Abstract
We move from the subaiterity of chapter 6 to a focus on myth in this one and bridge from rural ritual to urban conjuration by way of Euro-Instrumentation. The question of tills chapter Is that of the codification of myth as memory for life when one lives under a death sentence. Juxtaposing votiou veve drawing in the ritual place of the peristils (shrines) of Haiti and saxophone or trumpet playing in the after-hours space of the clubs of New Orleans or Chicago may not seem to represent likely linkage for mythic enquiry. Myth, after all, Is normally thought as narrative, a trick and talent of the tongue. Corn- meal Incantation and bent-brass improvisation are titillations of the hand, serving talents of the feet (to the degree both function to ener gize and direct dance). Why explore myth in the key of sonic beat and visual beacon when the subject Is story? But then myth Is not mere story, but the organization of contradiction into the flow of representation. Myth closes the gap of existence with a hypothesis about living. It imagines a living of meaning over the void of absurdity. Charles Long’s long standing styling of myth as mode of making do in the face of mortality issues especially In a consideration of the human capacity to codify rupture Into resilience. It is the category of the “break”—between worlds, between persons, between human and humus, between now and then—that pushes this Inquiry towards Its evident fascinations.
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Did John’s music kill him?
—A. B. Spellman, Four Lives in the Bebop Business
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© 2015 James W. Perkinson
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Perkinson, J.W. (2015). Praying with the Corn/Playing on the Horn: Reading Jazz at the Crossroads of the Country and the City. In: Political Spirituality in an Age of Eco-Apocalypse. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137489814_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137489814_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-70108-7
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