Jazz Saxophone Quotes

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I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn't resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes. After that I liked jazz music. Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way. I used to not like God because God didn't resolve. But that was before any of this happened.
Donald Miller (Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality (Paperback))
I am the twentieth century. I am the ragtime and the tango; sans-serif, clean geometry. I am the virgin's-hair whip and the cunningly detailed shackles of decadent passion. I am every lonely railway station in every capital of Europe. I am the Street, the fanciless buildings of government. the cafe-dansant, the clockwork figure, the jazz saxophone, the tourist-lady's hairpiece, the fairy's rubber breasts, the travelling clock which always tells the wrong time and chimes in different keys. I am the dead palm tree, the Negro's dancing pumps, the dried fountain after tourist season. I am all the appurtenances of night.
Thomas Pynchon (V.)
At the edge of madness you howl diamonds and pearls.
Aberjhani (Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry)
I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn't resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes.
Donald Miller (Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality (Paperback))
Don't play the saxophone, let the saxophone play you.
Charlie Parker (Charlie Parker - Jazz Masters Series)
Ducks quack like a cacophony of saxophone. At least, they sound like how I play jazz. If you're looking for an elevator musician, I am FOR HIRE.
Jarod Kintz (BearPaw Duck And Meme Farm presents: Two Ducks Brawling Is A Pre-Pillow Fight)
Did you even know the saxophone could make duck farm noises? You know I'm a genius jazz performer because it sounds like I haven't played an instrument ever before.
Jarod Kintz (BearPaw Duck And Meme Farm presents: Two Ducks Brawling Is A Pre-Pillow Fight)
It's hard to explain what happens when jazz and punk fuse with a violin twist but it works. Probably because Anson Choi takes off his shirt while he's playing the saxophone. Whoever's not chatting up a Cadet or a girl from Darling House or playing chess with the guys is watching the band. I turn into a groupie.
Melina Marchetta (On the Jellicoe Road)
There are quiet places also in the mind,” he said, meditatively. “But we build bandstand and factories on them. Deliberately—to put a stop to the quietness. We don’t like the quietness. All the thoughts, all the preoccupation in my head—round and round continually.” He made a circular motion with his hands. “And the jazz bands, the music hall songs, the boys shouting the news. What’s it all for? To put an end to the quiet, to break it up and disperse it, to pretend at any cost it isn’t there. Ah, but it is, it is there, in spite of everything, at the back of everything. Lying awake at night, sometimes—not restlessly, but serenely, waiting for sleep—the quiet re-establishes itself, piece by piece; all the broken bits, all the fragments of it we’ve been so busily dispersing all day long. It re-establishes itself, an inward quiet, like this outward quiet of grass and trees. It fills one, it grows –a crystal quiet, a growing expanding crystal. It grows, it becomes more perfect; it is beautiful and terrifying, yes, terrifying, as well as beautiful. For one’s alone in the crystal and there’s no support from outside, there’s nothing external and important, nothing external and trivial to pull oneself up by or to stand up, superiorly, contemptuously, so that one can look down. There’s nothing to laugh at or feel enthusiastic about. But the quiet grows and grows. Beautifully and unbearably. And at last you are conscious of something approaching; it is almost a faint sound of footsteps. Something inexpressibly lovely and wonderful advances through the crystal, nearer, nearer. And oh, inexpressibly terrifying. For if it were to touch you, if it were to seize and engulf you, you’d die; all the regular habitual, daily part of you would die. There would be and end of bandstands and whizzing factories, and one would have to begin living arduously in the quiet, arduously n some strange unheard-of manner. Nearer, nearer come the steps; but one can’t face the advancing thing. One daren’t. It’s too terrifying; it’s too painful to die. Quickly, before it is too late, start the factory wheels, bang the drum, blow up the saxophone. Think of the women you’d like to sleep with, the schemes for making money, the gossip about your friends, the last outrage of the politicians. Anything for a diversion. Break the silence, smash the crystal to pieces. There, it lies in bits; it is easily broken, hard to build up and easy to break. And the steps? Ah, those have taken themselves off, double quick. Double quick, they were gone at the flawing of the crystal. And by this time the lovely and terrifying thing is three infinities away, at least. And you lie tranquilly on your bed, thinking of what you’d do if you had ten thousand pounds and of all the fornications you’ll never commit.
