We Are Still Out Here
Leaving Nice at 9 am.
Fernando, Irene and I stop by the airport to pick up Boss Murphy's late arriving bag as the band flies to the next destination. We play the jazz night of the festival with Ahmad Jamal and Roy Hargrove. It's good to see some actual jazz musicians at a jazz festival.
Some loud non- jazz blaring from the main stage has created the campy atmosphere of a bad casino throughout the city all day and is now bleeding into every song we play. We have to laugh. It's like a 'collateralized debt obligation'. What could possibly be better to sell than nothing, with the name collateral to describe it.
Jazz beat our financial systems to this level of fraudulence with the first generation of 'selling out as artistic statement' some 40 yrs ago. Now it's a way of life. The equation: many of our bankers and traders resell unscrupulous loans using THE LOAN ITSELF as collateral, wreck the world economy and keep their jobs and our money (actually are given more)= Non-Jazz stands in for actual jazz, is easier to sell because it's not, headlines jazz festivals and destroys not just the festival ambience and intimacy, but even the late-night jam sessions with a lot of loud, sad, non-playing assed bullshit.
This non-jazz is celebrated for being 'open' and 'of it's time' and sells more and is more pervasive than the actual music whose name it carries. HaHa. This is 'of it's time', because corruption is of all times. My great grandma Mama Rosie used to say, "A lie will go around the world twice 'fore the truth ever gets started."
She wasn't lying.
Wynton