MILES DAVIS
Troop leader
of the Hip Patrol.
Change, like a tapeworm,
Eating out your gut.
ORNETTE COLEMAN
Ornette, the weird school kid. Intuited calculus. Flunked math.
Sneaked into the Band Room during English and tried to wrestle sounds from oboes and cellos.
Read comic books and slept with his homeroom teacher.
Liked his marching band uniform; lost a different piece of it every week.
Chess club.
Ornette, the weird school kid.
Bad reader. Simian line on his palm.
Juice fasts. Kools.
Brass, bow and reed junkie.
Hears one sound and devises a thousand ways to recreate it.
LESTER BOWIE
Man looks like an Algerian pharmacist:
Lucky Lester mixes the decoction,
Grinds the gris-gris.
And don’t worry about trying to find some damn philosopher’s stone.
Toys with the keys to the recombinant jazz gene lab. Sweeps up after closing and snorts what he finds on the floor.
Virus wrangler, germ dancer, spore fucker.
ARCHIE SHEPP
Hey man, you look like some kind of fucking duck. You hear me? Or some goose. Yea, some shit like that. You didn’t learn from no book. No, no book tell you how to make a face like a damn duck.
You blow that thing loud, right? You make some sounds. You blow tenor.
Allright.
You make some sounds like something inside that horn tryin’ to get out;
Reach up the neck of that horn and grab you by the throat;
squeeze you till you play what IT wants to hear.
Maybe that’s why you make that damn duck face.
