I think I took for granted just how sexy jazz music is. How could I not though? I was born well after its hey-day. And how often are you made hot by a rotting corpse? But it hit me the other day while I lay in bed and listened to Charlie Mingus. Whether it was the slight and happy buzz dancing in my temple, the sweltering summertime drowsiness in my un-air-conditioned bedroom, or maybe just that sex has been on my mind a lot lately, it was as if the music invited me into a history of long ago arousals and love affairs, quickies and courtships, sensuous seductions and spur of the moment romps, into the world of sex not as it had been when the music was played for the first time more than half a century ago, but as it has always been between man and woman, man and man, woman and woman, and lover and lover. 

I listened to the album straight through twice. Trying to pick out just what it was intrinsic in the music that made my mind and body jump to imaginings of handsome and mysteriously dark men sweeping me off my feet without words and bedrooms lit only by candle light or else the bright fluorescent hues of city street lamps easing in through the windows. Of wine and cigarettes and sweat and plenty of beds and whiskey with ice. Marijuana and arching backs, tussled hair, and held back gasps, moans and screams, no soundtrack in my mind except for the trumpet with the mute in and the trombone sliding in and out and the plucky bass strings twanging and vibrating around their standing position. 

It must be the movement to the music that I feel. The swinging and dropping and rise back up again and it's all moving so fast it feels as if there is going to be a great big crash coming and everyone is blowing and rallying so hard at once until there is just one great big banging hot noise and please please please just hold it there...until the end of time...the very end of time...or until the snare comes back in with the beat way down at the bottom and the high hat gives us something to follow again and we can tease our breaths back into our bodies, thankful for the brief and honest pause. 

Or maybe it's just that my understanding of jazz is very tied into my knowing of its cultural importance, of the smokey clubs and ill-lit stages that housed all sorts of society's refuse who were unafraid of being sexual beings because they were already outcasts. But this knowing seems less important as I lie in bed and listen. Because more or less it's all just a fairy tale to me. Those places only exist in story books and movies and ancient imaginings. The only thing I can really call my own is the sax which bellows me smoothly to ease and comfort and then the trumpet which awakens a vibration somewhere in my throat and of course the steady drum that tap tap taps it's not a song to play alone.