Aldous Huxley
If you like how jazz music sounds, you'll love how it tastes. My duck soup now comes in trumpet-solo flavor. You don't have to curl weights, because this is already pure Armstrong.
Jarod Kintz (Music is fluid, and my saxophone overflows when my ducks slosh in the sounds I make in elevators.)
Sometimes my duck soup tastes like melted saxophone jazz, only more metallic. That's why I spice it up with trombone solo in liquid format.
Jarod Kintz (Music is fluid, and my saxophone overflows when my ducks slosh in the sounds I make in elevators.)
Trumpets don’t sound like saxophones anymore. Think about that next time you try to farm some ducks inside a can of jazz.
Jarod Kintz (One Out of Ten Dentists Agree: This Book Helps Fight Gingivitis. Maybe Tomorrow I’ll Ask Nine More Dentists.: A BearPaw Duck And Meme Farm Production)
How much saxophone does it take to play the blues? I’m asking because I’m trying to fill up my pool using only blues, due to the fact that my ducks will only swim in sad jazz.
Jarod Kintz (BearPaw Duck And Meme Farm presents: Two Ducks Brawling Is A Pre-Pillow Fight)
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death, and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America’s naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.
Allen Ginsberg (Collected Poems, 1947-1997)
She realized now that she had been expecting old-fashioned instruments – pipes, fifes, fiddles and tinny drums. Instead there came the cocksure, brassy warble of a saxophone, the blare of a cornet and the squeak and trill of a clarinet being made to work for its living. Not-Triss had heard jazz with neatly wiped shoes and jazz with gritty soles and a grin. And this too was jazz, but barefoot on the grass and blank-eyed with bliss, its musical strands irregular as wind gusts and unending as ivy vines.
Frances Hardinge (Cuckoo Song)
My point is, I’m a fan of music, but jazz isn’t music. Jazz is some cockwomble in a beret, wanking himself off with a saxophone.”“Sax-a-phobic, are we?”“Don’t come that with me, Clarence from the E Street Band is a legend, but he’s not doing a twenty-minute atonal arse-clenching solo that sounds like someone sodomising a goose.
Caimh McDonnell (Angels in the Moonlight)
If you asked what my favorite music is, I'd say the kind you'd hear while shopping for groceries on a Tuesday afternoon. That's just the kind of romantic I am. But when working around my ducks, I'm all business, like smooth jazz in a crowded elevator.
Jarod Kintz (Music is fluid, and my saxophone overflows when my ducks slosh in the sounds I make in elevators.)
People say jazz puts them to sleep. As a master saxophone player, one who sounds like a duck quacking, I don't know if they're trying to insult me or insinuating they found a holistic solution to their insomnia. My music NOW comes in water-soluble tablets to be taken before bed.
Jarod Kintz (One Out of Ten Dentists Agree: This Book Helps Fight Gingivitis. Maybe Tomorrow I’ll Ask Nine More Dentists.: A BearPaw Duck And Meme Farm Production)
If you dig deep enough inside you, you'll find music. At BearPaw Duck Farm I hired an excavator, and I unearthed saxophone jazz. Taste the flavor for ONLY $3.33 per song.
Jarod Kintz (BearPaw Duck And Meme Farm presents: Two Ducks Brawling Is A Pre-Pillow Fight)
My ducks have trumpets for beaks. I do NOT farm the way liquid jazz would fill up an elevator and turn it into an ascending pond.
Jarod Kintz (Powdered Saxophone Music)
The voluptuous chords of the wedding march done in blasphemous syncopation issued in a delirious blend from the trombones and saxophones--and
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tales of the Jazz Age)
New Year’s Eve was a night for jazz, and the saxophone could cut you in half if you were alone.
Michael Connelly (The Black Ice (Harry Bosch, #2; Harry Bosch Universe, #2))
Ducks splash in water like an aqua saxophone swims in jazz. Elevators have space that needs to be filled with anti-silence, and I have a surplus of liquid music you can purchase or lease.
