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Legendary names. Names that helped create and shape this music we call jazz. I’m deeply blessed because each of these musical legends and others have sat with me on my local New York Cable
TV show in a one -on- one conversation. My show airs every week on NYC’s Public Access TV Station MNN, and is shown worldwide on the internet. (The JaRon Eames show, which debuted in 1994 is still running as this book goes to press in winter 2015). These wonderful souls told my audience and me stories about their lives and their thoughts on the music and life. These are many of the authentic creators of a dying genre of music artistry- a once great music steeped in soul, swing, and gutsy blues, filled with blood, sweat and tears. You used to be able to hear it in every turn of a phrase from the musicians and singers of yesterdays, days I knew as happy sweet sequester days- oh dem days … golden days, days of mad romance and love -as Lady Day sang. Authentic swing, and
black soul, pain, love, hurt, adventure, life lived and deferred When Jazz was young, it seemed to be a vaccine to white racism, something of an internal therapy shared with the world. Blacks created Jazz/Blues in a time so brutal and vile in American history, perhaps just to keep from going completely mad and to do something the oppressor could not do. All of the roots and seasoning of jazz/blues came from Blacks. Which became God’s gift to the world. The white musicians played it, following a tradition, which was set by African American musicians who came before them. And many of them over the years can swing. Sho Nuff. But it was a different time and Jazz wasn’t taught in universities as is today, it was learned in whore houses, juke joints, black ghettos, back alleys, slums, crap games, pool halls. It had a stench of reality. Today’s jazz is very polite and has a sound of gentrification. I for one don’t want jazz to grow, change or evolve. It is what it is, Jazz. One wouldn’t expect the music of Mozart or Rachmaninoff to evolve. Why should the music of Ellington, Basie, Coltrane, and Armstrong evolve? I’m one who strongly believes in presenting old classic material to a new audience which has never been exposed to it… Slow curtain… the end. Please continue to teach it in schools, by all mean and hopefully the realness will come from life experiences over time.
