Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sax (for Eric Dolphy)
by John Menaghan
It's Saturday afternoon and I'm reading
and listening to KJAZ when this music
comes through the speakers that's like
nothing I've ever heard before so
I drop the novel I've been lost in,
fling my feet over the side of the easy
chair to really listen because really
there isn't any kind of choice so much
is happening on the record whatever
it is with the saxophone sending out
signals from some black hole in a galaxy
nobody's named yet it's so far out there
and the rhythms so goddamn cosmic I'm
losing my grip on the armchair, the earth,
the concept of gravity while the tune
spirals further and further from melody
as if it just had to keep changing to stay
alive when suddenly it's all over and I
hear Bud Spangler breathing "Wow" through
his microphone and telling us all out
in radioland that was Eric Dolphy back
in his early sixties' wild, experimental
phase so I'm just trying to catch my
breath as I re-enter the atmosphere,
thinking: thank God, thank you, Eric,
and thanks, Bud, for telling me,
bro, because you know I might
almost have been afraid to ask.
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