Free Entry 1, Week 2

I give whatever I can to those blessed bastard children of Jesus, Muhammad, and Moses; serenating the concrete ears of non church-masque-temple goers, the screams of iron horses running everywhere and nowhere. The good ones moves across the platform to catch the next train, and the next station hoping their odds increase a little bit more, but this isn’t dice its life and strings of bad luck are choices you have to live with. I usually look for saxophonists and trumpet players, paint bucket drumming has become the latest hype and since most of the artists, if that’s what we can all them, are no better than my Kitchen Floor concerts I avoid them. When I hear the call of Bird and the Vertigo of Dizzy, blood rushes to every inch of my bio-chemical infrastructure like race riots in the 60’s burning every inch of a city. I once met a trombone player on my way to Carroll Gardens, to blaze with my friend Jonah; I dropped fifty cents in his case, thinking he was playing for some money. When the F-train came instead of the player staying he came aboard the train with me, which was a first for me. I know had an opportunity to talk to an Archangel in training, I was so thirsty to learn more about jazz I decided to ask him the song he played. Here this white man I knew nothing about, but the feeling of wanting to know more, to grasp what he could grasp, broke all barriers. He told me the song was Summertime by Miles Davis from the play Porgy and Bess or the musical. I was surprised he was playing a Davis impression because it did not sound like anything I had heard before. He told me he went to Oberlin, and was now a music teacher, I gave the guy props until I went to take a pen out of my bag and the book I was reading at the time “Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone” by James Baldwin was confused for Invisible Man. This guy so profound in Jazz knowledge didn’t know the difference between Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, so how did you really know the difference between Davis and Byrd? Me and the black guy next to us? He probably couldn’t tell on a dark night, but he got off the stop before me and I was out of fifty cents to give to the trumpet player at my stop.