“Oh, it’s jazz. All they do is improvise.”
Related reading
All OCA “overheard” posts (Pinboard)
Wednesday, December 8, 2021
Overheard
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Michael Leddy“Orange Crate Art” is a song by Van Dyke Parks and the title of a 1995 album by Van Dyke Parks and Brian Wilson. “Orange Crate Art” is for me one of the great American songs: “Orange crate art was a place to start.”
Don’t look for premiums or
coupons, as the cost of
the thoughts blended in
ORANGE CRATE ART pro-
hibits the use of them.
Comments are welcome, appended to posts or by e-mail. I moderate comments to keep out spam, so please be patient.
View Profile
Nancy, October 19, 1950.
“Who are we as a country?”
Michael Leddy
Don’t look for premiums or
coupons, as the cost of
the thoughts blended in
ORANGE CRATE ART pro-
hibits the use of them.
Comments are welcome, appended to posts or by e-mail. I moderate comments to keep out spam, so please be patient.
Search this blog
Creative Commons
StatCounter
Subscribe
Click to subscribe in a reader.
Top twenty tags
Words to live by
Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in the face of certain defeat.
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
*
Νέος ἐφ’ ἡμέρῃ ἥλιος. [The sun is new every day.]
Heraclitus
*
Every day is a new deal.
Harvey Pekar, “Alice Quinn”
*
Nos plus grandes craintes, comme nos plus grandes espérances, ne sont pas au-dessus de nos forces, et nous pouvons finir par dominer les unes et réaliser les autres. [Our worst fears, like our greatest hopes, are not outside our powers, and we can come in the end to triumph over the former and to achieve the latter.]
Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again
*
Surely, in the light of history, it is more intelligent to hope rather than to fear, to try rather than not to try.
Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living
*
I don’t really deeply feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of writers he loves, but it’s always nice, I’ll grant you, if he has one.
J.D. Salinger, Seymour: An Introduction
*
I’m not afraid to get it right
I turn around and I give it
one more try
Sufjan Stevens, “Jacksonville”
*
L’attention est la forme la plus rare et la plus pure de la générosité. [Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.]
Simone Weil, in a letter
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
*
Νέος ἐφ’ ἡμέρῃ ἥλιος. [The sun is new every day.]
Heraclitus
*
Every day is a new deal.
Harvey Pekar, “Alice Quinn”
*
Nos plus grandes craintes, comme nos plus grandes espérances, ne sont pas au-dessus de nos forces, et nous pouvons finir par dominer les unes et réaliser les autres. [Our worst fears, like our greatest hopes, are not outside our powers, and we can come in the end to triumph over the former and to achieve the latter.]
Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again
*
Surely, in the light of history, it is more intelligent to hope rather than to fear, to try rather than not to try.
Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living
*
I don’t really deeply feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of writers he loves, but it’s always nice, I’ll grant you, if he has one.
J.D. Salinger, Seymour: An Introduction
*
I’m not afraid to get it right
I turn around and I give it
one more try
Sufjan Stevens, “Jacksonville”
*
L’attention est la forme la plus rare et la plus pure de la générosité. [Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.]
Simone Weil, in a letter
#1 hit
In memory of
Blog Archive
-
▼
2021
(973)
-
▼
December
(90)
- New Year’s Eve 1921
- Last call
- A fish-dish fish dish
- Critter
- Sardine art
- Recently updated
- How to improve writing (no. 98)
- The best book of the past 125 years
- Gorgias in our time
- Graphs!
- NPR, sheesh
- Word of the day: tragus
- Well, or not
- Pronouncing omicron again
- “Book-wrapt”
- The Watts Towers at 100
- Noir filter
- Zippy’s thesaurus
- Today’s Saturday Stumper
- Christmas 1821 in 1921 in 2021
- Sondheim with a Blackwing
- Domestic comedy
- Streets
- Joan Didion (1934–2021)
- A pocket notebook sighting
- A Hamilton House menu
- Bounce, no bounce
- EXchange names on the screen
- “How to draw a snowflake”
- Hagar in the Oval Office
- Recently updated
- Solstice
- Advertising 101
- Q & Q & Q & A
- From the department of irony
- Verizon, grr
- Bombas, 25% off
- Twelve movies
- Nancy and orbisculate
- Domestic comedy
- RTF$
- Mary Miller in The New Yorker
- What’s a candy store?
