Jazz Tennis

Jazz Tennis was invented by my friend Torsten Bender aka Tosca Winterson, a cool, bohemian, tall dude from Germany that I met while Organic Combustion was doing a weekly run at the bar he was working at. Tosca had become a bartender after briefly pursuing a career as a professional tennis player after putting himself thru college with his serve and volley. He told me that at this point he was not even into giving tennis lessons any more, cuz it just annoyed the shit out of him. The whole winner takes all attitude of many clubhouses with overeager tennis moms and broken egos and inflated personalities all around had turned him off. Somehow I talked him into going out on the court a few years later after we had run into each other on the subway, just to show me how it's done. I had not played in 14 years and was in a state of health of a 55 year old at 28 years of age. Liqour, booze, drugs, little sleep, bad nutrition, you name it. From the huge discrepancy in the level of playing and the fact that you are not supposed to give lessons in Central Park resulted a very funny style of playing. We were basically both to jaded to wanna pick up balls, Tosca's skill level being high enough to always get the ball to where I could reach it; and my excitement about being on the tennis court after all these years; and hitting with a PRO just for the heck off it made me feel incredibly elated. I got so into it, I was blowing. I played better than I felt I had played when I was 14 when I stopped being that I thought I had to concentrate only on music to be able to hang in life.
When we walked of the court, Tosca sez, 'that was some nice jazz tennis we played there', and off we went, inventing a whole set of rules for Jazz tennis, which I now forgot but essentially it is all about making each other look good by not playing against each other, but with each other, constantly trying to find the 'swing' the pop and crackle when the balls fly just so and you nail it for a few more hits then you thought you had in you, you set each other up for shots and solos and you take a break and you say, let's hit another set, that felt good. u dig? Jazz Tennis.