Berlin Jazz Festival, 1964
Jan 29 2008


Martin Luther King
once gave a speech
“On The Importance of Jazz”.
I should have known
that the man who broke the back
of segregation,
who moved the people, both white and black
with his trumpet blasts of prose,
was a lover of jazz.
Almost as much as he loved beautiful women.

Because how appropriate
— the music of sharecroppers and slaves
and bodies in motion,
the music conceived
in the miscegenation of New Orleans,
the music that out-lived Jim Crowe.
Where it’s all give-and-take
and improvisation,
passed-on with a nod or a glance.
Where the great soloist preens,
then resumes his seat in the back.
Where you must listen as well as you play,
and the music is never the same.

He was a womanizer, a flawed man,
whom we excuse because of his greatness.
He orated and proclaimed,
and like jazz
made it all sound spontaneous
— his cadences, rising and falling,
his listeners
rapt.

And like all the fabled jazzmen
he remains forever young;
a dead composer, instead of living jazz,
silenced by a one-note gun.