Hey, It's Cafe Jazz

Snapping fingers, a low hum in the microphone) Hey, It's Café Jazz/ But we ain't just sipping black coffee and snapping our fingers in polite applause/ Talkin' Bop/ first idiom where being white wasn't the fast track to success/ Yeah, dig it/ Bop was the soundtrack/ To anxieties, to late nights, to dreams deferred/ A nervous tremor in the rhythm/ Hard to play/ Man, you don't even KNOW. Only Bird, Diz, Miles...a constellation of cats burning bright, digging deep into a new conception in jazz/ A new hip way/ The hard Bop LP Clifford Brown and Max Roach, Study in Brown, 1955? Got heads blown right off/ This isn’t just music, see?/ It's talkin' 'bout you, talkin' 'bout me/ talkin' 'bout life getting ready to take on a new form/ Be-Bop Creating a dialogue in Blending ideas, twisting sounds, birthing a style from the after-hours jam sessions at Minton’s Playhouse, Harlem/ Extreme virtuosity/ blistering speed/ /dissonant chords/ chordal substitutions – a vocabulary of rebellion/ Offbeat piano action, more action, SUPA DUPA HIGH VOLTAGE, MAN! Scorching tempos mirrored the doped-up lives...the pain... the desperation...of some Bop masters/ Even the beat poets... yeah, they copped the style/ the wicked mix of horn blowin' break-your-freakin'-neck speed, the Bop notes bleeding into their verses/ Jazz poetry on fire/ Did Bop influence Lenny Bruce? while doin’ a A-bomb of Heroin and Marijuana in the back of the room of his late night gig/ Is you black, or is you white?/ That question still under the skin of Jazz America/ still inching, scratching, Racism out of jazz/ Where are the jazz lords of the in-between at?/ What's the jazz world like today? Well, your ride is way clean, man/ got the chrome shinin', the leather gleamin'/ but… your gas tank is on E. (Silence, save for the click of the microphone being switched off)