Mr. James’s Reviews > Jazz > Status Update

Oh, the room -- the music -- the people leaning in doorways. Silhouettes kiss behind curtains; playful fingers examine and caress [...]. This is the market where gesture is all: a tongue's lighting lick; a thumbnail grazing the split cheeks of a purple plum. Any thrownaway lover in wet unlaced shoes and a buttoned-up sweater is a foreigner here. This is not a place for old men; this is the place for romance. -- TM

The music bends, falls to its knees to embrace them all, encourage them all to live a little, why don't you? since this is the it you've been looking for. -- TM

"Where you pick up a wild woman?"
"In the woods. Where wild women grow." -- TM

When he picks up the reins he cannot help noticing that his horse is also black, naked and shiny wet, and the feelings about the horse are of security and affection. It occurs to him that there is something odd about that: the pride he takes in his horse; the nausea the woman provoked. He is a touch ashamed and decides to make sure it was a vision, that there is no naked black woman lying in the weeds. -- TM

The quiet money whispers twice: once when I slide it in my pocket; once when I slide it out. -- TM

It's the time of year when the City urges contradiction most, encouraging you to buy street food when you have no appetite at all; giving you a taste for a single room occupied by you alone as well as a craving to share it with someone you passed in the street. Really there is no contradiction -- rather it's a condition: the range of what an artful city can do. -- TM

For who could keep him down, this defiant birthday-every-day man who dispensed gifts and stories that kept them so rapt they forgot for awhile the bone-clean cupboard and exhausted soil; or believed a child's leg would straighten itself out by and by. Forget why he left in the first place and was forced to sneak into his own home ground. In his company forgetfulness fell like pollen. -- TM

No, It wasn't the War and the disgruntled veterans; it wasn't the droves and droves of colored people flocking to paychecks and streets full of themselves. It was the music. The dirty, get-on-down music the woman sang and the men played and both danced to, close and shameless or apart and wild. [...] It made you do unwise and disorderly things. Just hearing it was like violating the law. -- TM

On those nights Joe does not mind laying awake next to his silent wife because his thoughts are with this young good God young girl who both blesses his life and makes him wish he had never been born. -- TM

Like the time Miss Haywood asked her what time could she do her granddaughter's hair and Violet said, "Two o'clock if the hearse is out of the way." -- Toni Morrison