RonPrice

I put together the following compendium of prose and poetry in memory of Dizzy Gillespie who died 22 years ago this month. John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie(1917-1993) was an American jazz composer, trumpeter, bandleader, and occasional singer. Gillespie was a trumpet virtuoso and improviser building on the virtuoso style of Roy Eldridge. But he added layers of harmonic complexity previously unheard in jazz. Go to this link if you want to read some of my commemorative prose and poetry: http://jazzfanz.com/showthread.php?36522-Dizzy-Gillespie-A-Retrospective

This prose-poem is a personal retrospective in memory of a man who brought beautiful music to my ears for half a century.-Ron Price, Tasmania ------------------------ I never even heard of John Barry(1933-2011). He died yesterday. He was an Oscar winning English film score composer. He was best known for composing 11 James Bond soundtracks and was hugely influential in determining the 007 series' distinctive style. His career spanned the same years I have been a member of the Baha’i Faith, the decades 1960 to 2010. Barry was employed by the EMI record company from 1959 until 1962 arranging orchestral accompaniment for the company's recording artists. From 1962 Barry transferred to Ember Records where he produced albums as well as arranging them. 1959 and 1962 were also big years for me as my young life was just getting air-borne. In 1962 I began my matriculation studies in Ontario, my most demanding academic year; that same year I also moved with my parents to a nearby town helping to form the first Baha’i spiritual assembly.-Ron Price with thanks to Wikipedia, 1 February 2011. One of the most famous signature tunes in film history, the James Bond Theme, came from your composing talents. This would be a big turning point for you, and you would go on to become one of the most celebrated film composers……winning five Academy Awards and four Grammy Awards with scores for The Lion in Winter, Midnight Cowboy, Born Free, and Somewhere in Time. My life had no signature tunes, but it did have a signature, about that there is no doubt, if I go back those five decades-half a century-singing a song that rose up from the Siyah-Chal and the dust in the barrack-square of Tabriz long ago. Westward that song moved, worldward, and now the earth is flooded with the felicity of this new song, this Godsong. Have you heard it John—now that you are in the Land of Lights? Ron Price 1 February 2011

