I'm just thread-stalking AlderonFrederic to see who are what kind of jazz he likes.
He gave me an inspiring reply to one of my threads, so I'm just scoping him out.
When I saw McCoy Tyner in a nightclub in Toronto during the "Atlantis" tour,
he got up from the piano and went over to the bar where he has his own orange juice in the cooler.
No-one else went up to him so I went over. We talked for over twenty minutes, and I felt jazzed up.
I decided not to mention John Coltrane and sang some riffs like his sax players,
saying I could jam along with his songs on guitar but only get so far before I got repetitious.
He said if I got to where I could sing and play along to give him a call. He was a great man.
He talked about taking a year off, driving a cab in New York and growing an orange tree in his back yard.
I asked him how his border crossing went, and he just gave me a look we both shared.
After I went back and sat at the table with my girlfriend, drummer and bass player,
taking a week off with our band so I could see McCoy Tyner,
the waitress came over and said the club owner was offering us a free round of drinks,
because if I was friends with McCoy Tyner he wanted to be friends with us.
Oddly enough, we wore our stage clothes like we always did, very colourful,
while everyone else in the bar, except for the afro dashiki attired band, were dressed all black and white.
That's Toronto for you.
When I saw Mr. George Benson in Toronto at the Colonial on Yonge St, as uptown as it gets, in 1971,
there was a brass railing that divided the room, whites on one side with... uh... "afro-Americans" on the other.
I hear a lot of jazz as coming from the frustration of not being able to live up to all your abilities,
being forced to be a second-class citizen in your homeland.
With that in mind, I'm seeing the non-citizen, displaced immigrant population in the United States,
refugees from Mexico, Central and South America, as being a new hot-bed for very intense music.
Kind of Blue by Miles Davis, Agape Love by Elvin Jones, Echoes of a Friend by McCoy Tyner,
and recordings based on the works of Nicolo Paganini, were my most important albums as a teenager.