Why Can't I Memorize "Freedom Jazz Dance"?

The teacher of the blues class I started attending at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, Yaki Levi, a great drummer and pianist, assigned "Freedom Jazz Dance" to us, a famous song by Eddie Harris. He wanted us to learn it because it's all on a single chord: Bb7. After a week of working on it, I still don't have it in my ears or under my fingers, and I've been playing it both on flute and on tenor sax. Maybe if I just did it in one key it would be easier.  But I should be able to hear how it goes.
In general I'm not very good at playing what I hear and memorizing. I can play a bunch of standards by memory, but I haven't really learned the changes, the chords underlying the melody, because I find that very difficult.
But there are no chords to memorize in this case. So why am I having trouble remembering a fairly simple song: two measures (15 notes), then two measures of rests, then another two measures (12 notes), and another two measures of rests, then four measures (32 notes), for a total of 59 notes. That shouldn't be an impossible feat of memorization.
However, the song doesn't have a conventional melody. It's composed of leaps up and down that move in fourths without spelling out chords. Obviously the key is to understand the logic of the piece, and I'm working on it.
Perhaps by dint of drilling it, the logic will come clear to me.

Tenor

Stupidly I once thought the alto sax was a wimpy instrument. Why would Charlie Parker, Art Pepper, Cannonball Adderley, Arnie Lawrence, and Phil Woods (to name just the musicians who come to mind immediately) have played a wimpy instrument?
However, think of the tenor players everyone admires: Lester Young (who could play with power when he wanted to), Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Wayne Shorter, and a dozen other powerful African-American musicians who used the tenor sax assertively.
When I took up saxophone again as a grownup, I started with tenor, but I eventually gravitated toward the baritone sax, which is more a supportive than a self-assertive instrument. I'm not a powerful African-American man (which isn't to say that there haven't been great white tenor players like Stan Getz, Al Cohn, and Zoot Sims).
However, recently I enrolled in a blues workshop, and I decided to take out my tenor again. I didn't feel like lugging my baritone around, and I thought it was time to try out my first saxophone love. It's fun to use a new voice and find myself in it. Maybe I can channel some of those powerful players.

I don't Get It. What's so Great About Philip Glass?

He's supposed to be a minimalist, but the production of Akhnaten we just saw, a simultaneous broadcast of the matinee of the Metropolitan Opera, was hardly minimalist.
Samuel Becket is a minimalist. His stages are bare, and the lives of his characters are pared down to nothing. Philip Glass writes long, loud, elaborate, pretentious operas.
I went to hear Akhnaten mainly out of curiosity, not expecting to enjoy it, and my expectations were fulfilled. What is there to enjoy except the stage effects surrounding the production? The music is monotonous. The opera has virtually no plot, no characters, no drama. It's slow-moving, pompous, and bombastic. Some people call it hypnotic. I don't go the opera to be hypnotized. I go, if I do at all, to be overwhelmed by the beauty of the music.
Yet if you read about Glass, you are exposed to a story of phenomenal success. He is prolific, widely performed, and highly regarded. I would call it a case of the emperor's new clothes, but Glass isn't naked. He's overdressed, like the singers in this production, in outlandish costumes that mainly have little or nothing to do with ancient Egypt.
Okay, I'm not an opera fan. Mainly I see opera productions as money misspent. Even though my wife and I paid about a hundred dollars for our two seats at the mere broadcast of the opera, and the people who go to the real thing pay many times more than that, we are told that the broadcasts are subsidized, and that the Metropolitan Opera needs contributions to keep going. In a country swarming with homeless people (and a world swarming with hungry refugees), they have a nerve to present themselves as a charity.
Rather than spend millions of dollars on super-lavish productions, they should stage the operas frugally, in a manner that lets the music come out. After all, the music is what it's about, not the costumes, sets, and special effects.
A few years ago we heard a production of Cosi fan tutte in the opera house of Lyons. The singers were fine, the orchestra was high level, and the staging was simple. Who needs anything more?
But if you put Akhnaten without all the flimflam, you 'd see it for the empty thing that it is.