A Woman’s Face in B&W – The Beauty of a Good, Lived Life

Pantoum, Kissed.

The elderly woman, crippled, wrinkled and Sitting in her wheel-chair
was once a sex-symbol, just as wild as you are now
you, who look down upon her with your slim thighs and golden hair,
bubble-gum and smooth talk, look at her thick veins in dismay.

But she was once a sex-symbol, just as wild as you are now
followed by men, she’d see an elderly woman and with her
bubble-gum and smooth talk, look at her thick veins in dismay
and promise herself never to end her days like that and turn back to the men.

Followed by men, she’d see an elderly woman with her
thick glasses and wooden cane, barely able to find her way
and promise herself never to end her days like that and turn back to the men
who are always busy cracking jokes about that same old woman.

With her thick glasses and wooden cane, barely able to find her way,
she had decided, after years of contemplation to turn her back on the men
who are always busy cracking jokes about that same old woman
and found a new set of men whom she never had known.

She had decided after years of contemplation to turn her back on the men
who had loved her when she was young but betrayed her as she grew old,
who are always busy cracking jokes about that same old woman
as she sits once again down, to her double latté, alone, under the sun, kissed.

Pariah

At night, flooded in his
own dreaded sweat, he
dreams of Colombo.
His older brother follows the
river with him swaying upon
his back, dips
him in the more shallow parts
lets him linger a moment until
he is done. They speak in foreign
symbols, a forgotten language, ancient
Tamil. He asks for food he can barely
digest. His brother collapses out of
thirst and hunger, beneath the weight of
him. Here in downtown Odense, where he
now lives, he hears the alarm clock ring and
his stomach makes a summersault. He is known
as “darky” amongst the other kids, where the
population is approximately 166305, the unemployment
rate the topic of conversation. Between breaks,
they tie him to the flagpole and try to make understand
that he is not one of them and never will be. As he is levitated into
the air, the laws of gravity defying him, he swears he
will become better than anyone in this country, at anything,
speak the language fluently and become famous
on television. He will not disappoint this, his new nation.
He will not let his fellow countrymen down.

About Nina Sokol

Nina Sokol is a poet and translator, and is in the midst of translating a series of plays and poems by contemporary Danish writers. She holds a Master’s degree in English from Copenhagen University.

Her poems have been translated from English to Danish by the Danish writer Niels Svarre Nielsen for publication in the near future, and she was a grant poet-in-residence at The Vermont Studio Center for four weeks in April 2011. She also attended The Bread Loaf School of English during the summer of 2012.

Most recently she received a grant from the Danish Art’s Council and The Danish Writer’s Guild to translate several modern Danish plays from Danish to English.

Her poems have received honorable in The Emily Dickinson Award for Poetry many years ago, and have appeared in the anthology “The Write Stuff” and most recently in “Ardent: A Journal of Poetry and Art.,” “Nite Writers International Literary Arts Journal,” “Convergence” and “Eye on Life Magazine.”

The post Poetry by Nina Sokol appeared first on Jerry Jazz Musician.

Intense, powerful, and compelling, Matterhorn is an epic war novel in the tradition of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Jones’s The Thin Red Line. It is the timeless story of a young Marine lieutenant, Waino Mellas, and his comrades in Bravo Company, who are dropped into the mountain jungle of Vietnam as boys and forced to fight their way into manhood. Standing in their way are not merely the North Vietnamese but also monsoon rain and mud, leeches and tigers, disease and malnutrition. Almost as daunting, it turns out, are the obstacles they discover between each other: racial tension, competing ambitions, and duplicitous superior officers. But when the company finds itself surrounded and outnumbered by a massive enemy regiment, the Marines are thrust into the raw and all-consuming terror of combat. The experience will change them forever.

Written over the course of thirty years by a highly decorated Vietnam veteran, Matterhorn is a visceral and spellbinding novel about what it is like to be a young man at war: the anxiety and anticipation before the first encounter with the enemy; the fear and exhilaration and brutality of fighting; the tedium and relief of downtime; and, finally, the bonds between men, and the agony and despair of losing one’s friends. It is an unforgettable novel that transforms the tragedy of Vietnam into a powerful and universal story of courage, camaraderie, and sacrifice: a parable not only of the war in Vietnam but of all war, and a testament to the redemptive power of literature.#

In an April, 2011 interview with Jerry Jazz Musician publisher Joe Maita, Marlantes discusses his book, his experience writing it, and his life of recovery following his return home.

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Karl Marlantes, receiving the Bronze Star

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The rest of the day Mellas raged inwardly against the colonel. This gave him energy to keep moving, keep checking on the platoon, keep the kids moving. But just below the grim tranquility he had learned to display, he cursed with boiling intensity the ambitious men who used him and his troops to further their careers. He cursed the air wing for not trying to get choppers in through the clouds. He cursed the diplomats arguing about round and square tables. He cursed the South Vietnamese making money off the black market. He cursed the people back home gorging themselves in front of their televisions. Then he cursed God. Then there was no one else to blame and he cursed himself for thinking God would give a shit.

- An excerpt from Matterhorn

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Somebody to Love, by the Jefferson Airplane

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JJM   I’ve spent a lot of time on the Internet reading comments from readers about your book, and many of them were from Vietnam War veterans themselves. In fact, the page for Matterhorn book reviews on Amazon is, I think, an amazing sociological forum that I encourage everybody to visit. In addition to the book reviews, people recount their own experiences in Vietnam and on the home front as well.

KM  Yes, I’m a bit of a coward and somewhat introverted, and if somebody gives me a bad review, I get wounded. So my wife says, “I’ll read them first and if there’s a five star review, I’ll read it to you and if it’s a bad one, I won’t even tell you about it.”

JJM  I understand your concern, but you don’t have much to worry about there. A common theme among the veterans is that they praise the novel’s authenticity, and ordinary citizens express gratitude that you wrote it. For example, one non-veteran wrote, “Thank you Mr. Marlantes for such a great story. My deepest respect to all of those who fought in the Vietnam War.” You must be incredibly proud of your achievement.

KM   Yes, I do feel good. Veterans tell me that I “nailed it,” and that is very important to me – it is worth 100 good reviews. It’s important because to a large extent I was just trying to tell our story. I mean, we were so badly received when we came home from Vietnam – we couldn’t even get a date north of the Mason-Dixon line. I was stationed in Washington, D.C. after I came back, and there were signs in restaurants that said “No servicemen allowed” – and this was in our nation’s capital!

I am always careful to say that the bad things that happened to veterans were because of the radical peace protestors – who were a minority, but they were a significant minority. Most of them were honorable and not all of them spit on the troops and blamed them for the war, but I did experience a lot of hatred. One image that has stuck in my mind occurred after having been back from the war for a couple of months, and I had to take some papers to the White House while dressed in full uniform. Across the street a group of young students, probably about my age, were waving Vietcong flags while shouting obscenities and flipping the bird at me. I remember being stunned! I wasn’t angry, but I was hurt, and I remember thinking to myself, “You don’t know who I am. You’re just doing this to a uniform, and because I’m in a uniform, I can’t behave badly and go over there and shout back at you.” They were just so…hateful. I thought if I could walk across the street and explain to them that the people they called “baby killers” are three years younger than they were, and it’s only because they got to go to college that prevented them from serving in Vietnam. I wanted to explain who we were. So, in a way, Matterhorn was a way to tell a story of what it was like to be 19-years-old during that time period, growing up in a war and dealing with all the things we had to. This was an experience that a lot of kids went through.

JJM  You had dual traumas – fighting in the war, and coming home to that kind of reception…

KM   It’s even got a name; the “Safe Harbor Trauma.” You think that you are finally safe because you are coming home to the loving reception of your grateful country, but, it wasn’t the case. It was so bizarre. They told us things like we should take our uniforms off so that we wouldn’t disturb people in the airports. If we flew standby – because it was half price if we were in uniform – they said we should fly between midnight and three-o’clock in the morning so there wouldn’t be any trouble. My reaction was, “Wow! This is what we came home to?” Today I see beer commercials where people are clapping as the troops get off the airplane, and see how drastically things have changed.

JJM  I lived in the San Francisco Bay area for much of the war in Vietnam – specifically Berkeley, which was the epicenter of war protest – and I was one of those guys with an attitude about the military. The soldiers were a symbol of some of the bad choices our country made, and targets of a very unpopular war.

KM  Yes, we were easy targets and most of the protesters were young. When you’re young, you’re black-and-white and you’re stupid. I look back on it now and see that America was just going crazy at the time, and the way we were treated upon our return was a part of the craziness.

JJM It’s one thing to write a war novel based on your experience. It’s another to write what many are calling a “literary classic.” What writing experience did you have prior to writing this book?

KM   I started writing when I was about eight or nine. I had a little diary that I kept and I would write my dreams down in it. I eventually burned it. A little bit later, my cousin and I decided to write a novel about two nine-year-old boys saving the world from space invaders. It was about 12 pages long and has since been long lost. Then, while in high school in Seaside, Oregon, I was reading Kierkegaard and I wrote a black mass from the viewpoint of being thankful for all of the bad things that God has done to the world. My father found it and he was outraged –it was my first major lecture on blasphemy. So, he made me go out in the backyard and burn it.

JJM  Did you feel like you had to hide your writing after that?

KM  No, not really – I put that in perspective. I mean, it’s my dad. But when I was at Yale, I won the Tunic Prize for Literature, which is a short story contest. So, by the time I got back from Oxford, I figured I could write the “Great American Novel” about the war. So, I’ve always been a writer…

JJM  Did you read a war novel before going to Vietnam?

KM   Oh, yes. I read The Naked and the Dead and The Thin Red Line before I went to Vietnam. When I found out I was going to Vietnam, I started getting into World War I poets – in fact, a girlfriend of mine gave me a book of Wilfred Owen poems that I carried with me for a long time in Vietnam. These World War I poets nailed the mechanized horror of modern war.

If you read Horatio Hornblower you learned that if you were fast on your feet, smart, good with a sword, and were daring and dashing, you could shave the odds – all of these things would help you live. But by the time World War I came around, I don’t care if you went to Oxford and were the fastest runner in the world, if the shell hit your hole, you were dead – there was nothing you could do about it. Death became much more random and you were so much more helpless than back in the day of pre-American Civil War. So, these poets were important to me.

I tried reading Tolstoy when I was high school, but I was too young to appreciate him. When I came back from Vietnam, I couldn’t put him down. I think I stayed up all night and day for three days reading War and Peace and I was like, “Oh my God!” In my opinion he is still the “great novelist.” He handles characters so well. The war novel is complex, and one of the major issues I faced artistically was how to show how the protagonist is completely in over his head and confused, and because there are so many new faces and names in the book, how do I get all of this across without making the reader feel so confused that they throw the book down? So, when I started writing my book, I went back and I reread Tolstoy and saw how something like stuttering could identify a character. So, in my book the character Jacobs stutters because it is a way to identify him, and you could remember other characters if one of them has a tic, or if someone has an odd way of looking at you while he’s talking to you.

