Footprints

I was working yesterday on a review of Warne Marsh's All Music and got entangled in an extended metaphor that, while I quite like it, I had to cut from the final copy in order to keep at least somewhat within my word limit. It may work best as a fragment, and it may only really come to any meaning whatsoever if I hand it over to the possibility of it becoming a conceit. So I post the happy (i.e., hopeful) little fragment here, and invite you to test its resilience.

Lester Young's feet never touched the ground. Coleman Hawkins was a 400 lb., 6'8" kingpin, mantled in an impeccably tailored suit and wielding a diamond-headed walking cane, who strutted down his streets with unflappable grace. The length of his legs and the size of his feet meant that Dexter Gordon's stride, no matter how deliberate, invariably broke into a jog, a run, a sprint. Sonny Rollins lopes and sidles; sometimes he waits around corners and hops out into an approaching pedestrian's path. John Coltrane charges ahead, his whole body titled slightly forward: shoulders pressed up towards his ears, chest out, head tucked, gaze focused… where? Warne Marsh is a man walking backwards with great alacrity and purpose. The initial impression his manner of "progress" leaves with you is that the man himself is some sort of daredevil, as perverse as he is fearless. Only later are you able to perceive how Marsh's gait is that of a man obsessed with the conservation of motion. So obsessed, in fact, that no system which promises to balance what God preserves and what humanity would squander can be too elaborate.