DUKE ELLINGTON & JOHN COLTRANE

What to say about this gorgeous album, which was recorded on September 26, 1962, and released the following February on Impulse. It features standards such as "In A Sentimental Mood," and my two personal favorites--"Stevie," composed by Ellington, and "My Little Brown Book," by none other than Billy Strayhorn, Ellington's longtime collaborator.

Ellington was 63, and Coltrane, 36, at the time of this collaboration, which was one of many for Ellington. Coltrane said he was honored to work with Ellington, and he plays conventionally here, compared to what would come later. He had already formed his famed quartet and great experimentation was yet to come. Coltrane's only composition on the album is "Big Nick," but his respect for the material is evident and the collaboration with Ellington, smooth and memorable. This is ranked as one of the top 100 jazz albums of all time.

Featured are Coltrane on tenor and soprano saxophones; Jimmy Garrison on bass; and Aaron Bell on bass on cuts 1, 4, 5 and 7; Elvin Jones offers a modern, polyrhythmic style on drums; and Sam Woodyard plays drum on cuts 4, 5, and 7.

Check out Ellington's lyrical piano and Coltrane's bluesy accompaniment in "My Little Brown Book." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_J0ZpJMQjDo

CELEBRATING AFRO-CUBAN JAZZ

If you are interested in Afro-Cuban jazz, you may want to read the story, "A Man's Hands En Clave," which celebrates the genre, in Jerry Jazz Musician, which celebrates jazz!

http://www.jerryjazzmusician.com/2015/02/mans-hands-en-clave-short-story-arya-jenkins/

A LOVE SUPREME

Now for some music from John Coltrane (This was in a very real sense Coltrane's spiritual/religious statement).
1. A Love Surpreme (full album) 1964


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3L-gL4XmjM

2. "Stellar Regions" from the album Stellar Regions (1967)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QiVRmvkwYM

Lullaby in Rhythm (Two Versions)

I bought "The Happy 'Bird'" as a $1.98 cut-out in Missoula back in 1973. This was my favorite track, labeled incorrectly as "I May Be Wrong." It is, in fact, "Lullaby in Rhythm," done up in the new day of bebop, with long solos by Wardell Gray. 

I was reading Kerouac at the time, nursing all of our innocent dreams of a sprawling country you could travel around in with some semblance of freedom--and believe me, we did indeed have that for a while. I racked up some serious miles hitching and riding Greyhounds and seeing all those little out-of-the-way places. For me this tune was a kind of anthem. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-804bJfVtY

Here's Benny Goodman's version of "Lullaby in Rhythm," from 1937-1938. I wanted to post something decent from the past, from a world of people creating something, a kind of country without borders, a country never declared, and without flags, and no need to conquer anyone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3H3MKYGgHn4

- Douglas A. Fowler

A RARE EVENING AT DEER HEAD INN with DERWYN HOLDER ENSEMBLE

The Derwyn Holder Ensemble, featuring pianist-composer Derwyn Holder, will be performing his original jazz compositions at Deer Head Inn,  Sunday, Nov. 16, from 5 to 8 p.m.

Holder has played with jazz greats such as Sonny Stitt, James Moody, Zoot Sims, Charlie Ventura, Clark Terry, Buddy Tate, Billy Eckstine, Johnny Hartman, and others, and in 2012 composed a full symphony.

The other members of his ensemble include Alan Brady on alto sax; Ron Naspo on bass; and Bob Beck on drums. Brady played with the Benny Goodman Orchestra, Nelson Riddle Orchestra, Ray Charles, and the Walter Thompson Orchestra. Naspo worked with Sonny Rollins, Stan Kenton, Wild Bill Davison, Bucky Pizzarelli, Billy Maxted, and the Don Shirley Trio. Beck played with Lionel Hampton, performed in LA studios and on Broadway, and has written and conducted more than 30 recordings.

Internationally renowned Guest Artist "Sweet" Sue Terry plays soprano sax and clarinet, is an author and Deer Head regular who leads her own groups, and is Artist in  Residence at the Jazz Society of Ecuador. More about her at sueterry.net.

Deer Head Inn, which is known as the oldest continuously running jazz club in the country, offers food, music and lodging to visitors. It is situated at 5 Main Street, Delaware Water Gap, Penn. Admission to attend the jazz evening featuring the Derwyn Holder Ensemble, will be $10.

For more information regarding this exciting jazz venue, visit deerheadinn.com or call 570-424-2000.