My experience these days of sociology, as a formal discipline, as just about entirely on the Internet. Occasionally I dabble(for I am retired now and I have made of dabbling an art-form) in this rich and variegated field which forty years ago I had just entered. I remember well that first year of the formal study of sociology, which ended in early May of 1964, just before I got a job checking telephone poles for internal decay. In about February or, perhaps, March, a tutor joined the sociology staff. He was able to explain the mysteries of Parsons better than anyone. And at the time, Parsons occupied a position in the emperean of sociological godheads. Everyone admired this tutor as if he was some brilliant theologian who had just arrived from the Vatican with authoritative pronouncements for us all to write down on our A-4 note paper to be regurgitated on the April examination. He was an Englishman, if I remember, rather slim and a good talker. And Parsons, for all of us, was about as intricate as you could get and still stay in the same language and on the same earthly plane. For a year I had no contact with sociology, except for a short period of time toward the end of my second year at university. I got to know a young woman of 27 who had one son and who studied sociology. I took her ice-skating in about February of 1965. I can’t quite remember how I met her but for two or three months I went to the occasional lecture with her in sociology. She had a passion for helping Africans and I had a passion for her. Our mutual passions interlocked nicely and it was this reciprocity that led us to join together in third year sociology. I took six courses in sociology that year, enough to bring the dead to life, or is it the living to death or, perhaps more accurately, I should say enough to kill any enthusiasms for sociology. In retrospect it was fortuitous that Canadian universities begin in mid-September with exams starting in mid-April. With the Christmas break, the week off for Easter and exam study the student is left with six months of lectures-reading-tutorials. That is about all one can stand of reading sociology. The cold Canadian wnters keep it all on chill: nothing like a brisk walk to class in sociology 3A6 to examine the essence of Marxism, if there is an essence, or the intricacies of functionalism and it has many intricacies especially the Parsonian brand. From Comte to the 1960s in a quick hit. Part of me always wanted to take it seriously and part of me found it such a burden of words that my already incipient depression just got another kick-start on its way. Anyway, I got through my third year and found myself with a BA bracket sociology end-of-bracket. I did not get my degree until November because when the transcript came out in June I was four or five marks short of a passing grade, 60%. I had to pay a visit to the Head of the Department, a gentle spirit who frequently imbibed a white wine, a beer or was it a claret? He taught me sociological statistics. This was the most mysterious of all arts in this youthful discipline which by 1963 was about 100 years of age with roots going back into the dawns of time. I remember, yes, as if it was yesterday, sitting in his class writing down as much as I could in the hope of unravelling it leisurely at home in a quiet evening where I lived over a restaurant in the small town of Dundas, 15 minutes away on a good hitch-hike. Of course I never did, unravel it I mean; night after night I’d ponder these mathematical symbols in the hope that sincerity and effort would pay off. In this case they did not and here I was eight weeks after the end of the year asking him for a few marks. He came to the party, probably because it was late afternoon and by then he’d already had a few and he was one of those drinkers who gets friendlier after knocking back a few. I had periodic dalliances with sociology after that graduating year of 1966. At teachers’ college we had a sociology unit. I had to go to a teachers' college to get some practical qualification because sociology was good for absolutely nothing insofar as a career was concerned. I could have tied it to social work as well as teaching, but untied to anything about the only use it had was at a bar in the evening, with your girfriend discussing your(and her) inner life, driving a taxi and sitting around filling in time reading books. However useful sociology may be in this private domain, you can’t take it far as the cornerstone of a career. I came to teach sociology in 1974 to trainee teachers in Launceston, in 1975 to library technician trainees in Melbourne, in 1976-78 in Ballarat to engineers and social science majors. When I lived in Katherine I taught it occasionally in adult education to evening classes and in Port Hedland to students in management courses. In the early 1990s in Perth I taught sociology in Certificate courses and again in 1997-8 teaching sociology for human service workers. Now after more than forty years I find myself finally finished combing library shelves through books which I first saw over forty years ago and the hundreds of additions. Some of the material is highly stimulating and some as dry and coagulating as a sewer after a long period of no rain. The books are still as fat and I find I can not spend more than an hour hunting them down. An immense fatigue sets in toward the end of my first hour in the library and I must scoop up my allotment of seven or eight books to read in the leisurely quiet of my home with a cold or a hot drink in my hand depending on the time of year. I look forward in my dotage to a long and happy life with this strange field I chanced upon more than forty years ago when I was trying to avoid the world of work and its deadening and so often predictable stamp of boredom. The labyrinthine channels of sociology one can travel in forever; the library shelves are getting more extensive; it is a burgeoning field as are all fields now. The river of sociology, now in its middle age, perhaps, will flow on into its third century while I get old. And when my days are long and I am freed from the work-a-day world and its routines I will play among its waters, bathing myself in its endless streams, having learned how to avoid drowning in its heady froth. I will only sample its choicest and its freshest glasses of refreshment. For by then I will be an accomplished connoisseur of its mysteries. I will be old and ready for my final hour. Ron Price * Two years and two weeks after writing this essay I retired from the teaching profession and from teaching sociology. By March 2000, three years after the pleasure of writing the above 'summary of experience,' I had seven arch lever files of notes, the residue from those many years of dabbling in sociology in my study in a house in George Town, the oldest town in Australia. By then I had begun to sample only the choice bits of the field that I enjoyed the most: sociological theory. I continued what I had done since my first contact with sociology in 1963, enlarge my understanding of the Cause through the insights of this useful discipline. I also found myself teaching sociology in a School for Seniors (19/8/2000). My final hour had begun.

MY SOUND By midnight it is time for me to move away from writing and reading, after what has usually been an eight hour day of intellectual and literary work. I sit in front of the box and let its soporific effects move my brain-waves onto alpha and help induce a sleepy effect---usually by 1:00 of 1:30 a.m. And then it’s off to bed. After making some toast and a hot drink I sat down and watched “A Journey Through American Music: Free Jazz to Future Jazz.”1 I won’t go into the many details of this short musical history, but will refer in this short prose-poem to a Wayne Shorter, a saxophone player who came to the jazz group known as Weather Report in the 1970s. Shorter had a reputation and a dominant role as an instrumentalist due to his solo work and his contributions to Miles Davis’ "second great quintet" during the 1960s. His choice not to follow the same approach with Weather Report led to some criticism of the group. During his time with Weather Report, Shorter was noted for generally playing saxophone with an economical, "listening" style. Rather than continually taking the lead, he would generally add subtle harmonic, melodic and/or rhythmic complexity by responding to other member's improvisations. Playing both tenor and soprano saxophones, Shorter continued to develop the role of the latter instrument in jazz, taking his cue from previous work by Coltrane, among others. But it is not the biography of Shorter, which I could go into in much more detail, that has given rise to this prose-poem, nor his technical virtuosity. It is, rather, his ability to play his instrument as if the sound of the saxophone was the sound of himself. The capacity to integrate his personality, new sounds he heard as well as new forms, textures and moods into his highly individual sound, into his complete self, to make his self more complete in the process---this was what one could call ‘the sound of himself.’--Ron Price with thanks to 1ABC2 TV, 11:45-12:35 a.m., 25/6/’10-26/6/’10. While you were making your name…. as one of the most important American jazz musicians of your generation, while you were becoming a household name… amongst jazz fans around the world, and winning honours and recognition, becoming considered jazz's greatest living composer… I got going with my life as a student-teacher and a member of the Baha’i Faith,1…...Then with Weather Report, 1971 to 1985,2……the first years of my life in Australia we were both beginning to record our own voice, at last, after some grinding 1960s years. We both had some grinding to come, eh, Wayne……as we enjoyed the sound of our voice with you in Soka Gakkai and me in the Baha’i Faith. Good luck old man! 1In 1959 Shorter joined Art Blakey. He stayed with Blakey for five years, and eventually became musical director for the group. Dizzy Gillespie joined the Baha’i Faith in 1968 when I was living on Baffin Island among the Inuit. Shorter is, himself, a Nichiren Buddhist and a member of Soka Gakkai since the 1970s. Ron Price 26 June 2010