JJM  So, you started writing this book over 30 years ago, but it wasn’t until 2010 before it was published. When did publishers begin taking your manuscript seriously?

KM  They never did. It’s really interesting, but a mistake was made in the telling of this story, and it made its way to the Internet, and you can’t ever correct that. When I first came back from Vietnam in the summer of 1971, I was at Oxford, and during an eight week summer vacation, I maniacally typed out 1,784 pages on an Adler typewriter. I remember telling somebody that it was “probably about 1,600 American pages,” and while I thought I was writing a novel, I now understand that it was actually a first-person psycho-dump, and a month after writing it I re-read it and I was not happy – I devoted four pages, for example, to the fact that I had wet socks and couldn’t get dry ones. I realize now, of course, that what I was doing is what is now called “journaling,” but the important thing is that I just had to get it all out.

So, when I told somebody that, the rumor became that Matterhorn‘s first draft was 1,600 pages long. There was a lot having to do with Matterhorn within those 1,600 pages because many of the things that I was writing about happened to me, so this was about me getting stuff out of my system.

Then, in about 1975, I started getting serious, and began reading books about things like how to structure a plot, and how to develop character arcs. I started reading those things and realizing that there is actually craft to this art form! So, the first draft came out in 1977, although it was clearly still too big – it was about 1,100 or 1,200 pages, double-spaced and typewritten. I started writing query letters and, at best, I’d get somebody to say, “Send me a page or two,” but no one picked up the manuscript. I was told that I was an unknown writer, that it’s a big book, and that since it’s about Vietnam, which no one wanted to read anything about, there was no market for the book. And these are things I heard from those who were kind enough to send me some sort of answer to my query letters. So, I gave up. By that time, I had a couple kids, and Mario Puzo had it right when he said that you can’t make a living writing fiction in America, but you can make a killing.

JJM Oh, that’s right…

KM  So I made another run at it in the 1980′s, and those who answered my query letters would tell me that there wasn’t a market for it, that Hollywood has done Vietnam, and it’s over. There was Full Metal Jacket, Platoon, Apocalypse Now, Deer Hunter, and the market is done. In the mid-1990′s, I got people writing me back and they would make suggestions like, maybe they could do something with your book, but, since the Gulf War had just happened, could I just change it to the Gulf War? Now I tell people, a little tongue-in-cheek, that I’m so thankful that by that time Microsoft had come up with search and replace because I could just put replace the word “jungle” with “desert!” And, since I had a mountain in my story, maybe I could make the story be about a mountain in Afghanistan and we could sell that.

Literature is a difficult marriage between art and commerce because you don’t get your art our there unless people who are in business can make a profit on it. I don’t complain about that, that’s just the way it is. Even Michelangelo had to find patrons. It has always been this way, and it is certainly that way in this country with the New York publishers.

JJM  Well, it could also be that the pain of Vietnam has affected us for so long that it took until recently before we were ready for a book like Matterhorn.

KM  Well, yes. I like to say that it’s like having the alcoholic father. It’s the family secret. Everybody tiptoes around it. We all know Dad drinks too much, but nobody talks about it, and Vietnam has been like that for decades. It’s influenced everything in our foreign policy, our political parties, and even who’s in our political parties. It has been an amazing factor in our current situation in Afghanistan, which is so eerily parallel to Vietnam that it blows my mind.

JJM When people described Vietnam when the war was being fought, the word frequently used was “quagmire,” and Matterhorn – the mountain where much of your book takes place – is a great symbol of a quagmire…

KM   Yes, this mountain was a conscious symbol of our “doing it to ourselves.” I mean, in Vietnam, we “did it to ourselves.” So, in Matterhorn we build it, we leave it, we go back after it at great costs, and then we leave it. It is the central symbol of the novel.

JJM  In The Good War, Studs Terkel’s great oral history of World War II, he quoted a veteran of that war by the name of John Charte, who said this about Vietnam: “I feel sorry for the kids in Vietnam. They couldn’t have figured out what it was they were fighting for. I knew why I was there. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t scared. I don’t know what I would have done in Vietnam. I mean, I’m a botch as a killer, as a soldier, but as an American, I felt very strongly I did not want to be alive to see the Japanese impose surrender terms.” So, World War II had a goal – getting to Tokyo…

KM   Absolutely. Vietnam was the first war that I know of where there was no clear cut way of knowing whether we were winning or not. During World War II, there was Guadalcanal – got it; Tarawa –got it; the Mariana’s – yep, we’re getting closer. Then the Philippines, Okinawa, and Tokyo’s next! You could measure progress, and on the European front as well.

The other thing is that I talked to my dad and my uncles and their friends who were in the second world war, and when they were in combat, they said that beating fascism for democracy was not a motivating factor – what motivated them was saving their friends and saving their own skins, and in getting the job done. This is like it always is in war. But, the difference is that there were actually good guys and bad guys. Today, I think you can stand up and say that the world is better off because fascism and Japan were defeated. We didn’t want to have the Japanese impose surrender terms on us. So, when they came home and had to deal with the fact that they had killed 19-year old Germans who were just fighting for the Fatherland – they weren’t Nazi’s – they could at least say that it was done in good cause, and that we contributed to the good. In Vietnam, you couldn’t. I wrote a scene in my book where one of the characters gets angry at the lieutenant and starts crying out “Where’s the gold? Where’s the gold? If someone would just tell me there’s gold or oil or something here…If I knew why I was here I would feel better.”

JJM  Vietnam was a war of body counts, and interpretation of the war’s success and failure on the battlefield was really determined by the numbers of Vietcong killed each day…

KM  Yes, and there were other metrics as well, like the number of villages pacified, but how in the hell would they ever know what a pacified village was, because it could be that everyone was smiling and happily selling trinkets to the American soldiers in the daytime and then they go out at night and set up land mines. I make fun of this in the novel, when Mellas has to call in a body count and by the time it gets to Saigon, it is considered a major victory.

Body count became a measure that people actually got promoted on because it was the only way that you could determine whether or not we were making progress. If you took the hill in World War II, it was great because they were one step closer to their goal…

JJM  And it wasn’t surrendered back to the enemy after it was taken…

KM  Absolutely, you don’t leave it. Try and tell troops that we just had 19 dead taking this hill – I had that happen to me, and it happened to so many Vietnam veterans. I’ve had them come up to me in book readings and say, “I know what hill that is. That’s 881 South,” or “That’s hill 55,” and I’ll tell them that it wasn’t, but, while I made the hill up, it was any hill you fought on.

The other thing about body count that I think is so bad is that it is immoral. I mean, the military is not there to kill people. The military is there to use violence and the threat of violence to get another side to stop killing your people. While you have to kill them to get them to stop, but, as soon as they stop, you’re done. You’re not there to kill people. You’re there to get the killing stopped if you’re doing it from the right perspective. So, it’s immoral. The other one is that American people only care about one side of that ratio. You could say we killed 600 NVA today and lost four Americans. but the headline will read, Four Americans Killed in Vietnam.” So, it’s a stupid political thing as well.

The post Karl Marlantes, author of Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War appeared first on Jerry Jazz Musician.

“Cuarteteo,”
by Jazzamoart

The post Poetry by Russell MacClaren appeared first on Jerry Jazz Musician.

A Pictorial Tour

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In cooperation with Frank Driggs and Chuck Haddix, authors of  Kansas  City Jazz: From Ragtime to Bebop — a look at the fascinating history of Kansas City’s golden age through book excerpts, photos and music

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All photos and book excerpts used with the permission of Frank Driggs, author of Kansas City Jazz: From Ragtime to Bebop — A History

_____________________________________________________________

“Don’t hang your head when you see those six pretty horses pullin’ me.
Put a twenty-dollar silver piece on my watch chain,
Look at the smile on my face,
And sing a little song to let the world know I’m really free.
Don’t cry for me, ’cause I’m going to Kansas City.”

- Music by Charlie Parker and lyrics by King Pleasure, ” Parker’s Mood,” 1953

photo Driggs Collection

Downtown Kansas City in the 1920s

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“If you want to see some sin, forget Paris and go to Kansas City. With the possible exception of such renowned centers as Singapore and Port Said, Kansas City has the greatest sin industry in the world.”

- Edward Murrow of the Omaha World-Hearld

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Kansas City Shuffle, by Bennie Moten

photo Driggs Collection

Famous Kansas City location, 18th and Vine, 1940′s

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“[Racial segregation] was a horrible thing, but a bitter-sweet thing. We owned the Street’s Hotel. We owned Elnora’s restaurant. The Kansas City Monarchs were our team. The money we made in the community, stayed in the community. When we traveled we spent money in other black communities and it came back when they came to Kansas City.”

- Negro League baseball player Buck O’Neil

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Harmony Blues , by Bennie Moten

Kansas City Jazz:

From Ragtime to Bebop, A History

by Frank Driggs and Chuck Haddix

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Kansas City: Paris of the Plains

Kansas City’s Local 627

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Excerpted from Kansas City Jazz: From Ragtime to Bebop, A History, by Frank Driggs and Charles Haddix; copyright, 2005. Excerpted by permission of the author.  All rights reserved. No part of these excerpts or photographs may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

The post Kansas City Jazz: A Pictorial Tour appeared first on Jerry Jazz Musician.

Jack Kerouac

____________________________

Valentine

Listen to the music
Listen to the sound
Turn off your thoughts
Tune in turn on
Gather round
Miles Davis is calling you
Gather round
Listen to the sound

Tiga Tiga boom boom
Tiga tiga twiddly mac twat
Tweet tweet twat
Bang a dong
Never ever, never ever mind
So what
The song
Bang a dong
Free me baby, free
So what
Give it to me

The beat, the beat
The unintended
Syncopated beat
On the street
Off my feet
Down the street
Moves on
No song
No memory
No intentions
An uninterrupted stream
A stream of consciousness
Beat beat beat

Searching a rhyme
A rhyme divine
Searching for a mind

No clash
A movement
From my head
To my heart
To and fro
Sway and fro
Brain and soul
A rhythm
A non rhythm
Bang those strings
Bang those skins
Bang a dong
Rough rough roughillicious
I am all
Tongue tied twisted
Beat up inside
King Kong and his bride
His lily white
Princess bride
Whitey tighty twiddly diddly twat

Searching for a string of notes
A parade of floats
Blue blue aqua velvet green
What a scene
A parade of boats
Rocking, rollicking bouncing
The wavy undulating heat
Strike those strings
Zizzy zizzy bingaling

And that horn
Blare blare mocaholic sound
Beat beat
Blow baby down
To the ground
A ground zerooooooo
You are the one
You are the one
Be mine every
Be mine in
And every
Time
Baby, it’s so good
For what ails you
Move body, mind
Heart, soul
The beat goes on
In a song
Without a song
Bang a dong
Within your mind
Oh baby be mine
All you need is
Love Love Love
Beat Beat Beat
All the time
Loony toony
Rhapsodic
Time
Incredible
Tripper-cerrific rhyme
Be mine
Be my
Valentine
Ffff fade away baby…

