Tony Adamo Poet Spoken Word

Notes About The Poem

Jazz City High

Jazz City breathes like a smoke ring in a midnight club/ Rudy Van Gelder at the console, the world’s greatest keeper of sound, Prestige Records spinning stories in the air/
 First with the great jazzman, a medium tempo groove that slides from bebop to hard-swing, rails blazing as the jazz Coltrane blows by on a melody that climbs and flies/
 Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, cookin’ the pot, steamin’ with a pocket full of jazz soul/ Clifford Brownie Brown leads a hip Quintet, Max Roach on drums, a harmonic understudy whispering the language of the streets and the back alleys' life and love/
 Some cats just don’t give a straight face to the night—high, sad, happy, drunk, angry—moods poured out on the bandstand like rain through a skylight/ The club crowd feels every wave, every push and pull, as these cats stride into something cool, strutting like tenor giants of the ‘50s and ‘60s, leaping on a note at the Half Note jazz club/
Ruth Brown, an R&B queen with a jazz vibe in her voice, comes drifting through the doorway—rhythm and blues calling her name, she answers with a smile that cuts through the smoke and lights up the room at the Surger Shack/ She’s something else, a heartbeat of dance steps in a rhythm and blues night that never truly ends? This is not just music; it’s a city waking up with a horn section for a skyline, a doorway into sound where every mood is a stairway into every solo/
 a streetlight, a conga line in every chorus/ Jazz City isn’t a place; it’s a pulse in the air, a memory you can hear whenever the world pretends to be quiet. So lean in,  my brother, and get super hip/listen close, let the grooves pull you into their orbit/where the greats walk the stairs of time and the present keeps time with the past, one note at a time."

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