Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
The Guy Downstairs
A Chaconnade for Everyone Names Rebecca
Freedom and Discipline
Academicism
Who Cares, Long as It's B-Flat
Influences: The Formal Idea of Jazz
Joe Turner
Song about Earl Hines
With Respect to the Infuriating Pervasiveness of Optimism
A Possibly Momentary Declaration in Favor of William Butler Yeats and Chalres Ellworth Russell
Paragraph
Got Those Forever Inadequate Blues
The Intentional Alligator
Personality of Genius
Tom McGrath Is Harvesting the Snow
Authenticity in the Age of Massive, Multiplying Error
Michigan Water: A Few Riffs before Dawn
Three Paragraphs
The Defeated Generation
The Cowshed Blues
The Main Thing about Improvisation
The Blues Scale
Ben Webster
The Time of Falling Apart
The Blues as Poetry
In That Session
James Wright's Collected Prose
Mystery and Expressiveness
An Expatiation on the Combining of Weathers at Thirty-Seventh and Indiana Where the Southern More or Less Crosses the Dog
Instances
Letter to Maxine Sullivan
Smith
To All Human Consciousness the Clandestine Is Basal
Duncan's Dream
Coda
Meditation in the Presence of "Ostrich Walk"
What Does "Organic" Mean?
Good Old Wagon
Ben Webster
Anthems
The Spun-Off Independent Dead-End Ten-Star Blast
Homage to John Lyly and Frankie Newton
What a Wonder Among the Instruments Is the Walloping Tramboone
Eleven Memoranda on the Culture of Jazz