Like free jazz can be, boxing is direct, visceral. There exists both jazz and boxing sub-cultures -- historically sports and arts have been strong alternatives to mainstream economics in the black community. To an untrained ear jazz can sound crazy, to an untrained eye boxing can seem mad -- as the ear and eye becomes trained one learns the complex patterns that underlie the boxing match or the jazz solo -- the theater of Kinetic Gesture -- a kaleidoscope of intelligent quick-silver action generates a structure of intense beauty. For the body becomes poetry in motion whether through a keyboard or in the ring -- complex patterned action generates a poetic time and space -- violent, yet dancelike, uncivilized yet graceful, raw yet sophisticated. The oldtimers always referred to a great improviser as someone who tells a story -- a great boxer tells a story but not with words or notes but in a refined language of will and transposed aggression. These acts of self expression - fighting and playing a musical instrument -- a neurological dance -- the placement of fluid reflexes that reaches into the rhythmic pattern of a deeper intensity of human motivation -- Is it a madness? The jazz solo speaks about the beauty of the neurological system for it must mirror what it comes out of. Thus in both dances (jazz and boxing) we come to the essence (improvisation) which is the unfoldmenf of the space-time of each -- a system of symbols that generates the language of each -- blue notes and blood -- the sensations that dance brings and the rhythmic firing of cells in the brain -- A ritual out of time explores the parameters of being in time -- the essence of the chromatic scale as it transposes being or the animal lust of the boxing crowd as it senses the knockout of time -- being, will, cunning, aggression, the sweet science, placement of tones, hangin' on by some psychic edge. < back^ home ^

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