The '90s were extremely diverse, almost like a laboratory of the new century. There was much experimenting around, in politics, economics, gender and family structures, and also in fashion. There was a cloud of possibilities which kept us all dizzy.
In those days before hearing Charlie Parker and Dizzy, and before learning of the so-called bebop era--by the way, I have some thoughts about that word, "bebop"--my first jazz hero ever, jazz improvisor hero, was Lester Young. I was a big "Lester Young-oholic," and all of my buddies were Lester Young-oholics. We'd get together and dissect, analyze, discuss, and listen to Lester Young's solos for hours and hours and hours. He was our god.
I saw the sky and sea and sand and the flickering flames of the bonfire through my tears. All at once, it rushed into my head with tremendous speed, and made me feel dizzy. It was beautiful. Everything that happened was shockingly beautiful, enough to make you crazy.
Education has become a prisoner of contemporaneity. It is the past, not the dizzy present, that is the best door to the future.
And anyone who thinks they can talk about quantum theory without feeling dizzy hasn't yet understood the first thing about it.
Once you start losing reality, when you start losing reality with yourself, sometimes people just get dizzy.
I didn't get dizzy, but I love working with horses.
I always called him the Dizzy Dean of music, he was so belligerent and braggadocio. . . But one thing I always noticed about Jelly, he would back everything he said by what he could do.
A lot of people call Dizzy old fashioned but so is the bible.
Even the best critical writing on Emily Dickinson underestimates her. She is frightening. To come to her directly from Dante, Spenser, Blake, and Baudelaire is to find her sadomasochism obvious and flagrant. Birds, bees, and amputated hands are the dizzy stuff of this poetry. Dickinson is like the homosexual cultist draping himself in black leather and chains to bring the idea of masculinity into aggressive visibility.
If youre serious about what youre doing, youve got to keep your head and follow your instinct. Maybe you wont reach the same dizzy heights as others, but you will get something back.
I went home each night dizzy and sick. He was murdering me with the sound of his voice.
Tis looking downward makes one dizzy.
For all that we have done, as a civilization, as individuals, the universe is not stable, and nor is any single thing within it. Stars consume themselves, the universe itself rushes apart, and we ourselves are composed of matter in constant flux. Colonies of cells in temporary alliance, replicating and decaying and housed within, an incandescent cloud of electrical impulse and precariously stacked carbon code memory. This is reality, this is self knowledge, and the perception of it will, of course, make you dizzy.
Ornette Coleman is doing the only really new thing in jazz since the innovations in the mid-forties of Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and those of Thelonious Monk