The Stand of Birch

Protector of dark
Secrets inside
Halos of fairy dust
Tinker Bell tracers
Castle like spires
Splendiferous
Translucent
Lunatic-licious
A cloud gate
You must pass thru us
We will wash your
Mind
Then push you on
Into dark forest
Beyond
All experience and imagination
We will cleanse your soul
For your trip
Upon a path of no return
A shining cloud gate
Etherealite
Sparkling souls
Remnants of rusting leaves
Shuddering in the wind
Clinging like loose buttons
To a threadbare thread
Silver shadows with
Barely hanging ornaments
On bones so white
So straight
As not to bend
To your will
We will cleanse your being
As you walk and breathe
Air, dust, cloudy steam
A world beyond
Blinded minds
In our timbre of existence

don’t know jack

what if i were jack kerouac
would that be
wac
or wut?
i would know the perfect
word to write
every time
i needed a line
is this too much rhyme?
if i were jack kerouac
i’d be cuul all day
beat in every way
seattle blue
if i wanted to
Criss crossing
screaming
across america
stories looking for me
if i were he.
was it all in his head
those amazing things
he wrote and said
or was it shoved in
like meat to a grinder
making a massive meat burger
from not so thin air?
the traffic light just
turned red
it really fucked up
my head.
jack kerouac is dead and
if i were he
who
would
be me?
cuul de sac is the nu b wac. beautiful beat…lives on…
jack uac is jazzdelicious, lost in space baby…

Saeta

The war was born
of a firestorm.
The band went marching on
and trumpets blasted to the heavens
as the earth scorched below.
The war was born
by men of no imagination
living illusions, delusions
who cared not for music
or the children of others.
Men who loved and were loved by their mothers,
or so they say…
Jack and Jill
marched up the hill
on a path
of their own construction and
destruction.
The band played on and
the trumpets sounded the story
of souls lost in their ways.
The war was born
of a firestorm.
Consuming all in its wake
burning flags and all else without discretion.

Indeed, the storm became
a demon of our dreams.
It took on a life of its own
stealing the air that we breathe
melting eyes beyond disguise
consuming all that it sees
and all that sees it.
Sucking up people off sidewalks and streets
burning all fruit, leaves, branches
pulling up the very roots of trees.
Melting all that melts and
all God’s creatures, innocent or not.
A reddish, yellowish, hellish tornado
not taking us somewhere over the rainbow
but only way down below
beyond protection and redemption.

Jack and Jill
went up the hill
to fetch a pail of water.
But were soon ascending to a fire cloud
sadly to return never after
rudely sent to their ever after
by men who knew not
what was true
who cared not, for me and you.
By men who were succoured by mothers,
women who were ultimately consumed
by their bombs and napalm.
The war was born
of a firestorm.
A storm which consumed all in its path
incinerated the haves and the have nots,
the know and the know nots
the first and the last
and the band played on.
We step to the beat of death drums
and the trumpets
extol our glory
to the bitter end.
We march to the boom boom beat of the drummer
only to be finally silenced
by the shattering of already deaf ears.

The post Poetry by Ed Corrigan appeared first on Jerry Jazz Musician.

Robin D. G. Kelley,

author of

Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original

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“The piano ain’t got no wrong notes!” So ranted Thelonious Sphere Monk, who proved his point every time he sat down at the keyboard. His angular melodies and dissonant harmonies shook the jazz world to its foundations, ushering in the birth of “bebop” and establishing Monk as one of America’s greatest composers. Yet throughout much of his life, his musical contribution took a backseat to tales of his reputed behavior. Writers tended to obsess over Monk’s hats or his proclivity to dance on stage. To his fans, he was the ultimate hipster; to his detractors, he was temperamental, eccentric, taciturn, or childlike. But these labels tell us little about the man or his music.

   In the first book on Thelonious Monk based on exclusive access to the Monk family papers and private recordings, as well as on a decade of prodigious research, prize-winning historian Robin D. G. Kelley brings to light a startlingly different Thelonious Monk – witty, intelligent, generous, politically engaged, brutally honest, and a devoted father and husband. Indeed, Thelonious Monk is essentially a love story. It is a story of familial love, beginning with Monk’s enslaved ancestors from whom Thelonious inherited an appreciation for community, freedom, and black traditions of sacred and secular song. It is about a doting mother who scrubbed floors to pay for piano lessons and encouraged her son to follow his dream. It is the story of romance, from Monk’s initial heartbreaks to his lifelong commitment to his muse, the extraordinary Nellie Monk. And it is about his unique friendship with the Baroness Nica de Koenigswarter, a scion of the famous Rothschild family whose relationship with Monk and other jazz musicians has long been the subject of speculation and rumor. Nellie, Nica, and various friends and family sustained Monk during the long periods of joblessness, bipolar episodes, incarceration, health crises, and other tragic and difficult moments.

Above all, Thelonious Monk is the gripping saga of an artist’s struggle to “make it” without compromising his musical vision. It is a story that, like its subject, reflects the tidal ebbs and flows of American history in the twentieth century. Elegantly written and rich with humor and pathos, Thelonious Monk is the definitive work on modern jazz’s most original composer.#

Kelley discusses Monk – and his book – with Jerry Jazz Musician publisher Joe Maita in a December 28, 2009 interview.  

Photo © Herb Snitzer

Thelonious Monk

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“He demanded originality in others and he embodied it in everything he did – in his piano technique, in his dress, in his language, his humor, in the way he danced, in the way he loved his family and raised his children, and above all in his compositions. Original did not mean being different for the hell of it. For Monk, to be original meant reaching higher than one’s limits, striving for something startling and memorable, and never being afraid to make mistakes. Originality is not always mastery, nor does it always yield success. But it is very hard work.”

- Robin D.G. Kelley

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‘Round Midnight , by Thelonious Monk

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JJM   Christopher Lydon recently wrote about your book in the Huffington Post, “There may be another jazz biography as thickly detailed, as audibly lyrical, as passionate, as thrilling as this one, but I can’t bring it to mind.” This is a common critique of your book, so congratulations, Robin, on your work.

RK  Thank you.

JJM  Who and what were some of your key sources for the book?

RK  A key source was, of course, Monk’s family and their private archives. I am the only researcher to ever have had access to the family’s materials, which included things like Monk’s composition books, a composition book from high school, and original manuscripts. There was no correspondence or anything like that, but it included a few little gems here and there, and for the most part I found resources all over the globe. I found articles that I had translated from Polish, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, Swiss, Swedish, and so many other countries, and found rare documents in the United States in the most unusual places. But, the most important source for me were the memories of Monk’s family – the stories that they were able to hold on to. It is a large, close-knit family, and it was their willingness to openly share the stories that really made this book happen.

JJM  How did the San Juan Hill neighborhood of New York City in which Monk grew up help shape his musical taste and ambition?

RK  I think that it is essential. He was born in North Carolina but he left at such a young age – about four-and-a-half years old – and the San Juan Hill neighborhood became his world. It is located just west of Lincoln Center in a working class, multi-ethnic neighborhood. But, while it was multi-ethnic, it was also very segregated. Sixty-first, 62nd, and 63rd Streets were West Indian blacks and African Americans from the South. Amsterdam Avenue was mostly white ethnic, Irish, Italian, Jewish. The corners of the Avenues is where everybody met, and it was called San Juan Hill because the racial violence was so intense at times that it looked like a war zone. Nevertheless, Monk experienced a neighborhood full of musicians and a very close-knit community. It had a community center – which just about every kid in the neighborhood was a member of – where they were taught things like music, orchestra and band, elocution, basketball, tennis, table tennis, and just about anything you could imagine. And that was Monk’s world.

His best friends were mainly from San Juan Hill, and his best friend Sonny eventually became his brother-in-law. He only had three girlfriends in his entire life, all of whom lived within a two-block radius, which to me is astounding. This was also the community where he learned to play the piano. He had a private classical teacher name Simon Wolff, an Austrian Jew who taught violin and piano to virtually all of the black kids who could pay him 75 cents a lesson. This is where Monk learned to play Chopin, Rachmaninoff, and others. He also had another neighborhood teacher, Alberta Simmons, a wonderful stride pianist who taught him a lot about music, but also taught him what it means to be an entertainer. She really had an impact on him. Finally, he listened to so much music in that multi-ethnic black community – calypso, salsa, and other kinds of music just on the street – and some of it entered into his own music.

JJM  You write about some of the racism that he encountered as a child. How did this affect his early years?

RK  That is an interesting thing to consider, because while he experienced racism in school and witnessed violence in his neighborhood, he also experienced a great deal of love and support from the community. So Monk always de-emphasized racism. While he acknowledged there were fights in the neighborhood and things like that could happen, he would say that every time he tried to hate white people, he couldn’t because he saw so many exceptions.

What shaped his early years was the love and support he got from his mother and the community. He was also nurtured while he became engaged in the jazz world. There were plenty of bad club owners and band managers in the world, but Monk’s world was hanging out with older musicians at the great stride pianist James P. Johnson’s house, where they would teach him about music without ever taking a dime for it. He later opened up his tiny little apartment on West 53rd to any musician who wanted to come by and learn a tune or sit with him and talk or just play. That sort of generosity made the racism seem small to him.

JJM You always think of Monk as the musician, but did he have any career alternatives to music?

RK That is an interesting question because, after all the research I have done, as far as I know the only job other than music that Monk took was delivering ice for the local iceman. I believe he held that job for about two days – he wasn’t going to do that! So, for Monk there were no options to music, and the thing that is most amazing is that he was surrounded by women who agreed with him. His mother felt that if he wanted to play the piano, he should play the piano, and she made sure there was a piano in the house. She also made sure that he had a place to live – she never threw him out of the house. When he married Nellie, she basically did the same thing. She worked as a seamstress, she worked for Chock Full of Nuts, she did whatever it took to help them survive. So music was Monk’s only possible vocation. He was a brilliant man who could do many things, but he couldn’t conceive of anything other than playing music.

JJM  Monk’s eccentricities and behavior are legendary. You wrote, “But not all of Monk’s bizarre actions were artifice. Thelonious suffered from bipolar disorder, the signs of which are evident as early as the 1940′s.” How did you arrive at this diagnosis?

RK  Well, a combination of things. First, by having access and speaking to Nellie, who explained a lot of his conditions to me. By the 1970′s, they had the correct diagnosis and were treating him with Lithium, but it was not always clear what the diagnosis was throughout. So, access to the family, and access to the limited medical records certainly helped me. I also spoke to two of his doctors – one off the record – and from looking at his prescription receipts I know that he was taking Thorazine. From other sources I was able to learn when he was hospitalized and under what conditions.

The other thing is that his behavior indicated classic symptoms of bipolar disorder. The instances were episodic. Sometimes he would go months and months without an episode, so most musicians who knew Monk knew him as a fairly normal, humorous person. The stories that don’t get told are the stories of his sense of humor and engagement with the world. The stories that do get told are the ones where he checks out because they make better stories, as far as the press is concerned.

