BE BOP A LULA

Charlie Parker, 'Bird'...the very word suggests flight, nay a soaring above the ordinary, the banal and the mundane. Was that really only three minutes and forty seconds?

...to see infinity in a grain of sand,
and eternity in an hour

Sorry about that...quite how Aleister Crowley got in here, I don't know.

God knows, the music itself was wild enough but the very names themselves trip off the tongue like spit off a hot griddle...Philly Joe Jones, Thelonius Monk, Lester Young...forgive my orgasmic spasms but these guys mean something to me.

Have you ever listened to Monk? And if you have, was it without laughter and tears?
If it was, then you are certifiably dead and your organs can legitimately be removed for scientific research into alternative lifeforms. Maybe we can best locate the soul by examining those who are so obviously bereft of one. Those in search of one need only to listen to 'Blue Monk' to be informed of the existence of something beyond. Beyond explanation, beyond rationalisation and beyond all understanding. God, that guy had such...floppy wrists.

He knew fuck all about music in the same way that Billy Cobham or Omar Hakim knew fuck all about drumming. Nobody had told him that what he was doing just wasn't possible and therefore the possibilities for him were endless.

I had been in Hungary for about three months when I met Tiborcz Ivan, who, at the time, was playing tenor sax in an attempt to reproduce the style of Bird. Stupid boy! He was good, but he was derivative, playing somebody else's music in somebody else's style. I advised him to switch to alto and to find his own style. Okay, he was moving in that direction anyway, and wanted to stop playing piano in a local jazz cafe so he did just that...sold the tenor, bought an alto and went for it.

He is now the organiser and prime mover behind the Cserfoi Jazzland jazz festival, an annual open air whoop-de-doo which is fast overtaking the Nagykaniszai Annual Jazz Festival in both popularity and taste. Christ, I'm pissed, must find another bottle.

There now follows a short intermission during which I locate a plastic bottle of home-made, family vineyard produced wine and uncork the bugger. That's better. There is a point in 'brother'-in-laws after all.

Now, where was I? Oh yeah, should you find yourself at a loose end around about July of any given year, I can put up at least three people in total comfort and as many as 300 people in tents in my garden should you wish to be exposed to the best jazz on the planet for three or four days. Applications to Kan the Man Productions Inc...in awfully good time.

HOE MOW FOE BEER!

I took somebody else's lesson on Saturday...I stood in, as it were, for an absent Hungarian teacher. Out of a class of 10, only two showed up and I am sure that they were the best and the worst of the group...sort of like doing two lessons in one without the benefit of an anaesthetic.

God knows what we were talking about but one of the two female students expressed an inability to understand quite how one male could find another male attractive. My inbuilt poitical correctness allowed me to express my opinion that the recently passed laws regarding same sex marriages are just an equalisation of rights. Her reaction was of the bleurgh vareiety as she just couldn't understand how someone could find someone of the same sex attractive.

We then went on to discuss what types we found attractive and I professed the opinion that ' the ugly can be beautiful, the pretty, never'. She asked me if I fancied Britney Spears and, when I expressed a preference for Jennifer Lopez, gave vent to the opinion that she had too big an arse. Case proven? Damn right!

Toodle pip!