“I submit that there is nothing that anybody in the world has ever done that is more civilized or sophisticated than to dance elegantly, which is to state with your total physical being an affirmative attitude toward the sheer fact of existence.”—Albert Murray
Years ago, I played guitar in a California cover band booked to play a wedding. It was a good group, and we had worked together before. But the rehearsals got stuck in the mud.
I don’t know where I got the idea, but I turned to them and said, “Follow me outside.” It was a warm day on an L.A. city street. Cars passed. I started striding down the sidewalk. “Move with me,” I said. We got into a rhythm, swinging our legs, moving. It felt good.
Back inside, we picked up our instruments, and the music, too, began to move. We had kicked up dust.
The phenomenon was not without precedent. But it was a while before it made sense to me.
A few years later, I began researching what started as a screenplay about Louis Armstrong. The work would molt through incarnations and become a book about Joe “King” Oliver, which I continue to work on. In the process, I stumbled across a key element of jazz rhythm.
“A jazz musician have to be a working class of man, out in the open all the time, healthy and strong,” recalled the early New Orleans string man Johnny St. Cyr. “A working man have the power to play hot, whiskey