Another thing I argue in the book – which bugs some of the reviewers – is that some of his behavior was intended to be theatrical, as a way to protect his own privacy As he famously told the writer Frank London Brown, “You know people have tried to put me off as being crazy. Sometimes it’s to your advantage for people to think you’re crazy.”

But some of his behavior was neither stagecraft nor mental illness. Some of it – like being late for jobs, for example – was resistance against the kind of exploitation he experienced from club owners, the exception being the Five Spot. When he was late at the Five Spot it was because he sort of took advantage of his good friendship with Joe and Iggy Termini in ways that I think were unfair. For the most part he would show up late for gigs because he felt that he wasn’t being paid enough, and at times he would refuse to do matinees. But, for a working musician, this makes perfect sense.

The amazing, surprising and even shocking thing to me about Monk is how many times he didn’t miss a gig, and how many times he did arrive on time. That is a story that doesn’t get told as much because, you know, being consistent is not as interesting as being absent or being wild. So one of the things I try to do in the book wherever possible is document what his schedule was like, especially during the 1960′s when he was on tour all the time. It was grueling, and sometimes you are exhausted from reading about it, but that is exactly the point – I want you to feel exhausted because Monk was exhausted. Once you experience what it means to play in 20 cities in 30 days, and to be on the road living in hotels, you see just how rough it was. On top of that, here is a man taking prescription drugs, who is having issues with sleep but still has to make the gig, and you can see that he led a hard life.

JJM  How much debate has this opinion inspired?

RK  Well, there has been some debate. Downbeat had a review that basically said all the evidence in the book suggests that he really was crazy and that he really was eccentric. While I don’t deny that these stories happened, what I do say is let’s take a look at the whole picture of his life. So, my book wasn’t an effort to simply knock down the character of Monk as being “crazy” and “eccentric,” it was to put that part of his life in context. It was to understand how he ended up in Bellevue, or how he ended up in Grafton State Hospital. What was he going through? What was he feeling? And what about moments like those found in the film Straight, No Chaser, when he is filmed spinning around in circles in the airport? What was he trying to do, and what part of that was stagecraft? Here was a man who was very much aware of where he was, being very playful, and what ends up happening is that people interpret that behavior as him acting crazy, when in fact, he was giving the viewer a show. He wants you to say those things about him.

JJM  Yes, as you pointed out earlier, he said, “Sometimes it’s to your advantage for people to think you’re crazy.”

RK  Exactly, and Monk really believed it. While it worked to his advantage to a certain degree, it would come back to bite him because there were points where his reputation for being unreliable and taciturn and crazy made it difficult at times for him to get gigs.

JJM  He was labeled a psychiatric reject by the Army…

RK  He was, but I learned that the percentage of African Americans labeled as psychiatric rejects was incredibly high compared to any other group during World War II. So in some ways, Monk was in good company. There is great research out there that shows that the Selective Service didn’t want African Americans in the military, and were worried about their presence in it. On the other hand, there were those – and Monk was one of them – who deliberately presented themselves as being kind of crazy or challenging in order to avoid being drafted. For example, I wrote in the book about Malcolm X and Dizzy Gillespie doing that. Dizzy went into the draft board and told them that they really don’t want him in the Army because, given the fact that white people have been beating him his entire life, he might get out on the battlefield and shoot one of his own compatriots as a result of mistaken identity. He was subsequently classified 4F.

Monk’s story is that he went to the draft board and said something similar to what Dizzy said, that he couldn’t fight a white man’s war in this world where black people are treated so badly. While he didn’t want to fight, he was committed to supporting the French resistance. He would walk around Minton’s Playhouse wearing a beret and a “France Libre” button on his lapel to let the world know that he was for the resistance.

JJM  Following a 1956 car accident, Monk was taken to Bellevue Hospital, where he was called a “psycho.” It was there that he began, as you wrote, to “exhibit classic symptoms of [bipolar] disorder – symptoms that would occur more frequently in the years to come.” What were his narcotics and alcohol use at that time?

RK  Well, it wasn’t much different from other musicians of that era. He drank recreationally and worked at clubs where what they do more than anything else is sell alcohol. Everyone was drinking in those days – it was a hazard of the job. You watch most any film about the 1950′s and every day, these middle class white men in grey flannel suits would have a beer during lunch, and would then come home to a couple of Martinis, and then, before going to bed they would have a nightcap. So, the musicians were drinking as much as anyone else, the difference is that jazz musicians were stigmatized for their drinking. Monk used heroine intermittently in the ’40′s, but by the late ’50′s I find that he is not. Monk was almost carnival-esque in his use of narcotics – he did whatever he felt like doing at the moment, but he was never an addict.

Another thing is that the doctor who checked him out, Dr. Robert Freymann – who was the Baroness Nica de Koenigswarter’s doctor – was administering what he called vitamin shots to not only Monk but to all of his patients. It was discovered years later that those vitamin shots were laced with amphetamines. Now, imagine a few years later, in 1959, Monk goes to Grafton State Hospital in Massachusetts where they administer him Thorazine while he is taking these amphetamine-laced “vitamin shots,” while he is also drinking whenever he feels like it, and while he was occasionally taking bennies. So the combination of these things exacerbated what was already a chemical imbalance in his system, and when he had his ups, he was up, and when he was down, he was down.

JJM  How did the narcotics affect his social relationships?

RK  The impact on his social relationships was less about narcotics and more about the poverty. You know, rich people who drink or use narcotics generally have a job, so they have resources for this, but Monk never really made a living from the middle 1940′s to 1957. He didn’t start making a living until he was 40 years old, which is significant. His wife worked very hard for him – she was not the only bread winner, but she was the primary bread winner, and Monk had to do what ever it took. In 1951, after he lost his cabaret card for the second time, he couldn’t play in Manhattan where alcohol was served, so he took gigs out in Brooklyn and the Bronx, playing in black-owned clubs. He hustled to get whatever gigs he could get. He played at cocktail parties and Bar Mitzvah’s and got the 10 or 15 bucks, taking whatever he could because he was so committed to his wife and family. The frustration he felt around his inability to get producers and club owners to really hear his music and appreciate it had more of an impact on him than anything else.

JJM A signature moment in his musical career was being hired by the drummer Kenny Clarke as house pianist at Minton’s Playhouse. What did Clarke see in Monk to hire him?

RK  Well, Monk wasn’t even Clarke’s first choice. His first choice, Sonny White, couldn’t take the gig, so Monk ended up getting it. In those days – and this is very important for readers to recognize – Monk wasn’t seen as so strange. In 1940 he was hanging out with some of the greatest pianists in the city of New York. Folks like James P. Johnson and Willie “The Lion” Smith really respected Monk’s skills as a pianist, and they encouraged him to be who he is. No one said, “Oh man, look at Monk, he is so weird and strange!” When you listen to those early recordings from 1941, you hear people in the audience shouting Monk’s name, “Monk! Monk!” There is a response to him that suggests that he was actually beloved, that people respected what he was trying to do. He played slightly different but you can still hear Monk. There was something powerful about him. He also had an encyclopedic knowledge of the music, and he was a good band leader. And, while he brought a new harmonic sensibility to the music that the modern players loved, if you listen to those early recordings, you can hardly call it bebop. No one was really experimental. They were making a gig, they were just playing music for the people. There were backup singers and they were entertaining crowds and doing whatever it took to play music that was actually palatable for a Harlem lower working class audience. So, Monk fit really well in that environment.

JJM In 1939, the pianist Teddy Wilson said, “Thelonious Monk knew my playing very well, as well as that of [Art] Tatum, [Earl] Hines, and [Fats] Waller. He was exceedingly well grounded in the piano players who preceded him, adding his own originality to a very sound foundation.” And, the pianist Herbie Nichols was an early fan of Monk’s, saying that he would rather hear Monk play a stride piano piece than anyone else.

RK  We know Herbie Nichols as one of the great composers of the music and a wonderful piano player who basically died broke because he never got his dues, but he also deserves credit for being the first critic to ever write about Monk. Although they were very different, Herbie and Monk, in a way, led parallel lives. Like Monk, Herbie Nichols was born and raised partly in the San Juan Hill area, and, like Monk, he was also once a house pianist – at Monroe’s Uptown House in Harlem. Nichols would go to Monk’s house and hang out a little bit, where they enjoyed each other’s company. Herbie wrote the first critical piece on Monk, praising him and his musical style, and then wrote the first long magazine piece in Rhythm magazine in 1946. So, Herbie Nichols understood what Monk was doing and promoted his music long before any of the other critics.

JJM  The fame of Minton’s house band didn’t translate into any outside gigs and recording contracts for Monk. Why not?

RK  Because he wasn’t there for that long. He was the house pianist there from January of 1941 through mid-summer, when he was fired, partly because he would be in the kitchen, lost in his writing. They would look all over for him and ask, “Where’s Monk?” There were other reasons too. Once World War II broke out, it had an impact on the whole scene in Harlem. Minton’s as a business was struggling, and the federal government was cracking down on some of the uptown clubs, including the Savoy Ballroom, which closed down. So, it was hard for anyone to sustain work. But he took whatever work he could, finding gigs at little clubs like Kelly’s Stable in Manhattan. But it really wasn’t until Coleman Hawkins hired him in 1944 that Monk got a regular gig, and he worked with Hawkins for quite some time.

JJM Meanwhile, while Monk was struggling financially and unable to secure regular work, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker became sensations. Monk felt that his music was being stolen and played by other people without himself benefiting financially. How did this affect their friendship?

RK It is an interesting question because, on the one hand, there is no question that there was tension between Dizzy Gillespie and Monk because Dizzy, more than anyone else, was getting the financial rewards and accolade for being the inventor of bebop – along with Bird. The critic Leonard Feather was a big promoter of Dizzy Gillespie at the expense of Monk, and I think he played a role in putting a wedge between those two. In his book Inside Bebop, Feather basically dismisses Monk as not being very interesting, and said his contributions to the creation of the music were unimportant. Meanwhile, he praises Dizzy as being the greatest thing since sliced bread, which pissed Monk off. Now, did Monk take it out on Dizzy? No. In fact, they hung out together, and Dizzy hired Monk to play in his big band in 1946 for a while, until Monk was late one too many times and Dizzy fired him. Whatever jealousy that might have existed between them certainly didn’t affect their ability to work or play together, and throughout the book there are moments where Dizzy might be in town and Monk would visit him. Monk kept a photograph of Dizzy Gillespie in his room, basically signed “To Monk,” so, Monk was the kind of person who, if he had a beef with you, he would tell it to your face. He would never keep anything to himself – he would tell you if he thought you did something wrong, if he couldn’t stand your music, if you stole something from him. But after, he would still hang out with you.

JJM  He was certainly suspicious of Dizzy, though. At one point he felt that Dizzy got him a job with Lucky Millinder because he wanted to keep an eye on what Monk was doing so he could steal more of his ideas.

