Word: seeing
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...SPRING of 1942, two jazz collectors followed up a rumor that a survivor of the legendary Buddy Bolden jazz band was living and working as a day laborer in the rice fields of rural Louisiana. They drove all the way across the country hoping just to see him, to speak to him, to learn what New Orleans jazz had been before the turn of the century, before the first World War, before the "dixieland" musicians and the arrangers of the swing era had diluted and transformed its raw power and beauty almost beyond recognition...
English teenagers mobbed him, trying to touch him, to see his face, to hear his voice. He played before packed concert halls, mesmerizing huge audiences with the simple, lyrical beauty of his horn, receiving wildly enthusiastic ovations at the end of each number. What was the magic of this frail little black man from the back streets of New Orleans? What was there in his music that spoke its message to the hearts of these Englishmen, Swedes, Danes, Germans, and Japanese as it had spoken to his own people for almost 50 years...
...SILENT for a time, looking out the window at a pigeon that was perched on the ledge. Then he looked at his right thumb, the callus which had been formed by more than fifty years of clarinet playing. "See that callus?" he said after a moment. "Slow Drag got calluses like that on all his fingers from playin' the bass...
...know what you means, but I don't think it's that way. It ain't that way at all. I mean, this is just people fighting among themselves, you know? They get into arguments and all that foolishness. See, they got these little gangs, they always fighting one another. The guys from the ninth ward got their gang and they always splitting' skulls with the cats in this housin' project here, you know? Now, prob'ly the dude that did all the shootin' was from the projects and seen one of these ninth ward cats who'd just beat...
...Well, me, I'm used to this shit. You'll prob'ly see two or three more shootin's before this parade's over. But I grew up with this, man. It's just part of my life. There's always been shit like that going on around me. Cats gettin' cut to ribbons with knives, razors, guns, fightin...