Piano Jazz

They replayed an old episode tonight: Clark Terry, recorded in 1994. I imagined riverboats on the Mississippi as he spoke of them, and the steel workers who would disembark to enjoy the good food, pretty girls, and cheap booze of St. Louis. (For Terry, this image is not just a story, but a biological structure caused by those steel workers, way back in time; they are weirdly still present in his body.) Late in the program, one of Terry's improvisations went to his famous mumbling place: scat singing that becomes an automatic music of inarticulate gurgles, consonants with no vowels, stray words and partial sentences. This kind of letting go is mostly not done in jazz, or anywhere. Joyce regarded language as a reflex, something our bodies can't stop doing, and Finnegan's Wake is kind of a picture of this regurgitative flow, but it's one thing to carefully plot the spillage at your desk for 17 years, and quite another to allow your mouth to erupt in this fashion in front of other humans. I had stopped moving and was deep in listening when Terry paused at the end of a phrase, and in this space Marian McPartland interjected, clear as a bell: "Michael Jackson." I do not know from what sub-basement of knowledge this chilling utterance might have emerged, whether it was spontaneous or premeditated (for she did not seem to be in any state of talking-animal flux), but it seemed to stop time, and I, as in the moment before a car crash, was frozen in a sort of cone of perception receding to slatted grille of the clock radio's speaker.