Jarod Kintz (Powdered Saxophone Music)
Cats make cuddly pets, but you can’t take them for walks. That’s why I love my pet waterfall, which also makes the splashiest snuggles. However, neither cats nor waterfalls lay eggs, which makes ducks the superior jazz musicians.
Jarod Kintz (Music is fluid, and my saxophone overflows when my ducks slosh in the sounds I make in elevators.)
The conversation swings from the brothers Bush to the war in Iraq to the emerging rights of Muslim women to postfeminism to current cinema—Mexican, American, European (Giorgio goes spasmodically mad over Bu-ñuel), and back to Mexican again—to the relative superiority of shrimp over any other kind of taco to the excellence of Ana’s paella, to Ana’s childhood, then to Jimena’s, to the changing role of motherhood in a postindustrial world, to sculpture, then painting, then poetry, then baseball, then Jimena’s inexplicable (to Pablo) fondness for American football (she’s a Dallas Cowboys fan) over real (to Pablo) fútbol, to his admittedly adolescent passion for the game, to the trials of adolescence itself and revelations over the loss of virginity and why we refer to it as a loss and now Óscar and Tomás, arms over each other’s shoulders, are chanting poetry and then Giorgio picks up a guitar and starts to play and this is the Juárez that Pablo loves, this is the city of his soul—the poetry, the passionate discussions (Ana makes her counterpoints jabbing her cigarette like a foil; Jimena’s words flow like a gentle wave across beach sand, washing away the words before; Giorgio trills a jazz saxophone while Pablo plays bass—they are a jazz combo of argument), the ideas flowing with the wine and beer, the lilting music in a black night, this is the gentle heartbeat of the Mexico that he adores, the laughter, the subtle perfume of desert flowers that grow in alleys alongside garbage, and now everyone is singing— México, está muy contento, Dando gracias a millares… —and this is his life—this is his city, these are his friends, his beloved friends, these people, and if this is all that there is or will be, it is enough for him, his world, his life, his city, his people, his sad beautiful Juárez… —empezaré de Durango, Torreón y Ciudad de
Don Winslow (The Cartel (Power of the Dog #2))
My point is, I’m a fan of music, but jazz isn’t music. Jazz is some cockwomble in a beret, wanking himself off with a saxophone.” “Sax-a-phobic, are we?” “Don’t come that with me, Clarence from the E Street Band is a legend, but he’s not doing a twenty-minute atonal arse-clenching solo that sounds like someone sodomising a goose.
Caimh McDonnell (Angels in the Moonlight (Dublin Trilogy publication order, #3; Dublin Trilogy chronological order, #1))
In Notes of a Jazz Survivor, a documentary about his drug- and jail-ravaged life, Art Pepper and his wife, Laurie, listen to his recording of “Our Song.” The entry of the saxophone, Pepper explains, is “like the most subtle hello.” Ramamani’s voice is the response to this call; it is Laurie’s hand reaching for her husband’s as they listen. Ramamani tells us not only what it is like to love, but also what it is like to be loved. When I hear her voice, darling, I feel your hand in mine.
Geoff Dyer (Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews)
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head, the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death, and rose incarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio with the absolute heart of the poem butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.
Allen Ginsberg (Howl and Other Poems)
After a few sips, he picked up his sax and started jamming with the storm. Most days, Rivers meditated twice, when he awoke and again in the evening before writing or reading. But he still found a special relaxation and renewal in solitary playing. Contemplation through music was different from other reflective experiences, in part, because his visual associations were set free to mutate, morph, and meander; while the other senses were occupied in fierce concentraction on breathing, blowing, fingering, and listening. Within the flow of this activity, his awareness would land in different states of consciousness, different phases of time, and easily moved between revisualization of experience and its creation. The playing dislodged hidden feelings, primed him for recognizing the habitually denied, sheathed the sword of lnaguage, and loosened the shield and armor of his character. His contemplative playing purged him of worrisome realities, smelted off from his center the dross of eperience, and on those rare and cherished days, left only the refinement of flickering fire. Although he was more aware of his emotions, the music and dance of thought kept them at arm’s length, Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquility.” . . . As he played, his mind’s eye became the fisher’s bobber, guided by a line of sound around the driftwood of thought, the residue of his life, which materialized from nowhere and sank back into nothingness without his weaving them into any insistent pattern of order and understanding. He was momentarily freed of logical sequencing, the press of premises, the psycho-logic of primary process, the throb of Thought pulsing in and through him, and in billions of mind/bodies, now and throughout time, belonging each to each, to none, to no one, to Everyone, rocking back and forward in an ebb and flow of wishes, fears, and goals. He fished free of desire, illusion, or multiplicity; distant from the hook, the fisher, the fish; but tethered still on the long line of music, until it snagged on an immovable object, some unquestioned assumption, or perhaps a stray consummation, a catch in the flow of creation and wonder.
