It's about this guy, a regular guy, like everybody else. Except his words were too big for his head. And it made him nervous. (It would make you nervous, wouldn't it?) And he tried everything to make his words smaller, so they'd fit into his brain.
He tried whistling. He tried selling picture-window ant colonies, and Bury-It-Yourself time capsules. He tried writing poetry about jazz. But nothing worked.
Until one day, when he heard about this strange way of doing radio. It seems that if you take the heebie-jeebie of Radio and mix it with the fribble-frabble of Jazz, you end up with something that takes on a life of its own. And words tossed into this mix of dreams and electricity become huge electromagnetic waves rolling across the landscape. Even the words which, up to that moment, had no other place to go.
So the man tried it- this "special radio". He took the words out of his head and sent them off on their own. And they did grow. They started wearing double-breasted suits, and appearing in small clubs across the country, complete with a 3-piece combo (featuring cello). There they'd take control of the stage and go on scatting wild ideas into the early dawn, with all the kool Katz and kittens caught up in the eternal now, simply snapping their fingers and saying, "Yes!...Yes!...Yes!"
Ken's birthday is April 13, 1920. And ya know what? The Internet Archive has him covered!
I'm stunned. "An Introduction to Stereophonic Sound"? Thought I'd never see this outside a thrift store. And here's the "Colors" album. And, it looks like, all the Word Jazz albums. More poetry, with Ringo Starr singing? Wait a minute-
Wow. I don't even know where some of this stuff comes from! Here's a Taster's Choice ad...reading "The Conqueror Worm" by Poe (hope I remember to post that, next Halloween)...an MST3K riff! Omigod...a 1966 ad for "Top Eliminator Dragstrip Set"; I already knew Ken narrated those "ding" filmstrips we saw in grade school. But ads, too, and for cool toys! No wonder he sounded so familiar when I first heard Word Jazz in the 70's. (Ok, they don't have the ads, or the filmstrip soundtrack, which we posted last year.)
This is amazing. Thank you once again, mighty Internet Archive. You are the mother of 10,000 things.
