The One Spot (Strange Chord)
Mingus, Miles, and Monk were all working in 1959,
the year I was born. I was born on a Saturday morning in June.
Bebop was at work on Friday, June 12, 1959. A gig or two
would've turned into an all-night affair. I imagine my jazz gods
heading home the next morning; at that juncture in time,
me, a strange chord, born. Oh my God, I remember this,
musician David Amram says in his 2002 memoir,
Offbeat: Collaborating with Kerouac, regarding Jack's
Mexican poem, "Orizaba 210 Blues," as he begins to compose
an accompaniment 35 years later to a tape of Kerouac reading the poem
... Jack read me this in 1959 one night while we were talking about his search for his Indian heritage and he said that, when hearing certain Mexican dialects, he felt the sounds of ancient Toltec reverberate in him.
Reading the memoir on my 50th birthday, I think of how
my elders' Abruzzese dialect fed my American-born
imagination when I was a child, and how I need
to get those sounds back into my ears. My writing studio
at home on One Cooper Road has been dedicated,
by virture of this poem, "The One Spot", in honor of the legendary
"Five Spot" at Five Cooper Square in NYC.
Although it's been years since they passed away,
Mingus, Miles, and Monk are still at work in 2009,
providing virtuosic swing to my aspiring art today.
