in the fifth grade:
"when, mulishly trying to make sense of opening chapter of "The Brothers Karamazov", I twigged that Alexei and Alyosha were the same guy, ditto Dmitry and Mitya ---ditto maxima, Parker and Bird".
as a music teacher:
my students had "followed me through Armstrong and Swing, and never blinked when we got to Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor, but the volatile 1945 Savoy record of "Koko" unnerved them.
Unnerved them?? The only folks that should be unnerved by Bird are the guys on the bandstand with him. --- Rok
"But where’s the pedagogical fun in that" -- speaking of messing with his students.
I continued to start the class with "Koko" without preface, enjoying the general alarm, ’wtw’
His style of writing was influenced by his reading Satrtre’s "Prisoner of Venice".
"By the 1980s, I had read Johnson, Boswell, Strachey, and Sartre’s longer ’Saint Genet’, and I knew what I wanted to do, if not how to do it."
Rok’s Take:
The ravings of a person full of himself. This is an example of the type of people teaching young people about Jazz.
And this is just the Prelude, to a book about a Jazz player.
Stay tuned.
Cheers
