Morning Joy

Morning Joy


Piano buttons, stitched on morning lights.
Jazz wakes the day,
As I awaken with jazz, love lit the night.
Eyes appear and disappear,
To lead me once more to a green moon.
Streets paved with opal sadness,
Lead me counterclockwise, to pockets of joy,
And jazz.



by Bob Kaufman

Dreaming of the Masters

This is the playlist from this mornings broadcast on KDVS. You can listen to it where it is archived under New Day Jazz - Justin Desmangles at kdvs.org

The over all tone and trajectory of the show was really, as you can see, motivated by the spirit of the great Charles Mingus.

The love affair with America's First Lady of Song, Ella Fitzgerald continues!

Special thanks to comedian, writer, actor and friend Paul Mooney

Charles Mingus - East Coasting
Charles Mingus -Hearts Beat And Shades Of Physical Embraces
Charles Mingus -(Soul Fusion) Freewoman
Lenny Bruce - Three Commercials
Ella Fitzgerald - Blues In The Night
Ella Fitzgerald & Ellis Larkins - I've Got A Crush On You
Randy Weston - African Village/Bedford Stuyvesant
Bud Powell - Collard Greens & Black-eyed Peas
Herbie Nichols - Argumentative Variation
Johnny Griffin - Cherokee
Betty Carter - My Shining Hour
Betty Carter - Something Wonderful
Helen Merrill (duet with Jim Hall) - Deep In A Dream
Billie Holiday - Am I Blue?
Teddy Wilson featuring Billie Holiday - I Cover The Waterfront
Billie Holiday - Billie's Blues
Margaret Walker - Old Molly Means
Bennie Green featuring Babs Gonzalez - Soul Stirrin'
Barney Bigard - Brown Suede
Interview with Paul Mooney by Justin Desmangles (live)
Duke Ellington Trio - Jumpin' Room Only
Duke Ellington & Billy Strayhorn - Tonk
Duke Ellington & Billy Strayhorn - Drawingroom Blues
Gil Evans Orchestra - Where Flamingos Fly
Lenny Bruce - How To Relax Your Colored Friends At Parties
Charles Mingus - Stop! Look! and Listen, Sinner Jim Whitney
Charles Mingus - Fifty-First Street Blues
Margaret Walker - Kissie Lee
Art Pepper - Why Are We Afraid?

Happy Birthday Lenny Bruce, We Miss You Terribly

Dear Lenny,

We sure could use you these days. You turned out to be right about just about everything. I am not sure that's a good thing. I do know I wish more people had listened, and that those who did had listened a lot closer. You wouldn't believe what's going on these days. Or maybe you would, seeing as you all but predicted it. Remember that joke you made in Berkeley? The one about the church being like a franchise? A Howard Johnson's I think you said. The real reason why we were in Vietnam. Well now its Iraq. Robbing the cradle of civilization. I am sure you'd have a riff on that. You were one of the few geniuses of our age. You showed us ourselves in a stark yet forgiving light. That word "genius" though, not funny is it? That was another thing you demonstrated, that word is not an accolade. It is, as it was with Bird, with Mingus, another of society's labels for "danger-danger." The sacrifice you made! My lord, you gave everything for freedom, and the dignity of truth unadorned. It's your birthday today and I just really wanted to say thanks somehow. Thanks to Sally Marr, too. Hey man, I know this is small, too small a thanks for all you have done. I will work on something more and get back at you. But for now, happy birthday Lenny!

Justin Desmangles

Roy Eldridge, Little Jazz

ROY ELDRIDGE, LITTLE JAZZ


A hard look and a fake I.D. won't get you
into the Metropole, but at 15 you can stand under
the marquee's heat lamps outside to listen.

That epithetical "little" must've
implied something synedochial
together with a downright

brevity. Eldridge was his own quintessence:
as Billy Tenant expressed it, "the guy who
could squeeze anything out of a trumpet."

His playing contains no stunts or slurs.
Each bitten phrase meted out with compact dignity.
Where the trumpet blares, its pointed elevation -

zigguratic high notes, chomps
goading (in Kenny Clarke, for one) a concomitant
reach in rhythm (the ride cymbal rose

in prominence) -
with an aspiration like the Chrysler Building
clinches the night air.




by Bill Berkson
from the book Fugue State

WCW takes a shot at Old Possum

"I'm glad you like his verse; but I'm warning you, the only reason it doesn't smell is that it's synthetic. Maybe I'm wrong, but I distrust that bastard more than any writer I know in the world today. He can write, granted, but it's like walking into a church to me."


