[Almost Blue] on Chet Baker's Opioid Sonata

 It’s the stroke of midnight, during a stroke of madness; I’m thinking of Chet Baker’s unashamed, unabashed, undeniable free fall into self-destruction, his very own, designed, composed, directed by the rise of his birth, fall of his physical ability, theatrics thoroughly thinned as so even the undeniably flawed may come as they are, feel no intent at attrition, attribute meager prayer, leave as they came; if only to be reassured by a fanciful deity they’ve no belief in, that those very flaws they possess will ensure natural selection would defy its very own process of elimination principle, just to spare the fool.

            Take the lighter to the base of the spoon, wait for the sizzle of the tar, draw in the cc’s needed after the ever-rising tolerance, slip the tourniquet over the brachial, expose the bulging channels in the antecubital space, brace ready, hold fast for the pinch of the needle’s near microscopic puncture, wait for the flash of blood, the indication, now the thumb commences to press the contents, the centuries-old known to man, inside, seconds lapse, just but a few, until euphoria breaks the silence with its impish liege of serotonin and dopamine, the tip of the lagging unfiltered Lucky Strike, weakly held between the lips is lit, trumpet is clasped in clammy palm; Chet Baker is again born.

            An Opioid Sonata is the continuation by an alternative means made a way of life refusing to be lived by any other means. And if by some means, some miraculous occurrence, as the chance of genetics within the human species should arise, Baker’s Sonata rises to that very occasion. Nothing can be mistaken; sadness is no longer a near but distant cousin to melancholia; bliss is estranged, rather shunned, from blessedness. Then and only then, is the canvas for one to paint their own destiny a possibility because all that holds the individual hostage, are those self-impositions that render themselves uncompromising when they’ve overheard the pillow-talk in the late nights, when the orgasm has been weakened to be conquered by the timeless spasm where electrical currents can no longer detect the static of dwindling of neurons.

Dontrell Lovet't

[Fall of the Jazz Season] on Stanley Kubrick's [Jazz is Hot Again]

[Fall of the Jazz Season] Stanley Kubrick's [Jazz is Hot Again]

Even if we have never enjoyed nor heard them, most can recall the names of Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Chet Baker and the likes. What too can be injected into the knowledge you may or may not have known, is the shared opiate dreams they all once frequented in dreams. Heroin itself can be blamed for the fall of the decline of the Jazz season.

Stanley Kubrick's [Jazz is Hot Again] can be seen as an idiom, or rather, step upon the already ailing corpse where Jazz lay in utter agony, cries unheard, aid unwilling to be sent. Whatever the obsequious of reasoning, the power and might of Jazz never saw the 80's and Miles Davis's [Kind of Blue] was the sum of what Jazz was, and still might be again, when life again is lived and books again are read.

The weary musician rests after a set, the set in representation is the era where Jazz rose, spread like an unrestrained, uncontrolled ravish upon Swing and Bebop, staining Europe with the scars of having once been the last great hub of an art then, as now, underrated and misunderstood.

[Flamenco Sketches] 9 Minutes of Discourtesy from the late Miles Davis

 “So What!”

What is this life without worry, without any anxious moments to motivate? Take time to listen to what Miles Davis attempts to revert, not from his discourteous manner what made him so infamous as a man, but from this life, with a musical intelligence that made him so illustrious as an artist.

            The man who knows himself and knows nothing more of this world has too all and every right of claim to know just as much of the world outside of himself as a seasoned traveler who has trekked decades across the globe. And this man, this self-proclaimed aficionado of any and everything, carries not a single second of hesitation to join those ranks of the very few and as every educator who has the right to educate, he has earned such right by a consistency that gave no leniency, never a sabbatical, from learning. If a book is near, it is reared in days, consumed; if there so happen to be music, as Davis himself spills in a “kind of blue” fashion, rarely does he respond to this mood but creates, then shortly after, sets its pace, then, and only then, can he find the cadence in which his steps should follow.

            Call upon the bookkeeper, the one so entangled in the leather-bound covers shelved, adorned in their dark corner, let him then call the astronaut, become the origin of the rumor mill, so that man who has gone out of this atmosphere no longer has to despise his haunting incapability to have never step food upon another planet; surely, he’ll confide next to the woman who shares his bed, the one who has lost her identity when she gave birth to an offspring who has become all she attends, now, she can smile, not due to schadenfreude, but to the knowledge that now she’s alone.