THE JAZZ TAROT

Your tonality card
 is the King of Trumpets.

As you might guess, this is an auspicious beginning,

A fanfare that may announce a royal entrance,

Or may signal danger, or both.

 (We will come back to the significance of the King of Trumpets by itself and as your tonality card)

Sure enough, the next two cards are more royalty.

Not only that but brothers of the same suit!

Cards in tension, the King of Saxophones (often pictured as a Hawk)

opposite the President of Saxophones.

The more prosaic interpretation is

A good natured but fierce competition,

one harmonic and one melodic, one wide and throaty and the other smoothly humming,

calling and responding with another call.

But the deep reading identifies a balance of two approaches.

You see here how the President is holding his saxophone sideways?

This is the powerful energy of underplaying, a quality also associated with

the Black Prince of Trumpets and the Count of Rhythms.

Here The President indicates an indirect approach balanced by the firm structural sounding of the Trumpet King,

Even the same suit can clash in rhythm and harmony.

If one of these Princes had been the Bird of Saxophones we would

sense a mild polarity, but with exciting consequences.

You must sometimes get in awkward and asymmetrical positions

in order to see outside the boundaries of your situation.

This arrangement of cards, so far, is rare and rather grand.

The King of Trumpets is your Tonality card,

and B flat is a dark but durable key.

Something big is going to happen.

In your counterpoint position you have the President and King of Saxophones

indicating a meeting of two great minds who think differently.

By the way, the two jacks or Princes of Saxophones

are not in as much tension as President and King.

They rarely appear together.

They go their separate ways, remaining brothers in the same suit.

They are known as the Giant Prince and the Sainted Prince of Saxophones.

Now we come to your Harmony card, 

The Dark Gentleman of Keys.

This represents inconsistent brilliance and future vision.

If you had drawn The High Priest of Keys, instead,

there would have been good feedback between him

and both the King and the Sainted Prince of Saxophones,

indicating a short but fantastically creative period.

The rest of that suit includes the Blind Priest of Keys, 

this of course indicates some form of virtuosity under duress,

and the Righteous Father of Keys, pictured with a wide smile.

You always like to see him and the Trumpet King pop up together.

Next is your Trump card.

You have drawn the Brown Prince of Trumpets.

This card in this position reminds you how little time you have.

If you had drawn the The Black Prince of Trumpets here

it would indicate a long journey through different time zones.

This is very unusual, to have two trumpets and four saxophones on the board.

All this power needs a Conductor, and that is your next card,

which turns out to be more royalty, the Duke of Bridges.

This is a very good omen. See how elegantly he is dressed,

pictured with a pen in his hand, composing at the keys.

Your Minor arcana over here, include

The Three of Horns represented persistence

 the Seven of Steps representing innovation

the Four of Hands representing discipline and cooperation

and the Five of Takes, indicating a period of rest which is

at odds with all the other cards.

Now for your Bass card and Time card.

You have drawn the Baron of Ming

and the Messenger of Art.

This pairing represents a strong but volatile relationship,

and in this position might mean a hypothetical meeting

that may or may not happen.

Looking at the entire array,

this is an auspicious time in which your every breath,

your every muscle, your reach, your strength,

you foresight and your ability to listen

will be put to a thrilling test of skill and discipline.

There are many good signs in this reading that you will succeed.