JAZZ LIT

NOVELS

Mary Morris's upcoming novel, THE JAZZ PALACE, is scheduled for release in April, 2015 and is being published by Knopf Doubleday.

ACTS OF GOD, a previous novel by Morris, is also set in Chicago during the jazz age.

Morris, who has published 14 books, teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College.

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SHORT STORIES

Jazz short stories by Arya F. Jenkins may be found on the Jerry Jazz Musician website:
www.jerryjazzmusician.com.

Her published stories there, include the award-winning, "So What," also "Soliloquy," "The Bluest Train," "Epistrophy," and "Broad Street."

Some notes on EPISTROPHY

"Epistrophy" is Arya F. Jenkins' third of three short stories commissioned by Jerry Jazz Musician. The story features jazz as a theme and employs techniques of improvisation even as it explores elements of the taboo.

Jerry Jazz Musician is a unique online magazine featuring key interviews, articles, fiction and videos on the present and past scene in American jazz culture.

Note: "Epistrophy," is a tune composed by Thelonious Monk and Kenny Clarke. Monk often ended his sets with "Epistrophy."

http://www.jerryjazzmusician.com/2014/04/epistrophy-short-story-arya-jenkins-2/

Feel free to read and share.

LOOKING AT TRANE

Looking and listening to Trane is a visceral experience. I am never left unmoved at either the images that speak for his life as a musician or the music itself, which continues to take me to new places while lending deeper insight into the man.

I first fell in love with Trane listening to My Favorite Things, which I played over and over again in the bookstore where I worked at the time, the early 90s. Coltrane's music was exhilarating and inspirational at once, and I have been listening to it and reading about him ever since.

A friend recently shared with me a series of recently discovered photographs of Trane taken during a session for A Love Supreme, another favorite album. The photos are by Chuck Stewart and lend further insight into the intense, spiritual and gentle giant of jazz music and composition, who constantly strove for perfection with his instrument, the tenor sax. Coltrane worked in the bebop and hard bop idioms and later helped pioneer the use of modes in jazz. Although he left this world in 1967, his legacy continues to inspire listeners and musicians alike.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/ablogsupreme/2014/03/28/295470520/a-love-supreme-comes-alive-in-unearthed-photos

JAZZ FICTION

Here is the second of three stories I was commissioned to write for JJM. It's called, "The Bluest Train" and appears second on the cover page. Please don't be offended by the "foul" language. We live in a world where people are more likely to resent "offensive" language than they are injustice. Don't let that be your world.

Thank you for reading my story.

http://www.jerryjazzmusician.com/2014/01/bluest-train-short-story-arya-jenkins/

EMPTINESS AND THE JAZZ CONNECTION

The belief in the inherent emptiness of phenomena and the interrelationship of all things that is fundamental to Buddhism is also at the heart of the philosophy of music of some of the best jazz musicians. Some of those who espouse the philosophy of life and music I am referring to are Larry Coryell, with whom I grew up (in a sense), in Westport, Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter, all of whom practice Nichiren Buddhism, and chant the mantra, "Nam-myoho-renge-kyo"in an effort to awaken their Buddha nature and tap into their deepest layers of existence. While I am not a practitioner of Nichiren Buddhism, but another kind of Buddhism--which is as diverse as the rivers of the world--I do share with these musicians/artists a series of core strands of beliefs which I feel makes their music as well as my appreciation of it all the richer.

Shorter is one of those Buddhists who believes that dedication to his practice can actually spark a human revolution. One of our great living jazz treasures, he is a vibrant innovator who has inspired many musicians and artists around the globe and has won numerous Grammy Awards, among them the Grammy for Best Instrumental Composition for "Aung Sang Suu Kyi," a lyrical and haunting composition dedicated to the Buddhist Burmese Nobel Laureate who was freed not long ago after years of enduring house arrest in her land.

Along these same lines, it's interesting to note that while some of the greatest musicians such as Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk were not Buddhists per se, they espoused an essentially Buddhist philosophy of transcendence and purity in their music. In his biography of Miles, So What -- The Life of Miles Davis, John Szwed quotes Shorter on the subject of Miles Davis. Shorter was with Miles' group from 1964 to 1970, then left with Miles' keyboardist Joe Zawinul to form a fusion group, Weather Report.

Shorter on Davis: "Many musicians talked of Davis's approach to music in terms of its purity, an integrity that transcends style. He aimed for a music that reached beyond voice, beyond music itself, even to the unplayable: to playing what's not there."

