August 20, 2021
Jerry Jazz Musician (jerryjazzmusician.com) is a non-commercial website you’ll want to bookmark. It’s all things jazz curated by Joe Maita, founded and published in Portland, Oregon in 1997. Music, culture, history, art, poetry, interviews, fiction, Maita shares the best in jazz. If it were a museum it would be the Smithsonian; if it were a book it would be Carl Sagan’s Cosmos; a magazine National Geographic. Now you get the idea of the quality represented here.
The name came from one of Woody Allen’s stand-up routines from the 1960’s. Called “Unhappy Childhood,” Allen describes traveling the subway to his clarinet lessons dressed as “Jerry Jazz Musician,” that might have included a beret and probably a beard, if he’d been able to grow one at the age of 15, when he began. This may have been Allen's first acting role. Joe Maita doesn’t have to act, his fascination with everything jazz is real and natural and you’ll see it when you visit his website.
The summer issue is the poetry collection, which includes a poem from my book Jazz Lines, “Sweet Jazz O’Mine.” My lighthearted dissection of jazz instrumentation stands on tiptoe trying to reach the height of insightful odes by true poets, to the giants of jazz lore like Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Miles Davis, and many worthy others. I’m so excited to be included!
This is the second verse from Jazz Lines that Maita published at jerryjazzmusician.In the June 24, 2021 issue Maita included “Teach Me Tonight,” under the title “Thelonious Monk…and Five Poems.”