RK Exactly, and I am sure that Monk told Dizzy that. It is true that Dizzy and his arranger Gil Fuller loved Monk’s music, and his tunes were the ones they really wanted to arrange for big band. So, they wanted Monk around, even if they didn’t appreciate his piano playing. That is the other irony, that they brought Monk into the big band but you can hardly hear him play on the recordings. But they certainly wanted to have tunes like “‘Round Midnight” and “Playhouse” – which we now know as “Introspection” – arranged for big band.

JJM You wrote, “Nineteen forty-eight became the year Thelonious Monk was invented.” How so?

RK  Monk was signed by Blue Note Records in 1947. They were the first record label willing to record him as a leader, and by this time he was 30 years old. The owners of the record label were Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, and Lion’s wife Lorraine was sort of like a one-woman publicity machine at Blue Note.

They got involved with Monk around the time that the photographer William Gottlieb wrote the first article on Monk, called “Genius of Bop,” published in a mainstream magazine, Downbeat. The piece was short, and the hook of it was to discover this eccentric guy who started the music called bebop. He actually referred to Monk as the “George Washington of bebop,” which I love! He said that Monk is the guy who started it but you don’t know who he is because he is so mysterious, he is so eccentric and underground, and that he had to go track him down. So, it is a good story, and it created a sort of myth about Monk that Blue Note saw as a selling point. Lorraine Lion essentially took a page from Gottlieb’s article and wrote a press release emphasizing Monk’s mysterious qualities and nature, and told anecdotes about how he would go days and days without sleeping, knocking on people’s doors at all hours to play their pianos, how he would crash in their homes for a couple of days. All of this strange behavior was not written in a derogatory sense, she was just trying to make him interesting. It was a classic case of media manipulation that had some truth to it, because part of this behavior she described was tied to his bipolar disorder.

What is astounding to me is that from that point on, virtually every critic or writer who did a profile on Monk repeated many of the same things from Lorraine Lion’s press release. There were a flurry of articles profiling Monk that came out in 1948 – from both the black press and the mainstream press – all of which quoted things from the press release. From that point on it became the imprint of who Monk is.

JJM  They really took the bait…

RK  They sure did, and it worked for a minute. He was getting some good press until his arrest for marijuana possession – serving thirty days in jail and losing his cabaret card for a year as a result – and he wasn’t really resurrected until the 1950′s.

JJM  While this publicity strategy helped Blue Note get press for Monk, it didn’t help them sell records, did it?

RK  It sure didn’t, and there are two reasons for that. The first is that critics didn’t like Monk’s music. It is amazing how much power the jazz critics of the time had. Downbeat or Metronome or any of the jazz magazines never had anything good to say about Monk’s music. The only critics who said he was doing anything interesting were Herbie Nichols and Monk’s friend Paul Bacon, who was actually the art director for Blue Note at the time, so given that personal relationship the review could be questioned. There were a couple of Swiss critics who wrote an article in French that praised Monk in 1949, but no one in New York was reading those reviews. A young Orrin Keepnews wrote a strong article praising Monk in Record Changer, but no one was really reading Record Changer. So, the critics not being impressed with Monk was the first reason that he didn’t sell records, and the second is that Blue Note was still wedded to 78 RPM recordings in an age of 33 1/3 and the ten inch LP. Some record stores didn’t even offer 78′s any more, which didn’t help Monk’s record sales. Nevertheless, Blue Note continued to be committed to Monk and kept recording him until 1952, which was the year of his last recording for the label as a leader. So they were committed to Monk but they didn’t make much money off of him. Today, they make money off of him.

JJM  Blue Note attempted to turn Monk into a commercial artist, doing things like setting him up with Milt Jackson and changing his rhythm section. And then Bob Weinstock of Prestige signed Monk. How did his vision for marketing Monk’s music and persona differ from that of Blue Note’s?

RK  Weinstock had a different philosophy. Blue Note believed in rehearsals and in having arrangements, whereas Weinstock wanted to make good, decent quality jazz records that swung at the lowest cost possible. He wanted the musicians to come into the studio and make up the song and the recording on the spot, all in one or two takes, and if it turned out good, then fine – whatever. So Weinstock created these blowing sessions, while Monk came out of a tradition of actually writing difficult music that you really need to be up to par to play. He put out wonderful records on Prestige but they didn’t sell so well.

The other thing that was different is that once he recorded Monk, he began to use him as a side man, and one of his most famous recordings was with Miles Davis, Milt Jackson, Kenny Clarke and Percy Heath. It was an all- star cast, with Miles as the leader, and it was Weinstock’s effort to push all of his artists out there. Monk didn’t really last very long with Prestige, recording for about three years, from 1952 – 1955. That is when Riverside signed Monk.

JJM  His 1956 Riverside recording, Brilliant Corners, received critical acclaim, and was labeled by some critics as “modern music.” So, it was during his time at Riverside that he began to be recognized as a great composer and a great contributor to the art…

RK  Exactly, and I would add that it was Monk who got Riverside started on the path of being recognized as a great label. Before Monk their modern artist was pianist Randy Weston, who really delivered Monk to Riverside, despite what Orrin Keepnews or others may say. Keepnews and Bill Grauer owned Riverside, and when they first started, were doing things like recording the sound of Ferraris, which appealed to the single, hip, urbane male who liked to listen to the new novelty of high-fidelity recordings. They made a lot of money off of that – enough to be able to invest in jazz – so they recorded some of the older musicians, as well as modern artists like Weston and Monk. Even before signing with Riverside, Monk had already developed a reputation in the clubs as well as on some of the Prestige recordings he made with Miles Davis, for example, which did pretty well. Keepnews’ strategy for Monk was to have him make his first LP a recording of standards that he could interpret and put his imprint on, and, for the second album, it would be Monk Plays Duke Ellington. The idea was to make Thelonious Monk palatable to a broader audience. Part of that theory was that no matter what Monk played, he was going to sound like Monk.

Monk was all for these ideas. He was very invested in his career and took part in conversations about what to do, so if someone had a good idea for him, he would follow through on it. The Ellington album is a classic, and what he was able to do in a trio setting with Oscar Pettiford and Kenny Clark is just fabulous. So, by the time he gets to the third album, the now-famous Brilliant Corners, it is all of Monk’s own compositions, and it is no longer just a trio, but rather a quintet with Sonny Rollins and the great Ernie Henry on saxophone, Max Roach, Pettiford, and Monk. “Brilliant Corners” is a challenging composition – 36 bars with a seven bar bridge – and a strange song that shifts tempos. It was so challenging that even these great artists had trouble with. Keepnews tells the story of doing 25 takes, and then mixing them together to record one take.

So, Brilliant Corners was in some ways his breakout record, but I must also emphasize this recording coincided with him getting his cabaret card back, working at the Five Spot Café, and having a visible presence on the jazz scene not only in New York, but in the outer boroughs as well. All of these things combined in a way that helped him sell records and build his reputation.

JJM  Was it during this era – particularly when he was playing to such acclaim at the Five Spot – that he began to understand his potential as a celebrity?

RK  Yeah, but it is a tricky issue because Monk never lacked confidence, and his celebrity was more like a wave. In the spring of 1941 he was kind of a celebrity while playing at Minton’s, and then he disappeared. Then he was with Coleman Hawkins, and then he was out again for a while. Again, during that period in 1948 when he was in the press everywhere, he had some celebrity. 1957 was a period when, for the first time in his life, as a leader, he had his longest term gig ever. For six months straight he worked at the Five Spot, and everything was going really well for him – he had regular income, Nellie no longer had to work, and he got gigs traveling the country.

So, all of this great stuff is happening! But, a year later, during the fall of 1958, he’s beaten by the police in Delaware on his way to a gig in Baltimore, and as a result of him trying to defend himself, he ends up being fined and convicted of disturbing the peace, which results in him once again losing his cabaret card, this time for basically a year-and-a-half. It wasn’t his downfall, but it was just another blip in what was an upward trajectory.

JJM The incident in Delaware was a racist confrontation, where he and the Baroness were trying to get a glass of water from a motel proprietor…

RK  Yes, in October of 1958, the Baroness was driving Monk and Charlie Rouse through Delaware, on their way to Baltimore for a gig. They stopped at a motel because Monk was thirsty and wanted a drink of water, and Nica didn’t realize that Delaware was still kind of Jim Crow at the time. So, the people in the motel office didn’t appreciate Monk’s presence, but he didn’t want to leave until he got some water. They called the cops, who came running in and dragged him out, roughed him up a little bit, and then let him go. They followed them down the highway and pull them over, got back-up assistance, and then pulled Monk out of the car and beat him severely with billy clubs while Monk fought back. They ended up being brought in, and the cops did an illegal search and seizure of the car – no warrant or anything – and found a trace of marijuana in Nica’s purse. They tried to convict her on marijuana possession, but the case was thrown out because it was a complete violation of her constitutional rights. She never saw a day in jail. So, Nica doesn’t really suffer, but the person who did was Thelonious. Despite the fact that he was he was perfectly justified in his effort to defend himself for being beaten, he was still convicted and fined. While he never saw a day in jail, the NYPD, who controlled the cabaret licenses, took his card away again, and he didn’t get it back again until early 1960.

JJM  Of journalist Barry Farrell’s Timemagazine’s article on Monk and its impact on jazz, you wrote, “While praising Farrell for writing an accurate, well rounded portrait, in depth of a complex personality, [prominent jazz writer] Leonard Feather nevertheless concluded the essay might actually harm jazz and race relations.” We know that Leonard Feather had an issue with Monk, but why did he feel that this article could harm jazz and race relations?

RK  There are two reasons. Leonard Feather sort of took the bait about Monk’s character and felt he was not the best role model for jazz. He felt there were all these other role models that Farrell should have written about, like Oscar Peterson, like Dizzy Gillespie, and others who were in fact not doing drugs or drinking, who didn’t wear funny hats, and who didn’t engage in strange behavior. So he was basically saying that jazz needed a more respectable musician on the cover of Time magazine, not a crazy one like Monk. But, as far as Feather was concerned, that is what Time was interested in. The other reason too is that since Time reached a non-jazz and predominantly white audience, having the image of Monk on the cover would reinforce the stereotypes whites had for black jazz musicians. But what Feather doesn’t do is question the authenticity of Farrell’s piece which Ralph Gleason, the jazz critic in San Francisco, does. Gleason was saying that the article wasn’t even correct, and went after Farrell in a way no other critic did.