Jay Richards (Silhouette of Virtue)
We got into the car. It was my first time. The car was spotless and I liked its smell, the smell of old leather and old steel. When, two minutes later, we reached my building, I began to feel sorry for him but didn't know what to say or how to help. I was too shy to ask him to open up and tell me about the cloud that had cast such a gloomy shadow over him. Instead I suggested something so flatfooted that I'm surprised it did not irritate him even more than he was already. I told him to head home and sleep the whole thing off, as if sleep could free a castaway from his island. No, he needed to work, he replied. Besides, her was looking forward to driving at night. He loved cruising Boston by night. He loved jazz, old jazz, Gene Ammons — especially played en sardine, with the volume really low — as the tenor sax invariably blocked all bad feelings and made him think of romance and of sultry summer nights where a woman dances cheek to cheek with you to the saxophone's prolonged lyrical strains that made you want love even after you'd stopped trusting love exists on this planet.
André Aciman (Harvard Square)
Now there is this song on the saxophone. And I am ashamed. A glorious little suffering has just been born, an exemplary suffering. Four notes on the saxophone. They come and go, they seem to say: You must be like us, suffer in rhythm. All right! Naturally, I’d like to suffer that way, in rhythm, without complacence, without self-pity, with an arid purity. But is it my fault if the beer at the bottom of my glass is warm, if there are brown stains on the mirror, if I am not wanted, if the sincerest of my sufferings drags and weighs, with too much flesh and the skin too wide at the same time, like a sea-elephant, with bulging eyes, damp and touching and yet so ugly? No, they certainly can’t tell me it’s compassionate—this little jewelled pain which spins around above the record and dazzles me. Not even ironic: it spins gaily, completely self-absorbed; like a scythe it has cut through the drab intimacy of the world and now it spins and all of us, Madeleine, the thick-set man, the patronne, myself, the tables, benches, the stained mirror, the glasses, all of us abandon ourselves to existence, because we were among ourselves, only among ourselves, it has taken us unawares, in the disorder, the day to day drift: I am ashamed for myself and for what exists in front of it. It does not exist. It is even an annoyance; if I were to get up and rip this record from the table which holds it, if I were to break it in two, I wouldn’t reach it. It is beyond—always beyond something, a voice, a violin note. Through layers and layers of existence, it veils itself, thin and firm, and when you want to seize it, you find only existants, you butt against existants devoid of sense. It is behind them: I don’t even hear it, I hear sounds, vibrations in the air which unveil it. It does not exist because it has nothing superfluous: it is all the rest which in relation to it is superfluous. It is. And I, too, wanted to be. That is all I wanted; this is the last word. At the bottom of all these attempts which seemed without bonds, I find the same desire again: to drive existence out of me, to rid the passing moments of their fat, to twist them, dry them, purify myself, harden myself, to give back at last the sharp, precise sound of a saxophone note. That could even make an apologue: there was a poor man who got in the wrong world. He existed, like other people, in a world of public parks, bistros, commercial cities and he wanted to persuade himself that he was living somewhere else, behind the canvas of paintings, with the doges of Tintoretto, with Gozzoli’s Florentines, behind the pages of books, with Fabrizio del Dongo and Julien Sorel, behind the phonograph records, with the long dry laments of jazz. And then, after making a complete fool of himself, he understood, he opened his eyes, he saw that it was a misdeal: he was in a bistro, just in front of a glass of warm beer. He stayed overwhelmed on the bench; he thought: I am a fool. And at that very moment, on the other side of existence, in this other world which you can see in the distance, but without ever approaching it, a little melody began to sing and dance: “You must be like me; you must suffer in rhythm.