Shorter goes further into describing what he believes Miles was trying to do in his music, which was not to only achieve transcendence, but a spiritual understanding through the medium.

"Sometimes when Miles was doing things, we would say, 'Miles is messing up.' He wasn't messing up. He was trying to destroy something, a learned thing or something he had done before or repeated. It was like he was stumbling through something. And then the stumbling became beautiful, but he wasn't actually stumbling. He was and he wasn't. It was seamless. It was a seamless process going on. What he was doing was a dramatization of struggle in life: what the hell music might be for. To another degree it's figuring out what life is for. We have so many ways to express what life is for that we have to be careful of getting hung up on the formality of something, a mold or a way of doing something which is not the way of life."

To these artists and musicians who consciously strive to integrate their music and spirituality, I offer up the homage of the sacred Buddhist mantra, OM GATE GATE PARASAMGATE BODHI SOHA, which is the essence of The Heart Sutra on Emptiness. The mantra means literally, "Gone, gone, gone altogether beyond."

THE BEST IN JAZZ LITERATURE

BEST Jazz Reads:

KANSAS CITY LIGHTNING, THE LIFE AND TIMES OF CHARLIE PARKER by Stanley Crouch. The long-awaited (and recently published) book on Bird is well worth the wait, and you won't want to put down. An expert on the art and aesthetics of jazz, Crouch offers fresh stories and insights on the man and myth. An essayist, columnist (The Daily News) and novelist, Crouch is perhaps best known for his long stint serving as artistic consultant for jazz programs at Lincoln Center.

THE BLUE MOMENT by Richard Williams. An interesting attempt to place the influence of Miles Davis in a wider musical, cultural and historical context.

COLTRANE by Ben Ratliff. An extraordinary, thrilling and often heady examination of the sound, technique and influence of the great saxophonist John Coltrane.

JAZZ by Bob Blumenthal. A primer on the subject by long-time critic Blumenthal, who has written for The Boston Globe and received Grammys for best album notes for Coltrane: The Classic Quartet/Complete Impulse! Studio Recordings in 1999 and the following year for Miles Davis & John Coltrane: The Complete Columbia Recordings 1955-61.

FOOTPRINTS: THE LIFE AND WORK OF WAYNE SHORTER by Michelle Mercer. An invaluable compendium of interviews and rich insights into this national living treasure, his struggles and his music.

HARD BOP by David H. Rosenthal. A standard. Read it if you want to know how bebop transitioned into hard bop.

JAZZ by Gary Giddins and Scott Deveaux. Superior photographs and a rich text, intelligent and chock full of love and appreciation for the music.

LUSH LIFE, A BIOGRAPHY OF BILLY STRAYHORN by David Hadju. A short, openly gay African-American dynamo, Strayhorn worked closely with Duke Ellington as a composer and collaborator. Among Strayhorn's defining compositions are "Take the 'A' Train," "Lush Life," and "Satin Doll."

A former writer for  The Village Voice and Rolling Stone magazine, Hadju is currently music critic for The New Republic and teaches at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.

READING JAZZ, edited by Robert Gottlieb. Readable and delightful, a must for any jazz aficionado.

SO WHAT, THE LIFE OF MILES DAVIS by John Szwed. A gorgeous, elegant, well-researched book. Szwed also wrote a bio on Sun Ra. He teaches music and jazz studies at Columbia University and is Director of the Center for Jazz Studies there.

BEST Magazine Reads:

Brilliant Corners - in hard copy only, this is the only national journal focussing on jazz-related lit, and has published some of the biggest names writing on the subject such as Yusef Komunyakaa and Philip Levine

Jerry Jazz Musician - only online, it features videos, articles and short stories on jazz. Historian and music critic Nat Hentoff called JJM "a wonder" -- "The site encompasses what could be called American civilization with jazz as the centerpiece."

A JAZZ SHORT STORY by Arya F. Jenkins on JJM

Jerry Jazz Musician, an online jazz website, just launched a series of jazz short stories by Arya F. Jenkins. The first is called "Soliloquy," and features McCoy Tyner.

http://www.jerryjazzmusician.com/2013/09/soliloquy-arya-f-jenkins/

Thanks for reading. And peruse the excellent JJM website.

REMEMBERING NABIL

I shouldn't feel shy about saying hard bop lives, it does, even after the masters die, it does. The ever funky Horace Silver, who began as a tenor sax man and moved onto piano, started The Jazz Messengers with drummer Art Blakey, and is still with us. Horace's mother was born in New Canaan, Conn., where I grew up and Horace was born in Norwalk. But it wasn't Horace who seeped me in the world of hard bop, it was Nabil, one of the great double bass jazz men ever, who lived in Bridgeport and also played with many hard bop greats.