THREE PEOPLE IN A ROOM When I entered my teens in 1957 and Shoghi Effendi died in November of that year, an event of little importance to me then, a young man Harold Pinter was on the edge of a career which led him to become the foremost living dramatist of the last half of the twentieth century. Pinter, then, was on no importance at all to me. I was only 13. In 1957 Pinter was pursuing his private vision and experimenting with dramatic form; he was also very poor and lived in a slum. He saw the personal and the political as a seemless blend; private life he saw as much a form of power-politics as was the partisan politics of government. We see this in his work The Dumb Waiter which was first put on in 1959, the year I became a Baha'i. By April 1960 he had become famous due to his play The Caretaker which he had written in the autumn of 1959 during October, the month I had joined a movement that was claiming to be the emerging world religion. At that time the movement had about 700 members in Canada. Like Pinter, I was young then. -Ron Price with thanks to Michael Billington, The Life and Work of Harold Pinter, Faber and Faber, London, 1996, pp.1-113. You did so well, Harold, to take your life and thought and put it on the stage making you so famous and so rich, eh? I've taken my life, Harold, and put it into poetry, my story, one which acquires more than a little significance due to its association with this emerging world religion. Perhaps, with ingenuity, I could take John and Hattie Dixon and Nancy Campbell and put them in a lounge room with some cheese-cake and apple-pie, add some of those birds flying over Akka and show how that central core of my life developed subtly, even uneventfully, with the real communication taking place without words—as you put it so well, Harold.1 Thank you Harold for all your work. 1 Part of Pinter's philosophy of life as conveyed in The Caretaker and summarized by Alrene Sykes, "Introduction," The Caretaker, Harold Pinter, Hicks Smith and Sons, Sydney, 1960, p.3. This play was centered around three people in a room. Ron Price 18 September 2001 (updated for Internet On: 26/12/08)

OUR LIVES Hayden Carruth’s(1921-2008) first book of poems was published the year I joined the Baha’i Faith: 1959. He had been released from a psychiatric hospital after a fifteen month stay right at the start of the first Baha'i international teaching plan, the Ten Year Crusade, in 1953. Of course, Carruth knew nothing of this new world religion back then in its early decades of expansion in the West. And I knew nothing of Hayden Carruth back then or even after his thirty books were published. I came to know him in the first two months after his passing in 2008. He and I shared much in common and that is, in part at least, why I write this prose-poem in memory of a man who grew up in a small town in Connecticut in the 1920s and 1930s before I grew up in a small town in Ontario in the 1940s and 1950s. We both drew on philosophy, history and literature while writing about: everyday matters, education, domestic life, mental illness and community life. In the evening of our lives we each got up late, had our brunch, moved slowly, suffered from mental illness, were disinclined to socialize and applied our energies to writing poetry and prose. We both owed much to Ezra Pound and both wrote millions of words about what we found to be “honest and true” in relation to ourselves, our talents and our society. We found writing was not unlike sex and what we wrote about ranged over a wide ambit of subject matter. We did differ, as any two people inevitably do, on many fronts: he had a bitter streak, felt marginalized by the literary establishment, thought writing had little affect on society as society got worse and worse in his lifetime, was disillusioned about the impact of poetry after holding high hopes for its role as late as the 1950s. He became somewhat like W.H. Auden who expressed the view that: poetry doesn’t matter. I possessed a solemn but not bitter consciousness. It was a consciousness that found its wellspring in a celebratory joy, a golden seam of joy that slowly matured in my adult life. By the time I turned to writing poetry extensively in my fifties and sixties I also enjoyed a tranquillity in which memories were recollected, recreated and seen afresh.-Ron Price with thanks to several internet sites on Hayden Carruth and The University of Chicago Magazine, April 2005, Vol. 97, No.4, 29 November 2008. You never received a wide acclaim, Hayden, an acclaim you deserved. Nor did I, Hayden, nor did I. But I did not deserve such acclaim far out on the periphery of poetic life, as I was, far down in the Antipodes, the last stop on the way to Antarctica if one takes the western-Pacific rim route. Much of our writing was far too academic and impersonal, in my case too eccentric, too religious, with apocalyptic intuitions.....an excess of personal convictions quite incompatible with contemporary literary taste, idiom. With feather not with hammer, Hayden, I brushed the sleep-fast windows of a dozing world where my brother lied innocently and unwittingly curled while the flames leaped lush and the tempest’s winds yammered....while tongues licked the door and lapped the sashes so little did he know and I, too, often wingless1 clambered, often, songless screamed but, so quietly now with inward tones softened with the years, softened, silent, tranquil now. And you, too, now, Hayden, you too—at last. 1 Roger White, “Nuncio,” The Witness of Pebbles, George Ronald, Oxford, 1982, p.126. Ron Price 29 November 2008

