New boks by Henry Grimes and William Parker

Henry Grimes, William Parker
Two double bass players have published a book each for the Cologne based publishing house Buddy's Knife.

Henry Grimes disappeared from the landscape of jazz for 30 years during which he lived, homeless or in poor quarters, at the West Coast while being presumed dead by the jazz world. In 2002 he was re-discovered and since May 2003 performs again on the international jazz stages. In the years before he filled hundreds of notebooks with thoughts, stories and mainly poems.

For the book he selected about 50 of these poems (Henry Grimes: signs along the road. poems; Cologne 2007 [ buddy's knife ], poems in English, preface in German and English). They are lyrical , contemplative, philosophical, dreamful. One feels the rhythms of jazz, the associations of free improvisations. And in "monk music" (1984) there is even a homage to jazz and to Thelonious Monk. The guitarist Marc Ribot wrote a preface worth reading, explaining the situation in which the poems were written and how he, Ribot, read them and thus got to know more about his colleague and friend Henry Grimes.

In 2002, Grimes was given his first double bass after his long recess from William Parker who is the author of the second book published by Buddy's Knife. It contains poems, philosophical thoughts about music, life and society, autobiographical texts, reflections about jazz critics, Charles Mingus, or music for strings. They are lyrical parables about the experience of music and its relation to life. (William Parker: who owns music?, Cologne 2007 [ buddy's knife ], text in English, preface in German and English).