- William Carlos Williams writing to James Laughlin regarding T.S. Eliot.


Williams, of course, turned out to be right about Eliot. A euro-centric cultist of the first order, Eliot was not only a royalist but a racist and fascist sympathizer.

The pessimism of The Wasteland was met with condemnation by some and admiration by others. It inspired resistance as well. Among the most successful examples of this would be the joy expressed in Hart Crane's masterpiece, The Bridge.

The above quote was taken from The Way It Wasn't, an "auto-bug-offery" by the late James Laughlin, founder and publisher of New Directions.

Bob's Bird

Chasing The Bird

The sun sets unevenly and the people
go to bed.

The night has a thousand eyes.
The clouds are low, overhead.

Every night it is a little bit
more difficult, a little

harder. My mind
to me a mangle is.





- Robert Creeley

The Music Where Our Mouth Is

This is a playlist from a early morning broadcast on KDVS in Davis. I went on the air at about 5 minutes after 3 and was off by 6. All though there were no mistakes I felt that towards the end, due to some extra bookkeeping at the request of BMI, my timing was a little off. I would have liked to have played the 1946 duets by Ellington, Strayhorn (on the same piano!) and something from Sterling Brown. The purpose of playing the poetry along with the jazz is not a mere hip contrivance. In fact, as those who have followed this blog know, it is meant to illuminate the deeper and perhaps more subtle meanings of the music itself. I look at the show in its entirety as a single composition and just as a color or a shape in painting "brings out" a color or a shape in proximity so does a clarinet, a drum, a turn of the phrase. The most successful of these sequences in this particular broadcast, I believe, were as follows;

Ella Fitzgerald & Ellis Larkins playing My One & Only, followed by Duke Ellington's Orchestra playing Snibor

Margaret Walker (pictured above) reading For My People, followed by Johnny Hodges playing Day Dream

Snibor & Day Dream are, of course, compositions by Billy Staryhorn, which, I think, speaks to the depth of his genius and intuitive response to African-American culture in general and Jazz in particular.

I would have also liked to have spent more time on the small groups lead by Ellington sidemen. Perhaps in a future broadcast that's all I will play!


Ella Fitzgerald & Ellis Larkins - Someone To Watch Over Me
Ella Fitzgerald & Ellis Larkins - My One & Only
Duke Ellington & His Orchestra - Snibor
Langston Hughes - I Have Known Rivers
Langston Hughes - I, Too
Bud Powell - Blue Pearl
Bud Powell - Reets & I
Duke Ellington & His Orchestra featuring Lil Greenwood - Walkin' & Singing The Blues
Abbey Lincoln - Long As Your Living
Lee Morgan - All At Once You Love Her
Louis Smith - Tunesmith (excerpt)
Louis Smith - Au Privave
Herbie Nichols - Argumentative Variation
Herbie Nichols - Riff Primatiff
Countee Cullen - Heritage
Barney Bigard & His Orchestra - Brown Suede
Barney Bigard & His Orchestra - Noir Bleu
Barney Bigard & His Orchestra - "C" Blues
Barney Bigard & His Orchestra - June
Anita O'Day - I Didn't Know What Time It Was
Anita O'Day - The Very Thought Of You
Anita O'Day - Anita's Blues '76
Kenny Burrell Septet - I Never Knew
Ella Fitzgerald - I'm Just A Lucky So & So
Margaret Walker - For My People
Johnny Hodges & His Orchestra - Day Dream
Johnny Hodges & His Orchestra - Good Queen Bess
Johnny Hodges & His Orchestra - That's The Blues Old Man
Johnny Hodges & His Orchestra - Junior Hop
Claude McKay - If We Must Die (Introduction)
Claude McKay - If We Must Die
Miles Davis Sextet - Milestones (Miles)
Bill Evans Trio - Milestones (Miles)
Miles Davis Quintet - Milestones (Miles)
Gwendolyn Brooks - Kitchenette
Abbey Lincoln - Afro-Blue
Abbey Lincoln - Lonely House
Abbey Lincoln - Let Up
Bill Evans Trio - Solar