A CELEBRATION Today in New England a celebration is taking place to pay tribute to one of the most astute poets of that region: Hayden Carruth.1 Until two days ago I had not even heard of this poet but, while waiting in the Launceston Tasmania library at mid-day(21/11/’08) before going for an ultra-sound at a local hospital, I picked up somewhat at random volume 84 of Contemporary Literary Criticism, a useful encyclopedia of analysis and commentary of the works of writers and poets, biographers and autobiographers as well as novelists and journalists. I had been dipping into this encyclopedia in the last fifteen years(circa 1993-2008), beginning in the last several years of my employment as a full-time teacher in Western Australia. In the same spirit of randomness and, perhaps, serendipity, as someone might browse through a magazine while waiting in a doctor’s reception area, my eyes casually fell on the pages devoted to Hayden Carruth. I found out very quickly many things about his life, about his poetry and his general writings. When I got home I looked him up on the internet. I found out he had just died and that this celebration I mention here was taking place today. I write this prose-poem to contribute my part to a celebration of someone I hardly know but with whom, in only the last two days, I have developed a sense of a spiritual, an intellectual, kinship. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Times Argus Online, 15 November 2008. I often write with a certain weary ease, Hayden, not like you.1 I often write, too, with an overt utilitarianism but, like you, it is often indirect and as subtle as I can. My criticism is, like yours, a verging on philosophy, indeed, a deep-down thing. There is for both of us, too, a subjective, an objective, communalism in my openly transcendent prose-poetic acts. You wrote things about poetry, Hayden, which I can only quote and will quote to end this verse: Poetry is the reason for all things humanly true and beautiful, and the product of them— wisdom, scholarship, love, teaching—Love of poetry is the habit and the need of wise men wherever they are, and when for some reason of social or personal disadjustment they are deprived of it, they will be taxed in spirit and will do unaccountable things. Great men will turn instinctively to the poetic labour of their time, because it is the most honourable and useful, as it is the most difficult, human, endeavour.2 .....and on and on you went as if the poet Shelley had been reborn as a result of your painful but incredible trip backwards toward the evolutionary roots of poetry in a politics of poetic spirituality and its politics of love. I wish you well, Hayden, in that Undiscovered Country, as Shakespeare once called the Land of Lights which, perchance, you may now enjoy. 1 Judith Weissman quoted in Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 84, p.116 from an introduction to Working Papers: Selected Essays and Reviews by Hayden Carruth, edited by Judith Weissman, The University of Georgia Press, 1982, pp. xv-xxiii. 2 Hayden Carruth in Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 84, p. 117. Ron Price 23 November 2008

------------------------ Thanks, Bill.-Ron Price, Australia

Writing is jazz....words roll and spin and jive.....a collection of letters and spaces, commas and periods, semi-colons and colons. -From Writing is Jazz, An Internet Blog: John M. Flores, 11 April 2007 Jazz improvizing and poetizing share much in the game of life. They are both fun and help their practitioners get to the purpose of life. To be in the moment--- drawing on the past, anticipating the future when time seems right. Often the process is effortless as if I am some sort of instrument: semi-analytical, semi-emotional, semi-performance, semi-trailer: carrying the baggage of life down the road in the darkness of night with headlights showing the way into meaning—at least for me if not for others on the road of night. Yes, there is joy and tranquillity, the preparation has been my whole life: the payment and reward has nothing to do with money, simply can not be bought or sold or chosen; it comes because of who you are and what you want as you go about finding your way in this slough of despond.(1) (1) This prose-poem was written after listening to an interview with Sascha Feinstein on ABC Radio National, 15 October 2008 at 10:05 a.m. Ron Price 1 November 2008