In the 1950s, bassist Nabil Totah, came home from the Korean War to the Big Apple an aspiring musician and, after only three days of jamming in sessions was hired by Charlie Parker. He was mentored by bassist Oscar Pettiford and worked with Charles Mingus, among others. Nabil's home was an homage to jazz greats with photographs and sketches of them covering nearly every wall. He made me homemade hummus and Ethiopian coffee whenever I came to visit and and played jazz records for me in his studio and would invite me to recite my poems into his recorder and sometimes let me play his piano.

Nabil was born in Palestine to a Palestinian Quaker minister and an American teacher and once performed at a gallery show I curated for three artists in my home in Black Rock. I was fortunate to see him play his beautiful bass with his trio many times at the Silvermine Tavern in New Canaan and at Bread and Roses in Bridgeport. He was brilliant, warm and generous and the world's worst driver--it's a wonder he didn't go out of this world in his pale blue Lincoln--and, like many musicians of his time, an awful drunk until he quit. He quit cigarettes too a few years after letting go the booze, and passed away at 82 last June 7. I still play his gorgeous album, More Double Bass, which he recorded in 1998 with pianist Mike Longo and drummer Ray Mosca.

Here's "Subaru Mama," the last cut on the album, written by Nabil. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5AO_kDLF7k

Long live, Nabil. May you keep playing the double bass in heaven.

BIRD'S ABILITY TO PERCEIVE

Sculptor Julie Macdonald was taken with Bird and "the wonder about his ability to perceive." She and Bird met on his last trip to California, a year or so before he died. Macdonald is known for her extraordinary sculpture of Bird's head, a black and white photograph of which, incidentally, graced the cover of Downbeat in 1965, on the event of the 10th anniversary of Charlie Parker's death. The sculpture is made of sandstone, is almost twice the actual size of Bird's head, weighs 275 pounds and is attached to a polished black granite cube. It is said to capture the many conflicting and captivating traits of Bird's character and personality--the old man and young child, for example--and holds a resemblance to both Egyptian and African art. Macdonald's sculpture of Bird's head is in the collection of Robert George Reisner, who later wrote a biography of Bird that is comprised of interviews with 81 of Bird's closest friends.

Bird's last visit to California was interrupted by news of his three-year old daughter Pree's death. Initially, he reacted to the news by getting drunk on Alexander's. Then he got off heroin and alcohol, before returning east, to be there for his wife Chan through the ordeal of their loss. Many painful incidents in Bird's life were yet to come, but he was willing to put aside the drugs and make an effort to be the man his wife needed him to be in his last months.

For most of Bird's life, he was known as unreliable in all but his playing, a mooch par excellence. He never had enough money, food, cigarettes, booze or drugs. His appetites for all these and women too have been likened to those of Picasso. And yet he was a man who listened with his whole being, and was completely attuned to life. He once noted that if a person could hear every sound there was, he would go mad, which Parker did. He listened that intently to people, to everything.

Although Bird's life was tragic, some of the episodes that led to his being put away "in rehab" are humorous. For instance, once, while Bird was staying in a cheap hotel in L.A., he determined he had to make a phone call and went down to the lobby to use the phone. The manager behind the desk was horrified when he saw Bird, as he had no clothes on. Bird went back upstairs to remedy the problem and came down a short while later. He had put on a coat, but still had no pants on! Soon after that, he was sent to a police psychiatrist, then to Camarillo.

In 2010, musician/artist/performer Charles Wsir Johnson created a beautiful homage to Bird, using makeshift instruments, called "A Bird in Camarillo," about Bird's 1946-1947 visit to that hospital. Bird apparently wrote a short tune while in rehab there called, "Relaxing in Camarillo."

For most of Bird's life, and after it, people viewed Bird's erratic behavior as part of his nature instead of part of the diseases of alcoholism and drug addiction that afflicted him most of his life. Unfortunately, his addictions helped grow his myth. What remains indisputable is Bird's uncanny gift of music and his ability to perceive.

References: "Charlie Parker: A Genius Distilled," by Richard Williams, The Guardian, Mar. 21, 2010.
The Legend of Charlie Parker by Robert George Reisner, Da Capa Press, 1977.
"A Bird in Camarillo," by Charles Wsir Johnson, YouTube video.

