Johnson in the role of a Tuskegee graduate, a civil engineer, who overcomes prejudice by saving the life of a wealthy white oilman's daughter. Rewarded with a job, he strikes oil in California, then, realizing that the same oil-rich conditions exist on his father's Alabama farm, brings in a gusher there, marries his childhood sweetheart, and lives happly ever after.

                       Trite and simplistic by modern standards. Ambition nonetheless spoke strongly to black yearnings for acceptance and offered an new type of protagonist, a middle-class hero who believed as strongly as anybody else in the American work ethic. Produced on a shoestring budget and distributed to black theaters via friendly black newspaper editors who served as booking agents, Ambition struck a responsive chord with audiences. "Our patrons were surprised and delighted, " declared a Chicago theater owner.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

TO BE CONTINUED:

  

  

                                    From the autobiography of- RUTH BROWN - Miss Rhythm

  

        

 

  Chapter 9 "Oh, What a Dream"

Chuck Willis and I were discussing material at Atlantic one day in the spring of '54. "When are you going to write a song for me?" I asked him, half-joking. "Are you kidding?" he replied. "Do you really want a song from me?"

    "Of course I do. I've never been more serious about anything. " I was simply staggered at his modesty. "Well," he said, "I may have something that could be perfect for you. It's not finished yet, but i'll show it to you when it is.

    A few weeks later he produced a set of lyrics written out on yellow legal pad paper, and proceeded to hum the tune for me. In view of what I was going through with Willis, "Oh, What a Dream" was a killer title, but I fell in love right away with the wonderful slow, bluesy mood he'd created in his combination of words and music. All we needed was for Jesse Stone to come up with an arrangement to match, and we were home free--well, almost. The record was barely on the streets when the inevitable happened. You guessed it, a Patti Page duplicate on Mercury.    Patti page make Billboard's mainstream Top Forty; I settled as usual for the upper reaches of the R-and-B chart. It would be nice to report that my original had crossed over to the white chart. Instead, the reverse happened. "The Singing Rage" crossed over to the black R-and-B list! Later that same year I hit again with the topical "Mambo Baby." Mercury, not to be outdone, hit back with a Georgia Gibbs duplicate. Same result, the bulk of the sales creamed off. Never mind, the tunes kept the name of Ruth Brown hot, hot, hot in the same year that Atlantic, with its black orginals, was declared the "most-covered label" in the U.S. Personally i think "most-covered" was a misnomer; I would have termed it "most-duplicated." (to be continued

Bessie Smith 1936 by photographer Carl Van Vechten

 

Reading Music

Though a musician needs a good ear to play jazz well, it is possible to be musically illiterate and still excel in jazz. Erroll Garner was the most shining example. Erroll had such a quick ear as a child that he never bothered to learn to read. One hearing was usually enough for him to learn any piece of music. When someone mentioned his not being able to read music. Garner said, "Hell, man, nobody can hear you read."In the early days, a jazz musician who could read music was usually called "Professor." Written notes were viewed with suspicion by the unschooled and were considered to be devoid of soul. But men like Eubie Blake could read and write music very well. He said:

     In those days Negro musicians weren't even supposed to read music. We had to pretend we coouldn't read; then they'd marvel at the way we could play shows, thinking we'd learned the parts by ear.

Nowadays most jazz players can read, but they still may run into situations they aren't prepared for. Saxophonist Jack Nimitz, a Stan Kenton alumnus, had no problem with reading or improvising, but when he took a job with a club date band that faked harmony to standard tunes, he had trouble.  Club date fake bands play long medleys, one chorus of each song.  The trumpet or the lead alto will play the melody, and the rest of the horns find harmony parts by ear.

   Jack was doing all right with the harmony lines until the band began to play a tune he didn't know.  He tried to catch it by ear, but in the process he played a few wrong notes. The leader shouted over the music, "if you don't know the tune, just play the melody! 

 

Saturday Night Street Scene by artist, Archibald J. Motley Jr.

 

 

BEGINNINGS

Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis took a pragmatic approach to becoming a jazz player:

   I didn't buy an instrument for the sake of the music. It's different if someone says he likes music and wants to get an instrument to try to be a musician. In my case I wanted the instrument for what it represented.

   By watching musicians I saw that they drank, they smoked, they got all the broads and they didn't get up early in the morning. That attracted me. My next move was to see who got the most attention, so it was between the tenor saxophonist and the drummer. The drums looked like too much work, so I said I'll get one of those tenor saxophones. That's the truth.

 

Nat Cole's wife Maria discussed the legend that Nat's singing career had begun when a drunk had insisted he sing "Sweet Lorraine" until he finally gave in and sang it:

   The incident of the insistent barroom customer, a guy who often spent as much as "three bucks a night" in the Swanee Inn, did happen. As Nat explained it, "This particular customer kept insisting on a certain song, and I told him I didn't know that one but I would sing something different, and that was "Sweet Lorraine."

   The trio was tipped fifteen cents-a nickel apiece-for that performance, and the customer requested a second tune. Again, Nat didn't know it but asked, "Is there something else you would like?"

   "Yeah," the customer said, " I'd lkie my fifteen cents back."

 

Wynton Marsalis had a trumpet long before he developed an interest in being a trumpet player. He said:

   I was about five or six, and Miles (Davis), Clark Terry, Al Hirt, and my father were all sitting around a table in Al's club in New Orleans-this was when my father was still working in Al's band. My father, just joking around because there were so many trumpet players sitting there, said,

   "I better buy Wynton a Trumpet," And Al said,

   "Ellis, let me give your boy one of mine." It's ironic looking back on it, because Miles said, "Don't give it to him. Trumpet's too difficult an instrument for him to learn." Ha!

 

 

Jockey Club, 1929 by artist, Archibald J. Motley Jr.

 

 

 

HAPPINESS

Happiness is the greatest paradox in Nature. It can grow in any soil, live under any conditions. It defies environment. It comes from within; it is the revelation of the depths of the inner life as light and heat proclaim the sun from which they radiate. Happiness consists not of having, but of being; not possessing, but of enjoying. It is the warm glow of a heart at peace with itself. A martyr at the stake may have happiness that a king on his throne might envy. Man is the creator of his own happiness; it is the aroma of a life lived in harmony with high ideals.

For what a man has, he may be dependent on others; what he is, rests with him alone. What he obtains in life is but acquistion; what he attains, is growth. Happiness is the soul's joy in the possession of the intangible. Absolute, perfect, continuous happiness in life, is impossible for the human. It would mean the consummation of attainments, the individual consciousness of a perfectly fufilled destiny. Happiness is paradoxic because it may coexist with trial, sorrow and poverty. It is the gladness of the heart, --rising superior to all conditions.

THE JAZZI

It is necessary to understand this: Jazz has to do with quality. For musicians the music has to be first and foremost "good" to be perceived as jazz. All other criteria play a secondary role, however important that may be.

...James "the jazzi" Harber

 

"This we know, all things are connected, like the blood which unites one family. All things are connected.

Teach your children that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons and daughters of the earth.

Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web he does to himself."

Chief Seattle
Native American
1854