JJM  And the piece was written at an interesting time, on the cusp of the civil rights movement, originally scheduled to be published the week of Kennedy’s assassination. It got moved back to the spring of 1964…

RK  That’s right, and Barry Farrell himself was fascinated with the question of race in music because I believe he wrote an unsigned piece as the music critic for Time called “Crow Jim and Jazz,” which discussed how, in his opinion, white jazz musicians were struggling to get work, and described the black jazz musicians he identified as angry and revolutionary, and whose radical music had no place in jazz. The fact is that Monk’s Time profile emerged at a really hot moment when, on one side was the jazz avant-garde, which fairly or un-fairly was being identified with black nationalism and radicalism, and on the other side were the older swing musicians who were seen as conservative. These characterizations were not necessarily accurate but what they did is embody a political debate that was going on in the nation at the time – and Monk sort of gets caught in the middle. It is so ironic that a right-wing, conservative publication like National Review claimed Monk as their man because he knew how to swing, at the same time that a left-wing publication out of Harlem like Liberator claimed him as their guy, describing him as a revolutionary being exploited by the Baroness. So, it is fascinating how Monk became a symbol that people could write their own political agenda around.

JJM   And before that he was a symbol to the artistic community as well. The beat artists, for example, really dug Monk. You wrote, “They found in Monk’s angular sounds and startling sense of freedom a musical parallel or complement to their own experiments on canvas and in verse.” So, he had this history of being a symbol of several different movements.

RK  Absolutely, and, in fact, I would argue that the beat generation’s writers, poets and painters helped put Monk on the map.

JJM As Monk’s health deteriorated, was his downward emotional spiral ever evident in his recordings? We know he made some bad musical choices – like the Oliver Nelson arranged album, Monk’s Blues, is considered a bad choice – but I doubt we can pin that on his emotional state of mind…

RK  No, in that case the bottom line is that he was very committed to doing what it took to make some money. Surprisingly, it is amazing how little his emotional state affected his recordings. There are a couple of moments when he is clearly struggling, like on the live recordings at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco when he forgets what he played and plays another song. It could be that it was deliberate, but I doubt it was. But that is very rare.

What amazed me is his recorded output is consistently quality music, even when he was fatigued and struggling. For example, you listen to his recording of Duke Ellington’s “I Didn’t Know About You” from Straight, No Chaser from about 1967, and his piano introduction and solo is just outstanding, as are all of his solo recordings for Columbia, when he was really struggling. And by struggling I don’t mean struggling with his mental health, because most of the time he was quite cool and it was not an issue. But he was struggling with fatigue as a result of working so damn hard and not getting enough sleep, and he was struggling with physical issues – he had frequent colds and flu and had a lot of congestion due to the medication he was taking. He also had an enlarged prostate. If you look at the films of him playing during the 1970′s versus films of him playing with Count Basie in Japan in 1958, you will see that his body was moving constantly with Basie. His feet are moving, his body is moving, he’s dancing at the piano bench. Later on he is hardly moving, and that lack of movement is not mental, it’s physical – it’s his prostate. He is struggling with incontinence, he is uncomfortable, his fingers are stiff, his body is stiff, and he gained some weight. This is just old age! It’s that, plus the fact that later on the medication does affect him, so he does eventually “check out.” But I think the physical manifestations really have more of an impact because if you listen to those great London recordings from 1971, despite all that he is dealing with, you will hear that he hasn’t lost a beat, he still has his chops. It isn’t really until 1976, on his last recordings, where you can see that he is really struggling with the piano – it is really stiff for him and you can tell that his physical capacity is starting to be limited. That was the point where he decided he was done because he knew when he couldn’t play anymore.

JJM  He was treated by Doctor Carl Pfeiffer, the director of the Brain Bio Center in Princeton, where you say he “improved dramatically”…

RK  From all the evidence that I could put together, he started to go the Brain Bio Center in 1976 or 1977, which would have possibly been after his last concert. Saying he “improved” is tricky because his mental illness stabilized – the episodes of highs and lows kind of disappeared with the lithium treatment – but his physical health didn’t. He was able to take walks but an enlarged prostate is a real issue. He was sickly, and he was exhausted. So, I think he got tired of playing.

JJM He never had prostate surgery?

RK  Well, I don’t think it was significant enough. He was taking medication, but as far as I know he never had surgery for it. Prostate issues in the middle 1970′s were known about, but not like today. You know, today everyone is on Flomax…

JJM Yes, that was forty years ago…

RK  He never had to wear Depends for incontinence or anything like that. But it got him to move to the second floor of Nica’s house in 1973, and what worked about that is that he had his own room, with a bathroom next to him, and the piano upstairs. So, everything he needed was right there – it was his own little world. Getting to the bathroom was important because it made him comfortable and feel safe. He liked to lie in bed – he always liked to lie in bed, and at this point it became his vocation.

JJM There is so much to cover with a figure like Monk – it dawned on me we haven’t talked nearly enough about his music.

RK  There is a great deal to discuss, yes…

JJM What do you want readers to take away from their experience of reading your book?

RK  Probably three things. One is, I want them to know how Monk was made, what the context was that produced this genius. He didn’t come out of thin air – he came out of a close-knit, deeply cultural and intellectual community of working class people. The second thing is that I want people to be inspired to run to his music, to let my book be the opening of their own exploration of one of the greatest American composers of the twentieth century, someone who I put up there with people like George Gershwin, Charles Ives and John Cage. The third thing is to really understand his suffering. This is a story about a man who produced music that was so irreverent and humorous that you can’t help but laugh when you listen to it, but, he also had so many hurdles to jump over, like so many other musicians have had to. It is important to understand the number of gigs he had to play without making much money, his grueling schedule, the disappointment, the back pedaling – just following the money really teaches us what musicians were up against. I am just amazed that they were able to create this music under those conditions. Monk was actually one of the lucky ones. It is the ones we don’t know about who probably suffered just as much if not more than Monk who we need to pay attention to as well.

_______________________________________________________
Photo by W. Eugene Smith

Thelonious Monk, Town Hall, New York City. February 28, 1959.
*
“…for all the accolades and formal recognition, for all the efforts to canonize Monk and place his bust on the mantel alongside Bach and Beethoven, we must remember that Monk was essentially a rebel. To know the man and his music requires digging Monk – out of the golden dustbins of posterity, out of the protected cells of museums – and restoring him to a tradition of sonic disturbance that formed the entire world to take notice. He broke rules and created a body of work and a sound no one has been able to duplicate.”

- Robin D.G. Kelley
_____
Crepuscule with Nellie, Berlin, 1969

______________________________________________

Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original

by

Robin D.G. Kelley

*

About Robin D. G. Kelley

Robin D. G. Kelley is Professor of History and American Studies at the University of Southern California. His books include Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class and Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. He has written on music for the New York Times, the Village Voice, Jazz Times, Lenox Avenue, The Nation, and other publications. He lives with his family and his Baldwin baby grand piano in Los Angeles.

__________________________

JJM  Who was your childhood hero?

RK  My mother, Ananda Sattwa, was – and is – my hero in so many ways. She introduced me to jazz music. As a single mother with virtually no income, she used to take me on the subway for trumpet lessons with Jimmy Owens when I was about seven years old. She did everything possible to give us an education while living in a tenement house on 57th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in Harlem. And, I have to say that I feel like I got a better cultural education and better nurturing than a lot of kids who attended the most exclusive private schools. That was extremely important. My mother just finished up her Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies at U.C. Berkeley.

JJM  You spoke at her graduation ceremony, didn’t you?

RK  That’s right. I was the keynote speaker and had the privilege of “hooding” her, which is kind of a medieval thing where a recipient of a Ph. D. is given a hood. It was a great honor for me. I am very proud of her, and I still talk to her every day. My mother handed me Monk – she gave me Monk. I wouldn’t know anything about Monk if it wasn’t for my mother.

*

Critical Acclaim for Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original

“Monk’s story, from roots in slavery, to the Great Migration north, to the cultural explosions of the 40s, 50s, and 60s, encapsulates a vivid tableau of twentieth-century American life and music. This biography is, at its best, a fitting tribute to one of America’s most original and lasting creative geniuses.”

– The Sacramento Book Review
“…extraordinary and heroically detailed…I doubt there will be a biography anytime soon that is as textured, thorough and knowing as Kelley’s. The “genius of modern music” has gotten the passionate, and compassionate, advocate he deserves”

– August Kleinzahler, The New York Times Book Review
“An omnibus of myth busting.”

– -Ben Ratliff, The New York Times
“…a massive and impressive undertaking…Thoroughly researched, meticulously footnoted, and beautifully crafted, “Thelonious Monk” presents the most complete, most revealing portrait ever assembled of the man known as the high priest of bebop”

– – Steve Greenlee, The Boston Globe

*

Thelonious Monk products at Amazon.com

Robin D. G. Kelley products at Amazon.com

_______________________________

This interview took place on December 28, 2009

If you enjoyed this interview, you may want to read our interview on Monk with Gary Giddins

_______________________________

Other Jerry Jazz Musician interviews

# Text from publisher.

The post Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original appeared first on Jerry Jazz Musician.

Charles Mingus

____________________________

Bad Luck Moan

Hard luck and trouble have hounded me all my days.
Oh yes, hard luck and trouble have hounded me all my days.
If I got some good news, I could change my ways.

Waiting for my broker to give me a call,
Waiting for my stock broker to give me that call,
If it wasn’t for misfortune, I wouldn’t have any fortune at all.

I hear the mail man coming down the hall.
I hear the mail man shuffling down the hall.
If he has my lottery winnings, we’ll sure have a ball.

Tolling Bells

I hear Sunday bells tolling,
Resounding in my head.
Whom are they tolling for?
They are tolling for me.

Each resonating toll, a reminder
Of one of my shortfalls.
I did not listen, I did not heed.
I lived for me, a rolling stone.

I could have redeemed myself,
I could have done some good.
I could have thought of others;
But I did it all just for me.

I was so focused on me.
I consumed myself
Like a famished snake
Devouring its tail.

I am fading away:
I am drifting towards the gates of hell.
The toll man waits;
And I must pay.

River’s Invitation

I’m burning up;
The river is cool.

My mind is muddled;
The water is clear.

I’m scratching at the surface;
The river is deep.

I’m searching for a way;
The river meanders.

I am lost;
The river gives direction.

I need to get out of this place;
The river races around the bend.

I want to end it;
I can hear the crash of the falls.

Counterpoint in Indigo

The blues band shuffles into a slow burn;
My soul is chilled since she left.

The guitar screams;
I wail at the unfairness.

Strings are bent;
I can bend no more.

The bass thumps out a mighty heartbeat;
My heart aches and lurches.

Drums pound out the rhythm;
I seem out of sync.

The post Poetry by Michael James O’Neill appeared first on Jerry Jazz Musician.

Excerpted from exclusive Jerry Jazz Musician interviews, our guests talk of theirs.

