Friday was fusion day on the jazz front: hours of Weather Report followed by the Mahavishnu Orchestra and rounded out by returning to the old days of KXLY-AM 920 and listening to Spryo Gyra.
1. Listening to fusion jazz all day invigorated me. I don't know if I'd ever listened to Weather Report's I Sing the Body Electric (1972) before today. The album features improvisations that struck me as interstellar, to my ear, similar to some Grateful Dead journeys into space exploration. I also enjoyed Weather Report's deep dives into world music and their general openness to linking multiple styles of music to jazz. It had been years since I listened to John McLaughlin and the Mahavishnu Orchestra and it added to my day of being launched into the stratosphere as I listened to McLaughlin's sonic guitar work on their first album, The Inner Mounting Flame. I decided to calm things down a bit in the evening and listened to some Spyro Gyra cuts. Spyro Gyra is an earthbound band whose melodies are much easier to listen to and give me the pleasure of remembering listening to KXLY-AM in Spokane, 1976-78.
2. Although I've been staying very close to home since early March, today was a double hunker down day. It was the hottest day of the summer, over 100 degrees. On such days, I do my best to remain as stationary as possible. Listening to fusion jazz fit the bill. So did Billy Collins' broadcast. He continued reading poems from The Art of Drowning: "Thesaurus", "50th Birthday Eve", "Shadow", and "Sweet Talk".
In "Sweet Talk", the poem's speaker sweet talks his beloved by telling her she's not the Mona Lisa; she's not Botticelli's Venus; she's not a Delacroix odalisque (concubine). No, the speaker says, she is sunlight painted by Edward Hopper. The poem transported me, not to any sweet talking, but to light in paintings, to Edward Hopper, Rembrandt, Andrew Wyeth, J. M. W. Turner, John Constable, and others; I also revisited those day when I used to go to the University of Oregon or to the trail around Greenbelt Lake or to Huntley Meadows Park and other places and photograph light.
3. I did my best to keep my mind off the heat with acrostic puzzles; with constant attention to the very mixed performances of my fantasy baseball teams; eating a crisp and chilled green salad featuring Romaine lettuce, celery, carrots, sweet red pepper, cold penne pasta, and tuna, topped with a luscious salad dressing that Debbie concocted; drinking a hand stirred vanilla milk shake; sipping on a Brandy Alexander; and, blissfully, taking a 10:00 p.m. shower, gradually making the water cooler and cooler, rinsing off the day's accumulated heat.
Here's a limerick by Stu:
Think of things which have altered your mood.
Could be happy or something quite rude.
But the best kind of “high”,
Ain’t from something you buy.
It comes from friends over time you’ve accrued.
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