 |
 |
 |
| Some of the greatest minds I’ve ever known held court while sitting on empty milk crates in the parking lot of ghetto liquor stores. It was at their feet that I first embraced the love of knowledge, and through their tutelage, learned to define self-worth in my own terms. These are the “Eulipians”—writers, poets, musicians, painters, and uncommon drunks—those shade-tree philosophers who contemplate the fungus within the cracks of society. While these obscure intellectuals stand well outside the mainstream of academy, I’ve watched with astonished delight as their students infuse the various philosophies of these ghetto thinkers into the mainstream of human knowledge. As one such student, I fully embrace the proposition that knowledge is free, and will, thus, transcend attempts to be contained through barriers of caste and privilege, leaving man’s innate thirst for knowledge free to overwhelm his lust for stupidity. It is in this context that I relate this message from the bowels of society. |
| MILES We knew him as Miles, the Black Prince of style, his nature fit jazz to a tee. Laid back and cool, a low threshold for fools, he set the tone of what a jazzman should be. Short on words, and unperturbed, about what the people thought; frozen in time, drenched in the sublime, of the passion his sweet horn had wrought. Solemn to the bone, distant and torn, even Trane could scarcely get in; I can still hear the tone of that genius who mourned, that precious note that he couldn't quite bend. Eric L.Wattree |
| PASSION She's dark, she’s passionate, and she's lovely, but she doesn't know herself: She doesn't know the extent her smiling eyes devastate this love-sick heart; the way they dance in the moonlight, subtly beckon, and betray the depth of her sultry passion. She doesn't know the ecstasy of pleading moans on a humid, Summer night, or the maddening pleasure of glistening bodies entwined in erotic flight. And She doesn't know the hot breath of passion, as it whispers between her thighs; the gentle kiss, the sting of bliss, the pain of pleasure that burns inside. She doesn't know the agony of lust while suspended in endless time, as she screams for sweet release, while desperately clingling to the sweet sublime. And She doesn't know of frantic begging for that of which she's run, of the animal that leaps inside of her, as flowing chills begin to come. She doesn't know the embrace of madness as her trembling loins begin to spill; She doesn't know of love, but on this night, her pleading eyes, say she will. Eric L. Wattree |
| Dexter Gordon |
| John Coltrane |
 |
| Miles Davis |