Vernacular

The center for vernacular music at Texas Tech defines it as music transmitted orally / aurally. But is this really true? Is big band music played with charts vernacular?

Earl Fatha Hines Trio

Comping Rhythms

I have wondered why I can't play comping rhythms on the piano. The answer is very simple: I haven't practice them enough in conscious way to try to nail them. I've practice other things but not that. It's obvious that to do something, you must do it, not wonder why you can't.

Use the poem to tell you how to read it

Eliot

 I have become  somewhat less attached to my own opinions recently. Someone on Facebook was just dssing TS Eliot and I found that I just didn’t care to disagree or agree for that matter to the extent that I agree with this opinion. It’s just hard to care about them as much as I used to. Even with Mary Oliver I’ve realized that people just want to with identify with an ideal self with a certain kind and that’s what they get out of her. Hell I don’t even care whether you like Lorca anymore.

Shirley Horn Trio Live at The Village Vanguard 1991

Kelly

At a used bookstore in Moab, Utah, last summer I got a 1st edition of Robert Kelly's work, The Cities.  It seemed like something I should have, a short prose fiction of 65 pages without much of a plot. Kelly is not my favorite poet, but I was somehow moved to get it. It was published in 71, and has some kinship with Calvino's Invisible Cities, published a year later as it would happen. It doesn't have the Oulipean structure of Calvino's book, but both consist of fanciful descriptions of imaginary cities mostly in an imaginary Asia. The resemblance is striking, and of course I am not the first to notice it, as a quick google search reveals. Neither book was inspired by the other, though Borges might lurk behind both.

I am often more interested in the "poets' novels" than in novelists' novels. Calvino's, of course, is much better known. Kelly's overdoes the whimsy a bit, but it stands up well to its Italian counterpart, and I like the two books for similar reasons.