Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames "Yeh Yeh" (1964)
Yeh Yeh
My life has been like jazz. Maybe a jazz symphony in like a hundred movements or more. Themes and variations. Music of the mind, body, heart, and soul. My life in music. The music of my life.
Sometimes the melody is obvious. You probably recognize it and might even hum along. We're on the same track and you get it and I get it and it's like an old-fashioned sing-along. Then there've been those times when I've gone off on some kind of improv. I get in a groove and I'll be boppin' along or maybe just lolling low and mellow. But I'm getting there. Somewhere. Maybe you're there or maybe I've left you lost far behind.
I don't always understand jazz. Maybe it's not meant to be understood, but to be heard, felt and wondered about with wonder and amused bemusement. There are not necessarily any rules to jazz other than what rules might be putatively presumed by people who pretend to know all there is about music. I think they're wrong. Jazz can sound like many things. And sometimes like nothing yet imagined. Imagination set free, run wild.
My life seems imagined at times when I look backward. There are stories there. Stories to be told and some to be held hostage in the secret places of my memory. If I unleash my mind's treasury of memory, should it come in chapters, in books, in suspicious furtive looks. This canister of thunken thoughts that I call my brain: Will it safely retain the stories until they are lain down in written words that dance, that flow, that stumble across the paper or across my field of vision on my eyestrain computer screen?
"Hurry, you've got a solo coming," the bandleader says, which is ironic since I am the leader of my band. Play well and stay in tune unless discordant notes are called for. Experimentation in the writing I do is sometimes my playful toil. It's jazz after all, this thing that's my life.
Accentuate the positive and play the sad parts sweet and low. Slow down on the reflective passages and speed through the mundanities of the rush rush daily grind of life's same story. It's a jazz life told in syncopations and synchronicities. Tick tock, the clock counts the rhythm and time makes the rhyme.
A good life has been lived and I aim to stay on the positive track. Yeh, yeh. Stay away from the downers. Yeh, yeh. Keep on gigging the good times in jazz. Yeh, yeh.
Do you tend to keep a positive outlook on life? Have you had a tendency to be negative in your life? Do you ever experiment with free-form writing styles or stream of consciousness?
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