let's not diss one another

[Jon Ford]

>btw.  You will, no doubt, be equally horrified to learn that I have just
>purchased (from India) a new valve trombone and am trying to get my
>embouchure (sp?) back to what ever degree that is possible at this late
>date.  Want to play some Billy Strayhorn and Cole Porter.


Wayne, I believe everyone has a right to play music badly. Once, as a kid, I 
tried to play my father's beat up trumpet; I even pounded the bongos for a 
couple of years back in high school.
Enclosed is a poem about one of  my adolescent efforts at musicianship. So 
at least something came out of it !
Jon

Roy Eldridge
“Serious as a heart-attack…he was at his best when he let it rip.”
(Francis Davis, The VillageVoice 2004)

I heard his name on the radio
and a sampling from the Verve box, just released
coffin back from hell
the flames still licking at the embers

scratchy old 78s re-mastered
filling the tight space of my car
with a trumpet, groaning like a man’s voice
hacking and spitting--it took me back,

lifting the horn from its black,
velvety cradle, putting to my lip
tasting brass once again
trace of old spit on  the mouthpiece.

And  I played it, the wild
loose sound of a  kid with no lip,
no discipline, no idea
of where I  was supposed to come in,
aware the whole time this  horn

was not mine, but tasting it,
making it vibrate the cheap chandelier
thinking of the Dayton high school
marching band, a picture framed in black,
young Dad in his uniform, skinny as a white clarinet

clutching this same horn for dear
life, trying to stay in that moment
the war just a speech on the radio
knowing he’d go if he had to

hoping he’d live long enough
to play in  a band like Roy Eldridge
his black hair slicked back,
tux immaculate,

only the sound of the band in his head,
the trumpet almost playing itself,
except when he soloed, oh then, all that tracking
veered off  in sheer free-fall

down to the river of notes, drinking it up
spewing it out in the room.
They could feel it all over their ears, their bodies,
the invasion of something they never had dreamed

would be there, the rest of the century
calling them up, drawing them in.

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