JAZZ

90" x48"
Oil on Canvas
2008

Some enterprising merchant discovered that they would make a huge fortune by importing slaves from Africa to America.  They transported them in such horrific, inhuman conditions, that during those journeys, millions of those Africans died.  I cannot imagine how those business creatures felt when they counted their profits.  I think they should have been put to trial, post mortem, for their crimes against humanity.

Now, Africans arrived here, strong and good humoured people.  They worked in cotton fields and on plantations and they lived together, separately from the white people, so that in their free time, or on a day off, they would get together with a few instruments, a couple of drums, clapping their hand palms, chanting their laments and joys with their inborn rhythmic talents and arts.  We are very lucky that those African people brought with them to us such a vitality and joy of life, despite all their hardship.

And so we have Jazz.  Jazz is such a loud music of bursting, of joy, and of laments.  Jazz was a very healthy injection of living energy into the American Culture.  It is like opening a window into a dark room on a sunny day.  What a bright, hot-blooded, lively burst of sounds after centuries of melancholic, doleful, cheerless “spiritual” and funerary wailings.

What else can I say?  Well I will call the waiter, then, and ask for a glass of sparkling Jazz!

Oh…a naked woman.  Are we ashamed to see a naked woman?  Besides, she is singing to us!  What a Jazz!