some essays ::

“Using an enormous tone, a breathy, enveloping vibrato, and terrific glissandos, he constructed castles of sound that were romantic but never sentimental, luxuriant but tasteful, yearning but free of self-pity.”

⏤ Whitney Balliet on Ben Webster, 1973

hal klopper's sampling of essays

Birds

They’re cute, birds. They chirp. And they fly. Wings and feathers. What a revolution. Or rotation. Or…flap. What a flap.

Cymbalism

Maybe it began like this: a million years ago, give or take, our hero heard the thump-thump of the heart of the woman he was caving up with.

Intersection

A man with no tolerance for intolerance, he is fundamentally opposed to fundamentalism, whatever its form.

Calvin Crest

We stand in a collective footprint, peering toward the source of shadows we did not create but which are projections onto and through us.

Kneed Attention

I tell him that I saw an elephant break loose from Barnum & Bailey’s, and a bunch of us had it cornered but it turned suddenly and crashed into my knee and busted my ACL.