blue and orange birds and silver bells
“When they’re dancing where the lights are soft and low,
All the glory of the sunset’s purple glow
Is reflected in your eyes where beauty dwells,
And I hear blue and orange birds and silver bells.”
—Blue and Orange Birds and Silver Bells, recorded by Della Reese with the Jimmy Hamilton Orchestra in 1953.
a shiny pale-blue sky
“I got into bed and lay there . . . thinking of that picture advertising the Biscuits Like Mother Makes, as Fresh in the Tropics as in the Motherland, Packed in Airtight Tins. . . .
There was a little girl in a pink dress eating a large yellow biscuit studded with currants—what they called a squashed-fly biscuit—and a little boy in a sailor-suit trundling a hoop, looking back over his shoulder at the little girl. There was a tidy green tree and a shiny pale-blue sky, so close that if the little girl had stretched her arm up she could have touched it. (God is always near us. So cosy.) And a high, dark wall behind the little girl. . . .
And that used to be my idea of what England was like.
‘And it is like that, too,’ I thought”
—Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 1934.
two spots
“There was a spot on the ceiling. I looked at it and it became two spots. The two spots moved very rapidly, one away from the other. When they were about six inches apart they remained stationary and grew larger. Two black eyes were staring at me. I stared back at them. Then I had to blink and the whole business began all over again.”
—Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 1934.
the grey-brown or grey-green sea
“There was always a little grey street leading to the stage-door of the theatre and another little grey street where your lodgings were, and rows of little houses with chimneys like the funnels of dummy steamers and smoke the same colour as the sky; and a grey stone promenade running hard, naked and straight by the side of the grey-brown or grey-green sea; . . .”
—Jean Rhys, on England, in Voyage in the Dark, 1934.
that sable colour
“I liked the room and the red carnations on the table and the way he talked and his clothes—especially his clothes. It was a pity about my clothes, but anyway they were black. ‘She wore black. Men delighted in that sable colour, or lack of colour.’ A man called “Coronet” wrote that, or was it a man called “A Peer?””
—Jean Rhys, from Voyage in the Dark, 1934.
Being black
“Being black is warm and gay, being white is cold and sad.”
—Jean Rhys, from Voyage in the Dark, 1934.
the black hole of desolation
“Few who heard it could forget Baker’s version of “The Thrill Is Gone,” which he counted off at a tempo so slow that the music seemed to float in space. ‘This is the end, so why pretend . . . ,’ he sang, pulling listeners into the black hole of desolation where he seemed the happiest. Then came a trumpet chorus so drawn out and full of silence that it felt as though he were groping through the dark for the next one.”
—James Gavin, from Deep in a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker, by James Gavin, 2002.
like a star
“The music on this album remains hung in the night sky like a star.”
—French jazz critic Laurent Goddet, on the album The Touch of Your Lips, 1979; quoted in Deep in a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker, by James Gavin, 2002.
blue diamonds of jazz
“From the damaged lips of this broken, defeated, skinny pathetic man emerges, night after night, a music sublime, luminous, and lyrical. From his voyage to the ends of hell, Chet Baker has resurrected, in the day, the blue diamonds of jazz. . . .”
—French writer Philippe Adler, on the later years of trumpeter Chet Baker; quoted in Deep in a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker, by James Gavin, 2002.
in dreams
“I’m not sure why but colors in dreams aren’t very clear or vibrant—there’s not much contrast. That’s why most people think they dream in black and white, which is rather silly because it’s so artificial and a long way from the way the brain actually understands the world. . . . Color is a difficult thing to remember. What I mean is that if you ask someone to describe something they’ve just seen, often they’ll make a mistake about the color. My wife just came in. Do you remember the color of her clothes?
Black pants and . . .
And her top? Was it red, green, or white? It was beige! People say, ‘Ah! Today I dreamt in color,’ but this is only when those colors took on some dramatic importance—like blood for example.”
—Roman Polanski, from an interview with Richel Ciment, Michel Perez, and Roger Tailleur, 1969; Roman Polanski Interviews, edited by Paul Cronin, 2005.