- More candy store
- Today’s Saturday Stumper
- Breakfast with Nancy
- Drinking and defending
- Frank O’Hara was kidding
- Distraction-free devices
- The Greek alphabet and us
- A gang of six
- From the carny world
- Almodóvar in the Times
- Yikes
- Domestic comedy
- Frank Cook (1942–2021)
- Mary Miller, troublemaker
- “Mandit”?
- “Some rocks”
- From the PBS NewsHour
- Recently updated
- Another Brooklyn candy store
- Today’s Saturday Stumper
- Here in downstate Illinois
- Shadows
- Night and the city
- Barry Harris (1929–2021)
- Giant telephone
- Telephone FTW?
- Overheard
- A mail chute in the movies
- Doris Miller and democracy
- Pronouncing omicron
- Chock full o’Nuts sighting
- The non-breaking hyphen
- Recently updated
- Heebie-jeebies
- Hallmark Holiday Movie Bot
- A little Hallmark nonsense
- Another Brooklyn candy store
- Barbie mit Fisch
- Today’s Saturday Stumper
- A fused participle in the comics
- Letter Boxed lines
- Command-Control-Shift-4
- “Y’all”
- Eleven movies, one mini-series
- "Sardine-tins scattered”
- Brontë weather
- “Ontological underpinnings”
-
▼
December
(90)
favorite posts
- Against “deep reading”
- Alkalize with Alka-Seltzer
- At the World Trade Center and St. Paul’s Chapel
- Being wrong about beauty
- Bobbing for apples
- “Bon Appétit!”
- “The Case of the Purloined Prairie”
- ChatGPT’s twenty-line poems
- “The ’Clipse”
- Couric and Palin and Orwell
- Digital naïfs
- Donald Trump’s spelling
- Ebinger’s
- Ellington for beginners
- “Extra credit?”
- Five desks
- Five pens
- Fluke life
- The gold standard, haircuts, and everyone else
- Happy birthday, Mr. Piletti
- Hoagies, pizza, and English studies
- Homeric blindness in “colledge”
- How to Write a Sentence
- Imaginary liner notes
- Invisible man: Louis Armstrong and the New York Times
- Invitation to a dance
- Is there a pencil in The House?
- John Lee Hooker and Canned Heat
- A Kerouac notebook page
- The kitchen shink [sic]
- Klenosky!
- “Make My Jotter Quit!”
- Lady Elaine’s can
- Mysteries of the tollbooth
- National’s et cetera
- Nick DeMaio and the Eldorado
- Obama revisions
- Obama thoughts
- On “On the New Literacy”
- On “Politics and the English Language”
- “On the Road”
- The Oteris and Marty
- The other little book
- Out of the past
- Peppa Pig and the Brontës
- Phones Are For People
- Politics and theory
- “The Poet”
- Proust: involuntary memory, foolish things
- P.S. 131
- Pullum on Strunk and White
- Re: the Beloit Mindset List
- Some have gone and some remain
- “The Spokesmen”
- Sports Illustrated and Proust
- The Springfield Daily Gazette
- That (in)famous line
- Things I learned on my summer vacation
- Van Dyke Parks in Chicago
- W(h)ither grammar
- What I hear in “Walk Away Renee”
Nancy, October 19, 1950.
comments: 3
You and I know the rigor of an Ellington, a Mingus, a Miles Davis even. But if you substitute the word "improvise" for "wander" or "noodle" or perhaps a slang for self-gratification you will capture the understanding of jazz by most.
I mean, Eb-13/#11 is an awesome chord, but the only reason anyone but a jazz aficionado has ever even heard it in contemporary music is because it's part of one of the saddest cartoon-based Christmas carols ever written.
Yeah, they’re just making stuff up.
I will have to wait till I get home to a piano to see (hear) if that’s the chord I think it is. But I think it is. I’ve always suspected that Vince Guaraldi was inspired by “Chelsea Bridge” with that tune.
Yep, that’s the one. : )
Post a Comment