Jazz is headed wherever all good things that endure must go...nowhere. Neither exploitative economies, social injustices nor political chaos can quiet this music. As a matter of fact, they feed it. You couldn't kill it if you tried.

Some of the lame stuff will die natural deaths and deservedly so. But collectively, as a genre, the music will survive. All good things do.

I recently moved to Georgia, in part, because the South inspires my paintings. My saddest discovering was realizing that jazz, a music I have grown to love, is difficult to find unless it's on your CD player at home. Besides an occasional concert, there aren't any clubs in my town where it can be heard. In nearby Atlanta, it's hard to find, too. Where are the juke joints and hole-in-the-walls of yesterday where the music found ears that listened! Now people talk right through sets.

Rarely is it on the radio and if it is, we won't discuss what 's played. It's not the stuff in my CD player. (How many times have I listened to Grant's "Lazy Afternoon"? Of late, I am mesmerized by Coltrane's "Psalm" and love Roy Hargrove's "Roy Allan".)

A brother I recently met at a book reading was most eloquent in explaining his theory on what happened to the music in the South. He told me "this music, that crawled as a field holler, grew into the blues and went west to New Orleans." And there, as he tells it, blues met the marching band and jazz was born. She was carried by the Mississippi River up to St. Louis, Kansas City, Chicago and Detroit and then eastward she went, to New York. But she never made it back south, he said. She never came full circle.

I would love it if she could come full circle. Will it happen? I don't know. It doesn't look good. That whole era has passed us. Many of the musicians who made that great music were born down here. Now they are born some of everywhere - even Bulgaria. And that's not a bad thing. It comes second and third hand when it used to come straight from the experience that informed the music. Surely all of this has been discussed before. The music will evolve. Into what? Who's to say? But maybe I'll have to open my own lil hole-in-the-wall so it can make it back to the town in which I live if no where else.