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photo by William Gottlieb/Library of Congress

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Supper Club

Musicians
make conversation
around the notes
warm up before leaving terra firma,
say goodbye to familiar places.
Soar.

One big river,
the ecology of jazz,
forming up, dispersing,
forming up again.
Listening for the sound. The new sound.
The perfect sound. Listening for that.

……………………..Listening.

Magpies at the bar
pick apart the tunes,
hold court
while royalty swings–
Mingus, Miles, Monk

That night in D.C.,
the Showboat,
Charlie on guitar.

……………………..Listen or leave.

“I played sax when I was a kid.”
“Is that right? Well, thanks for stopping by, man.”

Girl singer spends her days
in longing and her nights
onstage while half the crowd
listens and the other half
talks stock options.
Two kind of people in the world:
The ones who listen to “Body & Soul,”
and the ones who can talk right through it.

Next tune reminds you of the man in the nightclub
that time you were in another city,
the man who smelled of English Leather
when you danced and asked for
your phone number but didn’t call. Or
if he did, he didn’t leave a message.
Quick. What’s the name of that song?

……………………..I knew you’d remember.

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Molly Larson Cook is an award-winning Oregon writer, writing coach, and artist. In 2016, she received the first Steve Kowit Poetry Prize in a national competition. Molly was a Fellow at the Fishtrap Writers Conference in Oregon where she worked with poet Naomi Shihab Nye. Molly’s jazz novel, Listen, was published in a limited edition in 2003. Her “Colors of Jazz” paintings are at mollylarsoncookpaintings.wordpress.com. 

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Listen to the 1962 recording of Ella Fitzgerald singing “Body and Soul” (with the Nelson Riddle Orchestra) [Universal Music Group]

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