Have you heard of Ken Nordine? Back in the ‘60s while in the Navy I got hooked on Ken Nordine’s Word Jazz. To hear Ken Nordine speak or read with someone tapping bongo drums or playing a flute lightly in the background was very – er, very mind expanding. Your first thought, if you were over 18 then, might be “The Beat Generation!”
But now I am not sure it was the Beat Generation. I think it may have been the Beat Generation packaged and marketed into LP albums.
I thought Ken Nordine was good. I have several albums by him speaking on and on. I remember one that stands out about the lonely junk man in the junk yard and how he calculates and shrewdly estimates the worth of all the junk around him.
But getting back to the what Word Jazz is. Music Jazz is improvisation with musical sounds… jazz musicians are willing to do progressive and innovative sounds with their music instruments.
In that case, shouldn’t Word Jazz be making improvisation with the written word? To try new things with sentences and with the help of visual effects – well, improvise.
Isn’t that is what some of us bloggers do? Most of us had no formal journalism higher education (I know of one exception, my son Rocky, he has a degree in Journalism and I think has an excellent blog). We do what we can to share what we want to share. And the good thing, or bad thing, according to how you look at it, we know no rules to go by…. Which is good in a way – we can break all the rules and not know any better, we are not limited or bound by what we can do. We can get away with things!
And of course, we can make faux pas jazz too, which I have proved countless of times.
