Laura Ruby Artist

PILGRIM GALLERY

Say Jazz–I'm Always Thinking of Chaucer
14-panel print

Say Jazz–I’m Always Thinking of Chaucer incorporates and interweaves Chaucer’s medieval Canterbury Tales — his narration, his story’s pilgrims, and the stories those pilgrims told —with Tony Quagliano’s poem Say Jazz and the contemporary stories that poet Tony Quagliano told of contemporary literary and jazz pilgrims. The series is about medieval manuscripts, early books, and musicians — and twenty and twenty-first century poetry, jazz, and painting.

On one level Say Jazz–I’m Always Thinking of Chaucer is about the travels of disparate medieval characters yearning to reach Canterbury on a springtime pilgrimage. Along the way these pilgrims entertain themselves with stories from many literary genres. The Canterbury Tales is built upon an improvisational structure: Chaucer penned the words, but the narrator, host, and pilgrims took over the theme and the shape of those tales.

So, too, the artwork’s jazz musicians spin their own improvisational constructions to Quagliano’s poetic lines that run through the panels, the musicians stepping up for their solos at a captured moment in time. Engaged improvisational jazz keeps the tune-memory in play and borrows from the wealth of music that precedes it, resulting in new, exciting, on-the-spot, musical configurations.

MILES

HORACE SILVER

GREAT DAY IN HARLEM

BIRD

JOE PASS

MONK

RAHSAAN ROLAND KIRK

DIZZY

MINGUS

03 SONNY

TRANE

Say Jazz

to the jazz documentary film-
maker
who announces he no longer
uses the word jazz
go ahead use the word jazz
it's ok the word jazz
afro-american music might mean
jazz
docu-verite might mean
movie
use the word
you want
the jazz men the music
makers
who say don't say jazz
don't own the word jazz
they don't own the word
jazz
use the word jazz
if you want to
don't lose
your words
don't shuffle
your words away
use the words you want
say jazz if you want to
say jazz if
you want to say jazz
say jazz

--Tony Quagliano

Say Jazz–I'm Always Thinking of Chaucer

SONNY

ORNETTE

CHARLIE HADEN