Jean-Paul Sartre (Nausea)
Inside McClintic Sphere was swinging his ass off. His skin was hard, as if it were part of the skull: every vein and whisker on that head stood out sharp and clear under the green baby spot: you could see the twin lines running down from either side of his lower lip, etched in by the force of his embouchure, looking like extensions of his mustache. He blew a hand-carved ivory alto saxophone with a 4 ½ reed and the sound was like nothing any of them had heard before. The usual divisions prevailed: collegians did not dig, and left after an average of 1 ½ sets. Personnel from other groups, either with a night off or taking a long break from somewhere crosstown or uptown, listened hard, trying to dig. 'I am still thinking,’ they would say if you asked. People at the bar all looked as if they did dig in the sense of understand, approve of, empathize with: but this was probably only because people who prefer to stand at the bar have, universally, an inscrutable look… …The group on the stand had no piano: it was bass, drums, McClintic and a boy he had found in the Ozarks who blew a natural horn in F. The drummer was a group man who avoided pyrotechnics, which may have irritated the college crowd. The bass was small and evil-looking and his eyes were yellow with pinpoints in the center. He talked to his instrument. It was taller than he was and didn’t seem to be listening. Horn and alto together favored sixths and minor fourths and when this happened it was like a knife fight or tug of war: the sound was consonant but as if cross-purposes were in the air. The solos of McClintic Sphere were something else. There were people around, mostly those who wrote for Downbeat magazine or the liners of LP records, who seemed to feel he played disregarding chord changes completely. They talked a great deal about soul and the anti-intellectual and the rising rhythms of African nationalism. It was a new conception, they said, and some of them said: Bird Lives. Since the soul of Charlie Parker had dissolved away into a hostile March wind nearly a year before, a great deal of nonsense had been spoken and written about him. Much more was to come, some is still being written today. He was the greatest alto on the postwar scene and when he left it some curious negative will–a reluctance and refusal to believe in the final, cold fact–possessed the lunatic fringe to scrawl in every subway station, on sidewalks, in pissoirs, the denial: Bird Lives. So that among the people in the V-Note that night were, at a conservative estimate, a dreamy 10 per cent who had not got the word, and saw in McClintic Sphere a kind of reincarnation.
Thomas Pynchon (Inherent Vice)
Joy Harjo, who’s a Creek Indian poet and a jazz musician, was once asked by a white reporter why she played the saxophone, since it’s not an Indian instrument. And she said: “It is when I play it.” If “I’m in the reservation of my mind” is the question, then “It is when I play it” is the answer. It’s an internal condition, and we spend too much time defining ourselves by the external. There is always this implication that in order to be Indian you must be from the reservation. It’s not true and it’s a notion that limits us—it forces us to define our entire life experiences in terms of how they do or do not relate to the reservation.
Joe Fassler (Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process)
It was decaffeinated jazz he sent to WJZ via Western Union lines from the Hotel Pennsylvania. A distant echo of New Orleans, yet it spoke to listeners.” The ’20s style was lively, rich with saxophone and violin and well-sprinkled with novelty tunes. Lopez was instantly identified by his theme, Nola, given a dexterous workout on the Lopez keyboard. Whiteman had Gershwin: his Rhapsody in Blue concert at Aeolian Hall on Feb. 12, 1924, established his reputation. And though Whiteman was slow to find his way into radio, he was a major force in band music of the ’20s. George Olsen was a master of popular music: his 1925 recording Who was a bestseller, followed by such period hits as The Varsity Drag, Because My Baby Don’t Mean Maybe Now, and Doin’ the Raccoon, a testament to the national passion for fur coats.
John Dunning (On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio)
They were the younger guys playing at the end of the Swing Era, just playing their version of it. It became known as bebop, which sounds esoteric, but it was really just an offshoot of swing music.” That offshoot, however, almost instantly changed jazz music’s identity, advancing it from a danceable idiom played with the audience’s casual listening pleasure in mind to a more personal and cerebral modern music.
