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My favorite music is Swing.
This genre peaked between '35 and early 40's. Don't stick me to dates, cuz I forgot them years ago.
It arose from the despair of the Great Depression. Unabashedly innocent, clever, and optimistic. Wind instruments figured predominantly. The Universe vibrates celestial strings.
Horn is the call of the wild.
Of all the worlds' instruments - the blowing, rattling and drumming ones come in the most sexy shapes.
The name, Swing, has all sort of musical explanation as to dotted rhythms and shuffle. I don't begin to understand. I am an instinctual musician. Swing is a time-period to me. After the Great Depression to The Second Big War. We all had enough of Sturm und Drang, which means shit and shit in German.
Calamity culls, after which is Creation.
Everybody gets an idea for something at once and society starts humming along again. Lots of money to be made off disaster.
Swing music has baroque exhuberance and informality, so different from the proceeding styles, reflective of the social atmosphere.
American music evolved roughly from Spiritual to Ragtime, Dixie to Swing.
Improvisation, which is my favorite way of working, became essential to the development of Swing, epitomized by solos and scat.
It started as musicians' music, grew into Big Band - ending up sound-tracking Hollywood movies, saturated in strings, the era of the singer.
I watched alot of movies.
Films taught me that many folks were living a lot better than I was. Life could be fun; full of dancing, singing and love.
I had a fantasy life. Back then, we called it daydreaming.
Men abused me in the real world.
Better to love from afar.
The best place for your sex life is in your mind.
Then you can do it with anyone you want, no muss, no fuss, anytime, anywhere.
My first love was Sidney Bechet; A fantastic Horn player.
I met him once on the 20th Century, in the club car, on my way to Chicago.
Just a teenager I was; shy and ballsy, no sense of boundary whatever. A combination bound to get me in trouble.
I lucky not to be good looking in any shape or stretch. Only victimizers and rescuers paid any attention.
I knew how to be anonymous if I wanted to.
Lo, when my drinking boots was on; I shouldered up to center stage.
At such moments, a very funny drunk.
I feasted on rapt attention. Then went right for the jugular.
My encore often landed me in the street. Walking away, best I could - with dim hope of getting somewhere safe before morning.
The night I met Sidney, I had no money and didn't feel like hustling.
I was on my way out of town for the first time in my short life to get my dead mamas' things. My father, who'd I never seen before then, give me skoots for a ticket but nothing more.
I was dazed, numb - suffering from the post trauma symptoms.
Heard about that on Oprah.
On the BBC they said, the DNA, which is all our personal information, is changed by everything; from orgasm to catastrophe.
Like that rubics-cube; combinations re-calibrating from sickness to health.
By putting our minds to getting them codes in a better order, we might be able to cure ourselves of disease, body and soul.
In those days, the enlightenment of this knowledge was beyond my imagining.
Life stunk - didn't trust anybody as far as I could piss.
This made me defensively offensive, and vice in reverse.
Right off, the drummer comes over.
That's another story……
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Swing music, ah yes, and the era that danced to it.
Fred Astaire was my second unrequired love. I fell for his genius. Perfect timing, defiance of gravity, and androgyny; which mean beyond sex in my connotation.
He was simply perfection.
Today is my birthday, or so I imagine.
Adding and subtracting has confused me.
In celebration, the lady I live with put together a Fred Astaire retrospective. Silk Stockings and You'll Never Be Rich.
They bring back memory to me more clearly than months of hypnosis ever could.
Swing is viscerally embedded in my psyche.
Youth re-lived in the comfort of my own chaise.
What a tale it is.
Love,
LuRain
x
-lp©07-