Briefly noted. From my posting yesterday (6/26) “Enjoy your night in Tunisia”, in response to Lise Menn, a comment about:
the music; I wanted to open up “A Night in Tunisia”, encourage people to discover the early [Dizzy] Gillespie-[Charlie] Parker collaborations, maybe to go on to discover that words got added to it [more than once, in fact] and it was eventually performed and recorded by almost every jazz or just jazzy vocalist(s) there is (Ella did it, Manhattan Transfer did it) and that most of that is in fact fabulous, genuinely a precious part of our cultural heritage
As it happens, this has been a dire day for my spirit, filled with such intense anxiety about the worth of my work that I was reduced to reading through old postings, looking for examples of things I wrote that might have been of value to at least a few of my readers. The triggers for this despair were multiple, but it turned out that sleep deprivation was high on the list; life is considerably better after three one-hour naps.
Then I went back to Ella Fitzgerald, a deep pleasure since I saw her perform live back in the 1960s.
So I bring you Ella Fitzgerald’s 1961 recording of “A Night in Tunisia”, from her “Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie!” album — a tribute to Charlie Parker; listen to it here. The text of the final irenic verse:
The cares of the day seem to vanish
The ending of day brings release
Each wonderful night in Tunisia
Where the nights are filled with peace
The Charlie Parker original is famous for its amazing cascading saxophone solo — a riff that Ella Fitzgerald honored by a wild interlude of scat singing.
To love is to be a fish.
My boat wallows in the sea.
You who are free,
rescue the dead.
— David Ignatow, Rescue the Dead (1970)
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