Miles

These are quotes from the book "Miles" by Quincy Troupe. I only got to read a bit of it before I felt compelled to return it to the guy I borrowed it from, but these were some good things:

"...black people in St. Louis love their music, but they want their music right. So you know what they were doing at the Riviera. You know they were getting all the way down." -- p. 9
[Hey man, white girls in Iowa City want their music right, too! God damn. I wish I'd been around for more of jazz.]

"...Dizzy was also very, very beautiful and I loved him and still do today." -- p. 10
[I have this concept of Dizzy Gillespie.... he was the coolest dude ever.]

"...I remember it also like some kind of adventure, some kind of weird joy, too. I gues that experience took me someplace in my head I hadn't been before." -- p. 11
[I love those experiences. I wish I had more of them, but they're hard to seek out. They have to just occur.]

"He wasn't supposed to be smart, smarter than them. It hasn't changed too much; things are like that even today." -- p. 12
[I'm a white person who knows too many smart non-white people to think like that. People are smart - and not smart - and it has nothing to do with skin colour or ancestry. Nothing at all.]

"They sent us to war to fight and die for them over there; killed us like nothing over here. And it's still like that today. Now, ain't that a bitch." -- p. 15
[I hate being part of this "they." I fucking hate it. It makes me angry and sad and frustrated... gah.]

"My brother Vernon was born the year the stock market crashed and all the rich white men started jumping out of them Wall Street windows." -- p. 15
[I just like this image.]

"And I don't think I'm arrogant, I think I'm confident of myself. Know what I want, always have known what I wanted for as long as I can remember." -- p. 19
[I can say the first sentence about myself and aspire to be able to say the second.]

"That's why I used to love to go to my grandfather's place in Arkansas. Down there out in the fields, man, you could walk with your shoes off and you wouldn't step into no pile of shit and get it all running and sticky and funky all over your feet, like in elementary school." -- p. 20
["Out here in the fields, I fight for my meals. I get my back into my living. I don't need to fight to prove I'm right. I don't need to be forgiven." -- the Who, 'Baba O'Riley' There's something about nature that's awesome and can really be connected to. I love that about being human.]

"Shit, that fish was a motherfucker." -- p. 20
[I just love these expressions.]

"That kind of sound in music, that blues, church, back-road funk kind of thing, that southern, midwestern, rural sound and rhythm. I think it started getting into my blood on them spook-filled Arkansas back-roads after dark when owls came out hooting." -- p. 29
[Oh my god. I love this music, I love that sound, and this is image is a motherfucker, if I may put it so boldly.]

"When I got into music I went all the way into music; I didn't have no time after that for nothing else." -- p. 29
[I love stuff like that. I love losing myself in something I adore.]