Jazz is my Religion
Jazz is the closest thing I have to a religion, and it is the thing I am closest to, other than people to whom I am devoted, many of whom are sisters and brothers in Jazz. I could not be very close to someone who vehemently disliked jazz but I am evangelical about welcoming anyone into the fold. I am not religious in the usual sense. I recognize the difference between religion and devotion, as I recognize the differences between beliefs and knowledge. Yet both positive and negative aspects of religion also appear in my devotion to jazz. While it makes me feel connected to something larger than myself, Jazz also asks for sacrifice. Like being a monk or a missionary, being a jazz musician is not very lucrative, and even those musicians who make a living at it spent many years not making a living at it. I suppose some jazz musicians become so frustrated that they “lose faith” get civil service jobs or like me, become professors and at least temporarily become bitter about the struggle. But jazz has always drawn me back, much to the dismay of certain people who thought my career as a writer or scholar was sacrificed to almighty Jazz.
            One of the positive things I think religion gives some people is a feeling of humble gratitude at having something to hold on to when everything else in life turns to shit. This is how I feel about Jazz, after many years of being more to less deeply involved in studying it and playing it. But I suppose the way in which jazz is most like a religion for me is in the certainty and sense of purpose it gives. I am certain that it is a good thing to learn another Ellington or Monk composition, as I imagine some Christians seem certain about praying or reading the Bible. When in doubt about what to do, I know that studying jazz and practicing to be able to play it are things worth doing. Neither prayer nor Jazz counts as truly necessary activities, in that they arguably don’t actually change anything in the physical universe. While one could claim that deity-oriented religions are obviously doing a lot better than Jazz at surviving, it seems obvious to me that all music can make a greater contribution to human survival and well-being than the accumulative effect of most religions, which survive partly through psychic intimidation, such as the threat of eternal damnation. This brings me to a major difference between religion and devotion to Jazz. While religious dogma is often harmful to both believers and persecuted non-believers, Jazz dogma is only harmful to jazz musicians. The music can’t hurt you, but struggling to play it can. If you don’t know the blues when you start, you know them soon enough.
     Now for some testifying. In 1976 I was 19 and going through my “beat” period, reading poetry and Kerouac novels, listening to jazz and trying to learn to play piano.  Sensing that I needed a journey of some kind on which to contemplate my future, I took a Greyhound bus across the country. Looking back on it now I realize the idea and the energy to do such a thing coincided with a manic episode I didn’t know I was having.  It was ostensibly a pilgrimage to Walden Pond but it included my first trip to New York City and Boston. One of my most vivid memories from that journey took place somewhere in the Harvard/Cambridge area on a Sunday afternoon.  I had come down hard from the mania and was falling into a depression I didn’t know I was having. I was almost broke and still social enough to feel lonely so I went to a place where a local jazz group was playing.  As soon as I heard them joyously launch into “In a Mellow Tone” I was lifted up, out of my loneliness, out of my anxiety and depression. They were not very technically skilled musicians, but they meant what they played, and they swung. The 50-something black man playing tenor saxophone winked at my 19 year old self as if he knew that I knew what he had been “talking about” in his solo.
Sitting there in historic Boston, contemplating how the music I most loved had the stain of slavery on it, I had an epiphany. It was not a conversion experience, I had already been converted and was still in that sophomoric phase of jazz snobbery. But that Sunday at the jam session, far from home, was the beginning of a kind of faith, a faith that Jazz was worth living for. It didn’t matter if I became famous or at the top of the field or even that I become successful financially at it, I just wanted to get good enough to sit in with those guys in that bar in Boston. I was in church in that Sunday, not because a great jazz musician was playing, but precisely because it was just an afternoon jam session of local players. 
 In all the jazz writing I have read, both criticism and history, there is little mention of the fact that the majority of jazz activity that goes on is not professional. Though we can only put rough numbers to this local jazz scene, we can be sure that in bulk it vastly outweighs the big-time arena in any terms: number of players, number of gigs played, and even number of audience members if we count school programs and the total number of local fans attending across the country. Ultimately, jazz is alive because of this local scene and not only in the U.S. but worldwide. This is my church, and it is a more diverse community than most congregations.
From the musicians I met early on in my own local jazz community I somehow got the idea that not only should a player strive for technique and knowledge, but to develop a voice, to play “like yourself,” which really means that improvising within this paradoxical “tradition of innovation” was a way of finding yourself. Playing like yourself means being musically honest, a transcendent Mecca that you face toward every time you play.  In this sense, it is like prayer. It becomes like meditation when you are free of intruding thoughts and are playing and listening to everyone else’s playing in present time. It doesn’t happen that often perhaps to most players, but once it does, it is a kind of ecstatic state that you want to return to, and you can’t find it by playing the same thing you played when you experienced it before. Most musicians will tell you that after a good improvisation they don’t really remember what they played. It is not what they played that leads back to that transcendent state; it is the act of trying to have ideas and be musical in present time with as little conscious deliberation as one has when carrying on an important conversation with a friend, or testifying in church.

I am not sure that my appreciation and devotion to jazz was anything more than a series of historical coincidences that led to me getting positive reinforcement, good neurotransmitters and friendship. In giving me what it did, though, Jazz was always there for me when nothing else made sense, and I think the discipline of trying to play it helped me tremendously in navigating the extreme emotional landscape I had to travel as an undiagnosed bi-polar person. As such, jazz saved my life. Broke and lonely at the end of a manic trip across the country with almost no sleep for a couple of weeks, I might have fallen into an abyss of Depression I could not crawl out of. Instead I had something larger than myself to live for, and while my faith in Jazz has wavered, I have never forgotten where my church is.