NOTES ON TIME BEING

I was recently introduced to the music of Derwyn Holder by his girlfriend 
Lia Di Stefano, who created the interesting cover on his disk, Time Being. 
Listen to the disk if you can. It is available from NEEN RECORDS in 
Weehawken and features pianist/composer Holder, saxophonist Sue Terry, 
and bassist Ron Naspo. Holder leans toward the heady as well as lyrical and 
has performed with the likes of Sonny Stitt, Zoot Sims and Cassandra Wilson. 
According to Lia, he is focussing more on composing these days.

JAZZ FICTION

I remain amazed at the few outlets for jazz fiction at this time in the literary world. With so many people loving jazz--and many people do--you would think there would be more affiliations in the literary realm. I mean music and the written word are practically synonymous. I would, for example, love to see another anthology celebrating jazz short fiction.

In the meantime, check out www.jerryjazz.com, an award-winning jazz website run by Joe Maita and praised by critic Nat Henthoff. Not only does JJM carry diverse news about jazz and fascinating gifts and ideas, it has the audacity to actually pay writers for their jazz-inspired fiction. See a short story of mine, "So What," published there in 2012. The title comes, of course, from the famous cut on the even more famous Miles' album, Kinda Blue.

Check out Jerry Jazz Musician. Support jazz fiction. Read about jazz.

JAZZ SPACES

       There are places inhabited by the music, and I don't just mean dives or bars where it plays. When I lived in Ithaca, New York, in the mid 1990s, when it was still an undiscovered paradise, it was Dexter Gordon and me, traipsing along the snowy sidewalks. I listened to the beautiful, sensuous and warm saxophone of his playing, lifting me up and out and setting me down ever so lightly in the town in which I lived then, that was marked definitively, as Dexter's. And mine. Because of the music.

        Jazz seals you to times and places. I was born during the hard bop era and it's in my blood. And while it never made sense at first, it does now, that jazz was part of my creation too, in the melding between a North American dad as cool as Iowa wind in winter, and a mother as intemperate and warm as the Colombian sun. To be bicultural when I was brought up in the 60s and 70s was to know jazz and to be it. For the music is born of irreconcilable differences that due to the magic of performance and invention of musicians creates a new and better realm, a pathway of possibilities.

         It is probably said more often of the jazz medium than any other kind of music that the kind of performance you experience in a given time and place, live, can never again be repeated or recreated. Such is the magic of the moment and its importance in the creation of jazz.

        And just as I can go to Ithaca, New York, as I did recently, and hope to recreate that moment, it is irretrievably lost, gone. That place is no longer what it was, refined and touristy as it has become, and I am no longer who I was. And what is the best jazz, if not a rare conversation, an authentic meeting ground between differences? Dexter and our time together on those streets is a part of my internal history, is all, and while the memory of his ballads fused in a moment remains, I will never again feel about his music the way I did then and there, when no place was warmer than the street with his music in my ears.

       I haven't known too many jazz spaces i could call home, but Ithaca was definitely one.

The Case for Hard Bop

This is a blog about bebop, or mostly bebop, although I realized recently during a conversation with my sister Marcela, who is a jazz critic, that while I enjoy bebop, I am mostly a hard bop fan. We both are.

When I talk about jazz, I refer almost exclusively to Miles Davis, Dexter Gordon, Charles Mingus, Thelonius Monk, Bud Powell, Clifford Brown, as if these were the only names in jazz, or at least, the only artists worth listening to. They are all hard boppers. In 1954, Horace Silver (of Horace Silver and The Jazz Messengers) wrote a bluesy, highly rhythmic composition, "The Preacher." That, and Miles Davis's album, "Walkin'", produced the same year, are said to have launched hard bop. The term, which describes the decade of jazz from 1955 to 1965, apparently originated with critic and pianist John Mehegan.

Hard bop compositions are based on original choral changes and employ several horns during the head and in riffs. The soloing takes on more of a vocal approach. Bebop, the style of jazz of the 1940s dominated by Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker ("Bird"),  used fast tempos and complex twists and turns, while hard bop was influenced by blues and gospel, and often dubbed, funky.

Some of the great albums to come out of hard bop, considered the east coast evolution of bebop, were: Art Blakey's Ugetsu, Thelonius Monk's Brilliant Corners, Sonny Rollins' Saxophone Colossus, Charles Mingus's Mingus Ah Um, and of course, Miles Davis's Kind of Blue.

If you want to understand more about this style of music read David Rosenthal's excellent book on the subject -- Hard Bop, published by Oxford University Press in 1992.

