Yes indeed I was able to read, relate and connect. Haruki has touched a sensitive chord within me -this article transported me in a moment to the greatest experience of my life, the First ever Jazz Yatra in Mumbai in 1978. We were all struggling engineers and executives who could not afford the front row tickets so we had casually walked up the side aisles and sat on the steel railings for seven whole nights.

As I got high on pure jazz -for those days jazz at jazz festivals was unalloyed with hip hop or rap or other tampering methods – especially during the poetic performances by Sonny Rollins, Clark Terry, Big Joe Turner, and the mind-blowing jazz rock from some brilliant European groups like The Laboratorium, et al : this thought had crossed my mind repeatedly.

“Why I can’t I write a poem as mellifluous as Sonny Rollins’ riffs on this electric sax?”
In fact I wrote and rewrote many but then it was an exercise in futility because till very recently poetry or literature had little in common with Jazz. I haven’t bothered to keep the poems either. This vacuum between writers and jazz musicians, has bothered me for decades.

Some years back, in the huge mass of email friends I have developed through reviewing jazz cd’s at http://www.jazzreview.com, I had befriended a very finicky wood winds expert, Chris Greco who like my review of his first audio CD so much he showed it to his music professor at UCLA, who also praised my poetic allusions to the abstract stuff being played. Chris is both a professor and a gig-musician. He often takes breaks from his scholarly pursuits to conceive, perfect and execute a new CD and then goes back to teaching and research. He is grounded heavily in the European Classical approach to Jazz (something one can see in Benny Goodman, who was one of the first whites to venture into what then was nearly a total coloured territory) or in Stan Kenton whose huge orchestra usually played a curious mixture of jazz and western classical music -he even calls his compsitions ‘Rhapsody In Blue’ and stuff of that sort.

Chris and I doodled with the idea of writing a unique book on Jazz that would treat the matter in this lyrical fashion as are my reviews -though like most non-writers of prolific natures he seemed somewhat resource myopic. I was ready to do all the donkey work, but I was busy keeping the wolf from the door and he got busy discharging his duties as a fresh new father. Things got shelved. I reviewed one more CD for him and he was thrilled, but then my daily life struggles took over with a heavy hand, and the project turned into a castle made out of clouds.

Some day !

Thanks for posting this, most wonderful.

Warmest

Max