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[23] "round about midnight" |
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We Just Change The Beat
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Wednesday, 28 December 2005 09:34 |
#14
round about midnight
for linda jones
there is a point
between night & day
where it all comes clear
& bright, a new beginning
where yesterday
can be left behind
& a new day is there
to greet us, clean
with promise
& a clear path
thru the hours before dawn
when the mind kicks in,
the squares all tucked in bed
& the people of the night
in charge of the scene players,
musicians, whores,
countermen at diners & cats
delivering the morning papers,
garbagemen & cops & drunks
in the rhythms of midnight
& the small hours after,
a different sphere completely
from daytime, traffic
& the peculiar world of commerce
this is when the music is made,
in nightclubs until two
or four a.m., & then in after-
hours joints & people's cribs,
or in the recording studios
after the gig, with everyone nice
& relaxed, half-
juiced or hazy,
lazy, a little crazy maybe
but ready to put down some tunes
onto recording discs or tape
for the rest of the world to hear
round midnight & after, the end
of a day, or in the meta-
phorical mode, it's the last sigh
of an era, like around 1939
thru 44, with the war
going on abroad, & the nation
finally tearing itself loose
from the last dying grip
of pre-modern america,
all its young men at war
& only the rejects, mis-
fits & draft-dodgers left
to shape some new form
from the ruins of the past,
some measure of their alienation
from the day before,
their allegiance to the flag
of tomorrow, like whatever
it might bring would be better
than what's happening right now,
the high discovery
of risk, or the existential premise
that something new & brilliant can be made
from the existing materials,
the intention
to create & invent
on little jobs that monk
spoke of in 1948, with no reward
but the beauty of the thing itself,
the challenge of invention
with no idea of what might come next,
no pattern to fall back on,
nothing but the driving force in-
side your self, & the long roots of culture
stretching back to west africa
& the southern united states,
the utter & absolute beauty
of making a bridge
across the years, to link the past
in a whole new way
with what would come next,
round about midnight
of a dying world, & round about
3 a.m. of a brand new day,
monk at the piano
composing the future
& bud powell taking the piece
to cootie williams to record,
1944, a standard of modern music
even before its composer could record it,
the loveliest work in modern jazz
at just over three minutes long
yet longer than tomorrow,
longer than the 45 years
since monk eased it out of his head
& his gargantuan heart
& gave it to us,
round about midnight, as a sign
that something was coming
that had never been here before
detroit
july 14/december 27-30, 1985
3.1.669 |
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