I am sure there are contemporary hard boppers, but I keep returning to the originals. In my mind I am always dressed in black, smoking cigarettes, listening to Miles and Coltrane. Stories inspired by their music float out of my brain, and join their shadows on an eternal stage.

The Jazz of George Benson

I don't attend many concerts these days, and, added to that, I don't have the luxury of having other friends currently contributing posts on the subject of bebop to this blog. This leaves room for creativity and deviation, my favorite norms. So, I am here to talk about George Benson, who I saw in concert last night at Bergen PAC in Englewood, New Jersey, not because he is remotely associated with bebop, but because I just had the pleasure of seeing this smooth jazz master of the past and present perform.

I'll launch with an interesting story Benson told about refusing to open a concert for his friend James Brown when he was a young man because, as he explained to Brown, "I do jazz." Due to that faux pas, it took Benson another 10 years to be recognized in the business, when "James Brown would have made me a star overnight."

Benson is a local, as are other musical greats like Stevie Wonder. I think it's in part due to that, that Benson was so generous, giving a two-hour concert, with a nice long come back after the first closing ovation. He played all the audience's favorites, such as "Give Me the Night," but also the music of his friends, tunes that appear on his most recent album, Guitar Man, which has received rave reviews. For example, he performed a beautiful rendition of his friend "Sir" Paul McCartney's early composition, "I Want to Hold Your Hand," jazzed up and arranged a la Benson. He also offered a tribute to Stevie Wonder, with his version of "My Cherie Amour," and Nora Jones, with a remake of her song, "Don't Know Why." He is accompanied by excellent musicians, particularly his longtime key board player, Joe Sample.

Benson's vocals, energy and guitar playing, remain exceptionally strong. The man is 68, not old by today's standards, but still. He is a wonderful balladeer, and I learned during this concert, an amazing mimic, doing imitations of James Brown, Little Richard and Stevie Wonder, all of them friends, whose music he has played.

Benson closed with his classic, "On Broadway," which was given a real send off by the young Chicago drummer playing with the group who blew the top off the house during a final solo in that number. He is listed only as "George Benson's drummer," playing on YouTube -- I'll be darned if I can find his name anywhere, as there was no program, but everyone had something good to say about him. He'll get an identity of his own yet!

Bergen PAC has hosted some hot and cool jazz over the years, and tonight was no exception.

SILENT MONK

As we approach Monk's birthday, which takes place October 10, and, as my most recent post examined the role of silence in Miles Davis's music, I thought it appropriate to offer homage once again to Thelonious Monk, the founder of bebop. Silence in his music was as audible as the piano keys he played, always a cacophony of surprise -- lilting, funny and moving. But it is the silent Monk that interests me now, the man who is said to literally have spent the last seven years of his life without uttering a word. He spent his last six years with jazz baroness and art patron Pannonica Rothschild in her New Jersey home.

Many have no doubt wondered as I have what it is that drove Monk to the ultimate period of speech. Was it his wife Nellie's death? Was it the calamitous abuse suffered over the years, the beating with a blackjack by police of his hands while en route to a gig at the Comedy Club in Baltimore, Maryland, sadly, on occasion of my birthday, October 15, 1958? Was it the years of drugs prescribed and drugs abused? He was diagnosed as a schizophrenic, also as bipolar; he received shock treatments. One psychiatrist claimed he had experienced brain damage from being given the wrong drugs. Was it perhaps a combination of all these?

In October 2009, Italian satirist Stefani Benni's, Misterioso. A Journey in the Silence of Thelonious Monk, a theatrical production, ran as a double bill with a documentary about patron Rothschild, The Jazz Baroness -- An Unlikely Love Story -- at Riverside Studios in London. Did she perhaps play a role in silencing him? Or did she merely encourage it, let him have what he had wanted so long?

Monk is a man who would enter a room and say nothing, who could exist from day to day without the compulsion to speak, who thought perhaps longer and harder than most people about what the right thing to say might really be. Once, while attending a music lab, after listening to students perform, he paused a long while and then simply advised, "Just keep tryin'." To those frustrated by such verbal minimalism, I say, "Why does it ever have to be more complicated than that?"

Not enough can ever be said, written or interpreted, regarding Monk the man or his music, as far as I am concerned. His ideas, even his style of sunglasses, hats, coats and berets, were copped by other musicians and wannabees. Whatever Monk was, anyone who knows his music knows he is incomparably, lastingly, the true thing, an original.