Michael Segell (The Devil's Horn: The Story of the Saxophone, from Noisy Novelty to King of Cool)
And where jazz music was concerned, there was a saying, Segodnia on igraet dzhaz, a zavtra rodinu prodast: Today you play jazz, tomorrow you betray the motherland.” Igor,
Michael Segell (The Devil's Horn: The Story of the Saxophone, from Noisy Novelty to King of Cool)
All his life he believed he was slumming toward something good. That there was meaning. In the youth shelter, the foster homes, the Army and Vietnam, and now the department, he always carried the feeling that he was struggling toward some kind of resolution and knowledge of purpose. That there was something good in him or about him. It was the waiting that was so hard. The waiting often left a hollow feeling in his soul. And he believed people could see this, that they knew when they looked at him that he was empty. He had learned to fill that hollowness with isolation and work. Sometimes drink and the sound of the jazz saxophone. But never people. He never let anyone in all the way.
Michael Connelly (The Black Ice (Harry Bosch, #2; Harry Bosch Universe, #2))
In an interview with Charlie Parker, another jazz saxophone legend, Paul Desmond, asked Parker if his fantastic ability came as a result of practice, or from performing a lot. Parker said, I can’t see where there’s anything fantastic about it at all. I put quite a bit of study into the horn, that’s true…. I used to put in at least from 11 to 15 hours a day…over three or four years.[1]
Jonathan Harnum (The Practice of Practice)
And I, too, wanted to be. That is all I wanted; this is the last word. At the bottom of all these attempts which seemed without bonds, I find the same desire again: to drive existence out of me, to rid the passing moments of their fat, to twist them, dry them, purify myself, harden myself, to give back at last the sharp, precise sound of a saxophone note. That could even make an apologue: there was a poor man who got in the wrong world. He existed, like other people, in a world of public parks, bistros, commercial cities and he wanted to persuade himself that he was living somewhere else, behind the canvas of paintings, with the doges of Tintoretto, with Gozzoli's Florentines, behind the pages of books, with Fabrico del Dongo and Julien Sorel, behind the phonograph records, with the long dry laments of jazz. And then, after making a complete fool of himself, he understood, he opened his eyes, he saw that it was a misdeal: he was in a bistro, just in front of a glass of warm beer. He stayed overwhelmed on the bench; he thought: I am a fool. And at that very moment, on the other side of existence, in this other world which you can see in the distance, but without ever approaching it, a little melody began to sing and dance: "You must be like me; you must suffer in rhythm." The voice sings: "Some of these days You'll miss me, honey".
Jean-Paul Sartre
I stop in front of a saxophone player performing with a small group of people surrounding him. “Do you like jazz?” I ask Bee from my shoulder as I snap my fingers and wiggle my hips. An older woman gives me a strange look before taking a step away from me.
G.M. Fairy (Bad Beehavior)
There are quiet places also in the mind,' he said, meditatively. 'But we build bandstands and factories on them. Deliberately - to put a stop to the quietness. We don't like the quietness. All the thoughts, all the preoccupations in my head - round and round, continually.' He made a circular motion with his hand. 'And the jazz bands, the music hall songs, the boys shouting the news. What's it for, what's it all for? To put an end to the quiet, to break it up and disperse it, to pretend at any cost is isn't there. Ah, but is is, it is there, in spite of everything, at the back of everything. Lying awake at night, sometimes - not restlessly, but serenely, waiting for sleep - the quiet reestablishes itself, piece by piece; all the broken bits, all the fragments of it we've been so busily dispersing all day long. It re-establishes itself, an inward quiet, like this outward quiet of grass and trees. It fills one, it grows - a crystal quiet, a growing expanding crystal. It grows, it becomes more perfect; it is beautiful and terrifying, yes, terrifying, as well as beautiful. For one's alone in the crystal and there 's no support from outside, there's nothing external and important, nothing external and trivial to pull oneself up by or stand on, superiorly, contemptuously, so that one can look down. There's nothing to laugh at or feel enthusiastic about. But the quiet grows and grows. Beautifully and unbearably. And at last you are conscious of something approaching; it is almost a faint sound of footsteps. Something inexpressibly lovely and wonderful advances through the crystal, nearer, nearer. And, oh, inexpressibly terrifying. For if it were to touch you, if it were to seize and engulf you, you'd die; all the regular, habitual, daily part of you would die. There would be an end of bandstands and whizzing factories, and one would have to begin living arduously in the quiet, arduously in some strange unheard-of manner. Nearer, nearer come the steps; but one can't face the advancing thing. One daren't. It's too terrifying, it's too painful to die. Quickly, before it is too late, start the factory wheels, bang the drum, blow the saxophone. Think of the women you'dl like to sleep with, the schemes for making money, the gossip about your friends, the last outrage of the politicians. Anything for a diversion. Break the silence, smash the crystal to pieces. There, it lies in bits; it is easily broken, hard to build up and easy to break. And the steps? Ah, those have taken themselves off, double quick. Double quick, they were gone at the first flawing of the crystal. And by this time the lovely and terrifying thing is three infinities away, at least. And you lie tranquilly on your bed, thinking of what you'd do if you had ten thousand pounds and of all the fornications you'll never commit.' He thought of Rosie's pink underwear.
