NIGHT DREAMER
(Music by Wayne Shorter)
Kurt Elling
Solos by Wayne Shorter & Lee Morgan, 1964


Lonely the roses of Avondaire / sing as though somebody still may care.
They live only for the dream of living / so come follow where / they will take
you there.

I once was apprenticed / to a man who was living
in the eye if the hurricane / to know despair,

He knew all the dreams by heart / just like sailing in a boat of
crystal silence / seeing visions / of the world / of life within a life.

In a turning / like a burning / came turning /
out of everything stirring / and what had begun before

but all wrapped up / in one great godly becoming -

Tumbling / and fumbling / and stumbling
into bumbling / and rumbling along -

whirling it / and swirling it / and twirling it / and hurling it /
and overturning it / and burning it again.

I shared a whirling dervish out on the side of a hill called metaphore vivace
swinging en route to a nascent solar / with the scissored visored blizzard
wizard /
gizzarding planets and secrets within / like an avatar.

While meanwhile / in turnstyling / and spinning over him
spells bespeaking kingdoms in the dark

calling me to yield / knighting me in a field / covered with armies
and with princes. All were signing / cannons shining / pennants flying.

And when he spoke to me he sang / and his words really rang -
this child of the knowledge of the beauty of the night -

he sang to me of masters passing on / of father after father after father
climbing up into the lotus bloom / upon the tortoise's back

and of grandfathers / who danced through their living a longer time ago.
He showed me a palace in time / in which all the talismans
from all the zeuses / swing upon a pendulum of secrets
in a circle that remembers / and when asked a question will surrender

every secret key to every hero's message / given to every heart in time
but only known to but a few /or so it seems.

When I asked of them / what shall I do / to see the god?
They only said / the goldenrod / which grows inside of
every secret dream you dream / while waiting for the god -
it-s a symbol from the man in the fire.
ling you the thing you desire
is a garment that covers the riddle of everything secretly wished for
and of the world of which you are an inheritor.

Suddenly the chamber was flooded with light /
hurling me skyward like a meteorite/

When I fell to earth / I saw everything in a blur.
I saw that time was accelerating in a curve

and the palace in which I had stood / it was flowing, like lava, on acres of
woodland
like a pompei-an mountain volcano / making archipelago
and destroying the planet / at fortissimo

bulldozing everything down / to make room for what
was a byzantine / a labarynthine / knotty mess of
manifolding passageways / a tangle of confusion /
where the walls made / an asylum of baroque.

Like a joke / words were spoken
to provoke me / and to toss me
nude and empty / to the sea.

But I would have none of it.
I simply turned my back and walked out/ of the dreamscape/
into landscape / like a bedroom / where I heard that

Lonely the roses of solitaire / sing as though somebody still may care.
They live only for the dream of living / so come follow where they will take
you there.
Stay awake - no mistake - dance the dream awake - and awake."



(Contributed by Andy & Mogg - July 2003)