Vispo/print (for sale): No Disagreement / Bonkers weather / Sonny Rollins an' all that Jazz / My Jazz book

 

No Disagreement, RTomens, 2026

A4 on 160gsm paper

For sale: £90
please email if interested

rtomens(at)gmail.com

Here's a print from a typed original which has been typed over again. Sorry if that sounds confusing but I'm half-awake. I typed the face then printed on a copy of that piece and typed on it again. Is that any clearer? Do I know what I'm talking about...?...ha-ha-ha! 

It's June and I have my winter jumper on because here in London the maximum temperature today is predicted to be 16c dropping to 14 this afternoon...FFS! Two weeks ago we were in the middle of a heatwave! Do such swings in the weather affect one's state of mind? What do you think? Everyone perks up when we get the first warm, sunny Spring days. Then extreme (for the UK) heat can confine you to the flat (it does me anyway...I mean...have you tried being on the 390 bus in the Summer? Of course you haven't, but suffice to say it's illegal to transport animals in those temperatures. So now we get cosy in the evening...under blankets...in June!

Sadly, Sonny Rollins passed away recently (well, we all gotta go sometime - except Marshall Allen, who's 102!). Sonny was one of the big hitters in Jazz, in case you didn't know. He played tenor saxophone. Getting into Jazz in the early 80s as I did his muscular tone would boom and bounce around my bedsit, filling the tiny space with fluid sonic contortions, the likes of which were still fairly new to me. This was one of the first albums of his that I bought. 

I probably got it from Ray's Jazz Shop on Shaftsbury Avenue. Here I am looking in the window circa '81. 

Well, you know, we thought Jazz was the coolest thing in the world...which it was...therefore full engagement with it made us the members of the Coolest Gang in the World! (heh-heh). 

Twenty years later I got around to writing a book about Jazz. Or to be more precise, my experience of Jazz. It's called Points of Departure and there's a review here. Despite learning a lot from the expert writers and even some academics I could never profess to be either so my writings had to come from a purely personal perspective, in the tradition of fanzines. Jazz is, after all, like all artforms, about our subjective interpretation...as we see and hear it. 

It's been said by others and even myself, that my visual poetry often feels like an extension of all that Jazz..it's influence and inspiration if not exactly the improvisational technique. If I had the typewriter equivalent of Sonny Rollins' chops...I'd be a master of the art!

TTFN!