______________________________________________

Heroes Page 1  2  3

Reverend Ralph David Abernathy’s daughter Donzaleigh Abernathy

Low Down: junk, jazz, and other fairy tales from childhood author Amy Albany

Bessie Smith biographer Chris Albertson

Jack Kerouac collaborator David Amram

Jazz Modernism author Alfred Appel

Joshua Berrett, author of Louis Armstrong and Paul Whiteman: Two Kings of Jazz

New Yorker writer Whitney Balliett

Anthony Bianco, author of Ghosts of 42nd Street: A History of America’s Most Infamous Block

Arc of Justice author Kevin Boyle

New York Times writer, Stork Club author Ralph Blumenthal

Lost Sounds:  Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890 – 1919 author Tim Brooks

Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans author Thomas Brothers

Madam C.J. Walker biographer A’Lelia Bundles

Ralph Ellison ‘s literary executor John Callahan

New York Mayor John Lindsay historian Vincent Cannato

Free Speech Movement historian Robert Cohen

World War II historian David Colley

Gil Evans biographer Stephanie Stein Crease

Cultural critic Stanley Crouch

Writer, critic Francis Davis

Bayrd Rustin biographer John D’Emilio

Chet Baker biographer Jeroen de Valk

Django Reinhardt biographer Michael Dregni

Cultural critic Gerald Early

Bobby Darin biographer David Evanier

Jazz poet Sascha Feinstein

Stardust Melodies writer Will Friedwald

Chet Baker biographer James Gavin

Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics author John Gennari

Bing Crosby biographer Gary Giddins

Ken Burns advisor Matt Glaser

Beat poet Gary Glazner

Harlem Globetrotters biographer Ben Green

Sam Cooke biographer Peter Guralnick

Billie Holiday historian Farah Griffin

Kansas City Jazz: From Ragtime to Bebop — A History author Chuck Haddix

Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth editor Sam Hamill

Journalist Nat Hentoff

Ralph Ellison biographer Lawrence Jackson

Making of Kind of Blue author Ashley Kahn

Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Leters editor Carla Kaplan

Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original author Robin D. G. Kelley

Boogaloo: The Quintessance of American Popular Music author Arthur Kempton

Jazz on the River author William Howland Kenney

Ralph Ellison documentarian Avon Kirkland

Rahsaan Roland Kirk biographer John Kruth

Negro League Baseball: The Rise and Ruin of a Black Institution author Neil Lanctot

Critic and writer, Gene Lees

Tony Award winning playwright Warren Leight

Hip: The History author John Leland

Nelson Riddle biographer Peter Levinson

The Burning author Tim Madigan

Fletcher Henderson biographer Jeffrey Magee

They Marched Into Sunlight author David Maraniss

Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a World on the Brink author David Margolick

Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War author Karl Marlantes

Pulitzer Prize winning author Diane McWhorter

Billy Tipton biographer Diane Wood Middlebrook

Musician, writer Max Morath

Jazz historian, Living With Jazz author Dan Morgenstern

Author, critic Albert Murray

Seriously Funny author Gerald Nachman

Sonny Rollins biographer Eric Nisenson

Paul Bowles biographer Cherie Nutting

Writer Robert O’Meally

Jelly Roll Morton biographer Phil Pastras

Robert Johnson: Lost and Found author Barry Lee Pearson

The Producer: John Hammond and the Soul of American Music author Dunstan Prial

Chasin’ The Bird : The Life and Legacy of Charlie Parker author Brian Priestley

Ralph Ellison in America author Horace Porter

Paul Desmond biographer Doug Ramsey

New York Times jazz critic Ben Ratliff

Saxophonist Joshua Redman

Writer Ishmael Reed

W.C. Handy biographer David Robertson

Richard Wright biographer Hazel Rowley

Reverend C.L. Franklin biographer Nick Salvatore

Bill Evans biographer Keith Shadwick

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picture

Cab Calloway biographer Alyn Shipton

Jackie Robinson biographer, NPR journalist Scott Simon

Lenny Bruce biographer David Skover

Comedian Tom Smothers

Hoagy Carmichael biographer Richard Sudhalter

Miles Davis biographer John Szwed

Jazz photographer Lee Tanner

Journalist Terry Teachout

Can’t Find My Way Home: America in the Great Stoned Age, 1945 – 2000 author Martin Torgoff

Pianist McCoy Tyner

Jack Johnson biographer Geoffrey Ward

Flying over 96th Street: Memoir of an East Harlem White Boy author Thomas Webber

Newport Jazz Festival founder George Wein

Satchmo Blows Up the World author Penny Von Eschen

Fire in a Canebrake author Laura Wexler

Our Mothers’ War: American Women at Home and at the Front During World War II author Emily Yellin

Mitchell and Ruff biographer William Zinsser

Dixie Hummingbirds biographer Jerry Zolten

Heroes Page 1  2  3

The post Who was your childhood hero? appeared first on Jerry Jazz Musician.

Red Heels Orchestra,

by Jazzamoart

____________________________

I see a swift river shinning like a knife, from
My Lebu, sliced into two halves of fragrance, I hear it,
I smell it, caress it, it travels like a child’s kiss and then
when the wind and rain rocks me, I am sorrowful
like an artery in my temple and on my pillow.

It’s him. It is raining.
It’s him. My father has arrived soaked in water. It smells
of a wet horse.
       It is Juan Antonio Rojas on a horse crossing a river.
This is not news. The torrential night collapses
like a flooded mine, and a flash of lightning shudders.

Mother, he has come home: Let us open the door,
give me that lamp, I want to receive him
before my brothers, Let me bring him a good glass of wine
so he can recover, and gives me with a kiss,
and he nails me with the spikes of his beard.

Here comes the man, here he comes
covered with mud, enraged against misfortune, furious
of the exploitation, full of hunger, here he comes
under his poncho de Castilla.

Ah, immortal miner, this is your house
made of oak, that you built yourself. Forward:
I have been expecting you
       I am the seventh son
of your children. No matter so many stars
have been passing through the sky for so many years,
that we buried your woman during a terrible harvest,
because you and her have multiplied. It is not important
that the night has been black for both of you.
— Come in, do not stand there
looking at me,
       without seeing me, beneath the rain.


Gonzalo Rojas                Translated by: Luis Lázaro Tijerina

Down the Road, With My Father

There is no road here, no cathedral
of wax candles to light up before the grave
of my Father, Luis Garcia Tijerina.

His fedora is long gone, blown into the wind,
the crevasse in his skull where lightning struck,
astonished us all, except here he is
visiting again in his khaki uniform,
       his black engineer boots hitting the ground.

Athena has accompanied me to this grave
with a bitter smile on her face
because Luis Garcia died so young.
She pulls back her braided hair,
tugging in the folds of her white tunic
before she throws her shield carelessly
over clumps of earth where others are buried.

She reminds me of the braceros my father put to work
in fields bursting with potatoes , cabbages, and lettuce,
these men who brought in the summer harvest
         laughing as they threw their full gunny sacks
like ammo rounds over their aching backs.

It’s autumn in Vermont and the cormorants
are flying over the shores of Lake Champlain.
The Adirondacks have all turned blue in the morning mist
but my thoughts move restlessly with the herds
of cattle on the dusty roads of Hereford, Texas.
That is where I see this youthful ghost
dressed up in his sergeant’s uniform,
his photograph enameled on his gravestone.

“What will become of you, my son? You do nothing
but read and kick a ball around in the fields, and collect
toy soldiers. What are we going to do with you?”
I still cannot reply.

Lost in the numbness
of this infinite-starred galaxy,
we still say nothing.
The hands that I’ve clasped out of desire
or simple love, awaken next to me
while Athena winks, again.
Defying death. This October
is a beautiful ruin of color and memory,
its rusted leaves scattering down the road.

Renunciation
“… the righteous man has nothing to fear, neither in life, nor in death, and the gods will not forsake him.”

Socrates

I.

It was a cold December morning.
The gods came to this place once known as Quanneapague
before the town bells could ring out their joy to the world.
In the forest surrounding the Sandy Hook Elementary,
the hoarfrost hung like Christmas icicles.
Homes along the quiet streets of Newtown
were brimming with pine cones and poinsettias,
with Christmas wreaths and Himalayan green roses.
The gods saw the longing for immortality
in these rolling hills with their winter apple orchards.
This was the same place where the French General Rochambeau
encamped on the way to the siege of Yorktown with his troops.
It was not a massacre then, but a revolutionary war.
These ancient gods who dimmed the hopes
of every schoolchild in Connecticut
were the same gods who sealed the pact
between a great democracy and an even greater anarchy,
proclaiming its right to bear arms.

II.

Here we are again, moved to insidious silence
as we witness men and women of high rank,
along with the somber faces of journalists and TV anchors,
lowering the flag to mourn another mass killing.
The people have gathered outside the Newtown meeting house
not far from Ram’s Pasture
as they have since the Revolution, standing
beneath the Rooster weathervane, its proud tail
spinning at the center of this unending vigil.
Everybody knows what this country is about.
The cathedrals and churches are lit with candles
while gun shops across America are jammed with new customers.
As members of the ‘Commission on Morality and Massacres’
we go on talking about safety
while gawking at children’s coffins on TV.
The chatter on the internet is all about mental illness
and the impossibility of gun control,
as if death was the perpetual star of our nativity.

III.

They fell at Sandy Hook: twelve schoolgirls, eight boys, six adults,
warriors as great as those at Lexington and Gettysburg
but they were no match for two automatic pistols
and the smooth steel of a Bushmaster assault rifle.
Thinking of America’s firing ranges and the carnage
unleashed by one gunman,
the gods came to me this morning.
Before the rooster crowed,
I took my AK-47 and smashed its wood stock,
gutting the firing chamber and breaking its trigger
with a sledge hammer.
I marveled at the precision of this weapon,
at all the beauty and craftsmanship
now lying in ruins.
The gods did not promise me any safe passage.

THE MALADY OF MODERNITY

I am text-messaging to you my malady,
from the ground up from days, months, years
where truth is no longer with us,
except “Breaking News” about the assassination
of a terrorist, as food prices go up
and millions cannot find work in a country,
The Live Reality shows bringing jealousy and laughter
to our private lives and hatred of who we are or were
in this modernity, the skies modern with flame and breaking glass
from shattered windows and bodies shot through
with fragments, glittering like bright pebbles
in a mountain stream.

It is May, the trees not quite bright green with leaves,
Women not yet slightly unclothed along the streets,
Men almost showing their bulges along their waist lines,
Children not quite ready to kill their friends
after watching a violent video in some suburban house,
The afternoons ‘twittering’ with jokes and gossip
about some Hollywood movie star,
or how the President struts so finely after announcing
another raid upon an enemy of his enemy who was once his friend.

The modernity of my life is weak.
App phones, computers with refine hard drives,
Applause for those actors who sit in the White House
Situation Room and hear with astonishment the heroic words
“Visual on Geronimo”, the luster of their history now seared
with glory for casting the great Apache warrior into
a code name for the murder of an enemy that was paid to once
be our friend, I do not have the force
to describe the seals coming out of water or skies in the darkness….
How dazzling it must be to hear music of bravery
that the malady of the rack squeaks out on the Pakistani road.

In the harbor, boats are reeking with foul smells and rat droppings.
The rivers are overflowing and scattering memories of water
across fields and houses, where people once lived in peace… or
in hatred. Sirens scream out, tornadoes slam into buildings, cars,
streets; those who were poor are now homeless amid the shattered
trees now bright green in May. More rain comes, where
is the Arab Spring here? Modernity has cast its spell upon these
shells of outspoken words, and still, and still,
I am weak from the modernity.