Aldous Huxley (Antic Hay)
I gravitated toward music that invoked loneliness in me. Jazz. More to the point, the sound of the jazz saxophone. I started with the essentials—John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Wayne Shorter
Michael Connelly (Hieronymus Bosch: A Mysterious Profile (Mysterious Profiles))
Whether it is labeled as sacred versus profane, gospel versus blues, God’s work versus the devil’s music, the classic (and still pervasive) African-American paradigm that holds church matters and popular culture in diametric opposition, that separates true spirituality from such music as jazz, held no sway in Coltrane’s self-erected system. How could it, when he had found salvation through a saxophone? With the clarity of youth, he divined a common source—and common goal—to both pursuits.
Ashley Kahn (A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane's Signature Album)
Brian Wecht was born in New Jersey to an interfaith couple. His father ran an army-navy store and enjoyed going to Vegas to see Elvis and Sinatra. Brian loved school, especially math and science, but also loved jazz saxophone and piano. “A large part of my identity came from being a fat kid who was bullied through most of my childhood,” he said. “I remember just not having many friends.” Brian double majored in math and music and chose graduate school in jazz composition. But when his girlfriend moved to San Diego, he quit and enrolled in a theoretical physics program at UC San Diego. Six months later the relationship failed; six years later he earned a PhD. When he solved a longstanding open problem in string theory (“the exact superconformal R-symmetry of any 4d SCFT”), Brian became an international star and earned fellowships at MIT, Harvard, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He secured an unimaginable job: a lifetime professorship in particle physics in London. He was set. Except. Brian never lost his interest in music. He met his wife while playing for an improv troupe. He started a comedic band with his friend Dan called Ninja Sex Party. “I was always afraid it was going to bite me in the ass during faculty interviews because I dressed up like a ninja and sang about dicks and boning.” By the time Brian got to London, the band’s videos were viral sensations. He cried on the phone with Dan: Should they try to turn their side gig into a living? Brian and his wife had a daughter by this point. The choice seemed absurd. “You can’t quit,” his physics adviser said. “You’re the only one of my students who got a job.” His wife was supportive but said she couldn’t decide for him. If I take the leap and it fails, he thought, I may be fucking up my entire future for this weird YouTube career. He also thought, If I don’t jump, I’ll look back when I’m seventy and say, “Fuck, I should have tried.” Finally, he decided: “I’d rather live with fear and failure than safety and regret.” Brian and his family moved to Los Angeles. When the band’s next album was released, Ninja Sex Party was featured on Conan, profiled in the Washington Post, and reached the top twenty-five on the Billboard charts. They went on a sold-out tour across the country, including the Brooklyn Bowl in Las Vegas.
Bruce Feiler (Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age)
She realized now that she had been expecting old-fashioned instruments – pipes, fifes, fiddles and tinny drums. Instead there came the cocksure, brassy warble of a saxophone, the blare of a cornet and the squeak and trill of a clarinet being made to work for its living. Not-Triss had heard jazz with neatly wiped shoes and jazz with gritty soles and a grin. And this too was jazz, but barefoot on the grass and blank-eyed with bliss, its musical strands irregular as wind gusts and unending as ivy vines.
Anonymous