Outtakes from the Unconscious: I Grow Old, and My Bellybutton Grows Cold

The line above is from a Yiddish translation/transliteration of the T.S. Elliot poem, Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock; done by the great Jewish writer Isaac Rosenfeld. **********

Sorry boys and girls, for the first time since I started my Substack column I do not have a new piece this week. Many many many apologies, and please don’t cancel your subscriptions. I have a crazy week ahead, and just didn’t get it together with prep and copying music, etc etc. So here goes:

Tomorrow night April 9 I am at Smalls Jazz Club, 7:30 and 9:00 PM, NYC. Come and see me if you are within spitting distance; mention my name at the door and they’ll say “Good for you; cash or charge?” The band is great: Lewis Porter on piano, Ray Suhy on guitar, Colson Jimenez on bass, Elijah Shiffer on alto sax, me on tenor, and Ethan Kogan on drums. This is truly a brilliant band, with the kind of guts that seem to have vanished from jazz these days.

Thursday, rehearsal with Kogan, Jimenez, me and pianist Matthew Shipp in preparation for:

Friday, recording session with Kogan, Jimenez, me, Shipp and the great Darius Jones on alto saxophone.

All music for all these sessions is written by me. A lot of it is brand new.

Smalls is one of my rare gigs in NYC - well, anywhere. I live near New Haven Connecticut, and there is one major arts festival here which has taunted and rejected me for about 15 years. NYC clubs are largely booked either by young musicians who book other young musicians, or club owners who book mostly younger musicians. For a while I thought I could fight this, but I seem to have reached jazz’s mandatory retirement age. Truthfully, we can outplay anyone in town, but we have been hurt by being ignored by a core of the NYC critics and publicists (Chinen, Smith, Merewitz, etc etc) and yes, I am pissed off, and why should I not be?

I will tell you, after sharing stages and recording studios with Julius Hemphill, Marc Ribot, Roswell Rudd, Doc Cheatham, David Murray, Don Byron, Ken Peplowski, Nels Cline, Matt Shipp, etc (all of whom were my sidemen) I have nothing to apologize for. Let’s face it, I don’t fit the image of what jazz imagines to be its present and future, and you can fill in the blank here to define exactly WHAT image I don’t fit, but I do not discriminate - I work with many younger players -and I refuse to back down and go gently into that stupid night. Not to mention that I have long been an advocate for women jazz musicians, and I have written about the music of the African Diaspora for about 40 years. So, I repeat, I have nothing to apologize for.

I believe I will, next week, have part two of my column on The Origins of Jazz. I just need a little break from work, work, work. I just turned 71, but I don’t feel a day over 80.