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Jazz and the Ambiguity of Influence, Pt. 19: On the Spiritual in Jazz

Spirituality is a vague, catch-all word, but like the Justice said about another phenomenon, you tend to know it when you see it. And so it was, when I was watching a jazz documentary -- I think it might have been "A Great Day in Harlem" -- and Dizzy Gillespie enters a room where his fellow jazz artists are gathered, and he was wearing a dashiki with a small bag of amulets around his neck, and the vibe of warmth and humor with which he greeted everyone just struck me as signifying so much about what goes into jazz beyond the music itself. We've been through so much together , it said. And we lived to tell about it! A band of brothers, I guess. But what was the battle? And what makes it spiritual? Spirituality in jazz is a lot of things, some explicit and others implicit. Let's start with the implicit part, which is the part I think I was alluding to above. What I'm saying is that if even if we're just considering good time jazz of the swing and groove varie...

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