Take Five: ...Feels so good

My love for jazz music began since I was in high school, having been immersed into the world of "progressive rock". During my early college years I studied the history of jazz and many years later taught also a course in the the history of this quintessentially American music. Jazz like a Baktinian concept of carnival; it is "carnivalesque". Mikhail Baktin is a Russian philosopher of structuralism, by the way-- discovered by the West through a "semiotic turn" in the study of language and in the emerging interest in the study of "discourse" and the view that everything is a text.

Back to jazz and "improvisation". It takes a structure and deconstruct that structure into many forms. It is a manifestation of the one and many. And after travelling into the "many-ness" of experience, comes back to the struturedness of the Oneness of the form. (You might think that this is a "spiritual" interpretation of jazz-- maybe. Art imitates life, some would say).

One of my favourite modern jazz pieces is this one by Chuck Mangione's below. Good for us in times of economic trouble in which the United Nations said that globally 50 million people have lost their jobs, in a globalizing world of "zombie politics" and "casino capitalism" in a world of "blue ocean strategies invested with sharks and piranhas" and postmodern "indentured servitude" in which humaniods are fed with bread and circuses.

Enjoy the piece -- feel good.