Don't you hear Miles' trumpet float like reefer smoke and Coltrane's tenor bourbon smooth? Didn't you hear that Cellars By Starlight has become more ephemeral than that. Yes it's gone. You can fire up your scooter or an mp3 and still hear a Paul Chambers' bass line after all these years; but you can't find those piles of paper yellowing in the attic, clipped for the odd notebook, unopened and forgotten. The energy poured into the scene with that inky black, sooty print by over all those years in the pages of the Phoenix, well those writers they have gone. It got on your fingers because you were flipping through it every week to see who was featured ( the lucky bastards), and what was happening in the clubs. It got in your brain, with pages and pages of ads and listings. It was awesome and tactile like it was a living thing and they kept it going for forty years. And pretty much if you name one writer you got to name them all. They were all great, at least in enthusiasm or talent or both. And it was that support from the newspapermen and women whoever they were, and the zeal of the writers that helped keep things here so competitive and vibrant. Well not only the Phoenix, though they did have radio WFNX, now freshly underground. It was also the WBCNs, and the Boston Rocks now long gone. There's no more rocking the gnomon copy with a fresh 'zine. Is it punk? Is it a flash mob? I wouldn't really know. But I do know that though Swift's and the Rat are cellars buried and gone, there are still basements and radios, the Dig and blogs(?!), and there's always somebody banging on those drums. Is that Philly Jo Jones? Is it Jonathan Perry or Brett Milano? No it's Jimmy Cobb.
Thanks so much to the Phoenix for all the good times, and for the music to come. The king is dead. Long live the music scene!