Saturday, April 26, 2008

QUOTE FROM MEMORY

When I was a young man, one of my favorite writers was the lyricist Jon Hendricks, from the jazz vocal trio, Lambert, Hendricks & Ross. I had a crush on Annie Ross (& interviewed her once, when I was an 18-year-old disc jockey), found Dave Lambert strange and off my radar (an "old" white man), but was greatly influenced by Jon Hendricks.

His lyrics not only influenced my own writing, but my personal philosophy.Or maybe I just felt like he articulated a lot of things I believed in as well. Like in the lyrics to, I think a Count Basie tune (Hendricks wrote words to already recorded jazz instrumental improvisations, and then he and Lambert and Ross sang the words as the various instruments in the recording, Ross being the trumpet and higher range ones, able to hit notes higher than any other singer at the time, and Lambert and Hendricks singing the saxes etc., originally multi-tracking, as in the case of the large Basie band for their first album, but at their peak, just single tracks), anyway in one early example he wrote a line about how "the mind is like a parachute, it functions better when it's open" (or something close to that).

But the line that hit me most, and I carried with me forever, (and used part of as the title of one of my first published stories, in the 1960s) was something close to this (I'm in the country and don't have the LP to double check the exact wording):

"If you be still and never move,
you're gonna dig yourself a well-intentioned rut,
and think you've found a groove."

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