Death is a Trumpet Note Away
(To the Jazz Trumpeter, Lee Morgan)

I hear your trumpet notes splitting the evening skies,
breaking up a piano solo, then a sparse hot guitar
opens the modal line for your slow bursts of almost
cornet sounds… a river flow of “Avotcja One”-
trumpet sounds “into a bed of plaints” and flurries
for a drink at the bar before midnight,
as a lusty tenor sax whines to the stars.
Your be-bop to hard-bop complaints:
Great trumpet’s fusions into the raging air,
sidewinder complaints of looking for the midnight sun,
The hardcore flow of aimless and good people
moving softly across the dirty dance floors…
as if waiting to hear your trumpet announce
the morning sunrise.

On a cold February morning at Slugs’, a jazz club,
your girlfriend shot you through the heart…
Death is a trumpet note away.

ON MINGUS

“Jazz, by its very definition, cannot be held down to written parts to be played with a feeling that goes only with blowing free.”

– Charles Mingus

You don’t have to be religious to love jazz.
There is no gospel in Mingus’s throbbing bass,
no lonely night train on a hot summer night
looking to the heavens for respite.
Rhythm surges six-to-bar to clapping
hands and soul
amid shouts of want and laughter,
drums, like a thousand sticks of dynamite
explode into sound.

Trombone morning for a trumpet girl,
-”Better Git It in Your Soul”,
says the woman next door.
No congregation waits for you.

Say hello to “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat”,
that 12-bar blues echoed by the saxophone
as piano bar melodies flirt shyly
with the trombone’s wail
of sliding rhythms.
Mingus plays “Fables of Faubus”,
a jazz protest,
strumming his portrait not in hues of color
but in refrains that echo the bitter fables
of our ravaged country,
mocking apartheid and American invasions …
The singular bitter, yet haunting pull of the bass strings
evoke our discontent against the State.

Blossom Dearie, Take These Jazz Words
(For The American Jazz Singer,
Blossom Dearie)

Your voice is sweeter than white blossoms scattering
from trees in Montparnasse, where I loved
a certain woman in my youth.
The irony of melodies echoes among the vespers
of cruel winter,
your hands glide across the piano keys
that seem to dance with the falling snow.
Springtime rains come to Paris streets
while children play the ancient games.
How proud we are in summertime…
when the forgotten flower stalls close near the Seine,
and nighttime falls, our laughter carried by the winds of night.
Autumn approaches and we walk,
arm in arm, with the sob of jazz in our hearts.

Chet Baker In Paris

In September of that year
when Paris had not yet turned her leaves
into pigments of dry reds and burnt umber,
you played your melodious trumpet sounds,
no mawkish phrases, no murmurings
sinking into the false twists, just cool jazz.
When all is said and done, no one
loved you more than your trumpet,
sending its small, lovely notes to the
night winds near Club St. Germain…

You played, “Those Foolish Things”,
“Tenderly” and “Summertime” with sad
trumpet walks on stage at the Salle Pleyel,
your phrases clear,
soft heat in April…
everything happening to you.

Monday Afternoon Jazz

The trumpet blows out a cool wind
       in May,
as shafts of sunlight spin through
       a large window café…
An upright-Bass gyrates up, down,
       then sideways to the urgent rhythms
       of an acoustic guitar.
An alto saxophone mutes out the clouds
between a man and woman holding hands
       at an old, wooden table…

The trumpet moans in answer to
       the flute’s teasing notes,
       as their passionate exchange
escapes into the steamy, rain-soaked streets…
Springtime turns into long summer days,
while our love lingers on a lonely, blue note
      on the dance floor…

Jazz Suite No.2
After Dmitry Shostakovich

A jazz march on Moscow’s Red Square-
saxophones blare in the cold sweeping snow.
Down the cobbled street
a suite of clarinets and flutes
dance to the blizzard’s song,
Shostakovich’s playful melody skates
on the Neva’s thin ice
white as pristine piano keys.

I lie awake, sipping scotch and soda
Remembering a springtime train ride
to New Orleans, that old city
of foxtrots, blues, and swing,
caught in the mouth of a hurricane’s eye
along the broken levees.

The Jazz Suite escapes its raging winds
bringing memories of your embrace.
We take “Tea for Two” on the dance floor,
Between our lips and fingertips,
the beat of eternity
in a jazz melody written
by the great Russian jazzman.

*



Luis Lazaro Tijerina is a military historian, a published poet, easel painter, and soccer coach. He was was born in Salina, Kansas and is of Mexican American descent. He currently lives in Burlington, Vermont.

The post Poetry by Luis Lazaro Tijerina appeared first on Jerry Jazz Musician.

Michel Petrucciani,

by Aletha Kuschan

____________________________

Aiming At More Freedom

Each time I play
I think I’m fine and firm.
It’s fun, I feel fulfilled.
I listen back. I wasn’t free.
How to play more musically?
(Or if you want to use the word)
Progress?
To sense completion -
What a blessing that would be!
Or is the trip continuous?
A boundless one?
An endless one?
A ceaseless one?
A changing and ongoing one,
Eternal and ethereal,
A source to dig from, build on.

Musician/Singer/Poet

Everyday
A thing
To say,
To sing,
To play.
That is my life:
A universal in the daily.
Techniques learned
While singing Kern
And reading –
Simple reading
Leading
Everywhere.

We Need Listeners Too

We need listeners too!
Boo-hoo, when
There are none,
Not one receiver.
You, the hearer,
Are the bearer
Of and from this generation
                                                 on.
A musician needs to ripen
in the open
And to ripen he needs you.
(one tiny answer to the question).

Improvisers of this world,
Must give it out:
This music beat, this sometimes shit.
Not for the income, no!
They need the listener,
Audio-
                     phile who,
Himself must, in his soul
Have music
For his wholeness.

My Genre Is Jazz

My genre jazz
Has
Been since I was…
Temperament
Which bases days,
Their doings
On a ground
Resembling chaos,
Playing ‘round
With themes that show up
Or been planned
From frames that caffeine brings.
Jazz
Is
An improvised
Now-think;
Its idioms infinite as man.
Mine cool, the medium Piano/voice,
Of course,
The genre jazz
Whose rule is the school,
Whose school is the rule
Of my genre.

To A Trumpetless Musician Sitting Tuneless In The Tombs*

Is his lot’s to rot,
Then rot he does;
Because of what?
Above the car-horn din,
Horned in by gloom,
Aloof, a genie sings within/
Without his being.
Now entombed,
Not faring well,
One city cell,
One man of music
Sans his trumpet.
Justice, just this once?


*The Tombs is a NYC jail. Tony Fruscella was a luckless genius trumpet player put in jail for possession of marijuana. He died in July 1962, aged 42 (See Why Did He Die) He recorded little but influenced everyone he met or played with.

So Much To Do, So Little Time To Do It In

For Michel Petrucciani

A little man, glass bones disease.
A la Lautrec: two prodigies.
At thirty-six his lungs gave out.
We cried, we would not be consoled.
Prodigious talent
Playing jazz as only he could,
For his best fan – God.

Excuse Me, I’m A So-Called Jazz Pianist

Kväll
Michel:
Backstage at a Lerum concert.
Queue is long -
Ten, twenty strong;
All longing for a word,
A signed record;
This little man
With hands of gold -
Maybe thirty-one years old
Sits smoking,
Chatting, greeting, joking:
Just plain nice.
The press is there; the fans are there;
Musicians to a man are there
Craning necks,
Straining to see
This king of musicality,
Like idolizing suitors.
By the time he heads the queue
He’s shy -
But not a tick goes by
When he croaks “Thank you,”
Though a hollow,
Shallow, marshey-mallow
Phrase comes out.
This clever, skillful, practiced player -
Sharp, fine-fingered Tatum sayer
Stammers as he almost bows
(One could say cows)
-Excuse me, I’m a so-called jazz pianist.”
As if living was his lie.


The word “Kväll” means evening.  

A Jazz Musician Poet

Hearing phrases, language read,

Seeing emails as a rhythm,

Alphabetic combinations that I cry from,

Are the bridges I feed on.





                                                                               __________________________________________


Two Great Jazz Musicians: A Riddle

 (a personal view) 


*

I want to talk to you about two great jazz musicians, neglected jazz musicians, almost forgotten.  Neither knows the other. One is English, one American; one a bassist, the other a flute/saxophone/clarinetist.  Both virtuosic, innovative, supremely creative neither knows the other.  Both are friends of mine: the linkedin of real life. 

Ron Mathewson, now 69, was born in the Shetland Isles.  His youthfully soft and musical Shetland accent, makes him fun to listen to.  His inborn perfect pitch makes his bass a joy to hear.  There is hardly a bass player who has played as lyrically.  A cliché to say he makes it ‘sing’, Ron’s bass sings.  

Perhaps it’s the finger facility that comes from childhood piano playing that marries the perfect ear and intense focus on the song that makes his playing unique.  

Described by Ian Carr (see Jazz: The Essential Companion) as “a prodigious natural talent, blessed with good time, good ear, great speed of thought and execution” it is probably the best summing up.

But he’s stopped.   “Toured enough” he says.  For Ron toured, worked all the time.  From 1962 to 1979 he worked continuously in groups led by Stan Getz, Tubby Hayes, Ronnie Scott, Phil Woods, Oscar Peterson, Ben Webster, Frank Rosolino, Roy Eldridge, Philly Jo Jones, Gordon Beck, Mike Pyne, John Taylor, Shirley Horne.  Yes, Ron worked and he toured – ever in demand.

Ron’s many basses  - acoustic and electric – line the walls lonely and ungiving. 

Ron and a collection some of the most exquisite recorded partnerships ever recorded can be reached at rmathewson@btinternet.com.

Sam Most invented the jazz flute.  Hyperbole?  According to Charlie Minus “He is the world’s greatest jazz flute player.”  To Yuseef Lateef, “A history of aesthetics of flute must include Sam Most.”  For the influential jazz critic Leonard Feather, “Justice should demand that the history books document Most’s role as the first truly creative jazz flutist.”

Sam’s impeccable musical background consists of an armlength’s list of the crème de la crème: Red Norvo, Louis Bellson, Teddy Wilson, Chris Connors, Buddy Rich…(see Sam Most discography).  His innumerable recordings span the years from 1953 to the present, for Sam, now 83, living in Los Angeles, is still playing, still recording and still scat singing with what is possibly the most original voice in jazz.; strange syllables, husky voice, perfect time (tempos whizzing by) and intonation – a human alto flute, perhaps.

But he talks about the thinning out  of L.A. gigs, the difficulties of having a lucrative career as a jazz musician…

Sam Most, Ron Mathewson, two greats: why are they not on everyone’s list, if not on their tongues?

                                                                                   __________________________


Arlene Corwin’s poetry page

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