Lament

Just hearing Lee Morgan composition on Jazz625 called "Lament for Stacey" - never heard it before and I'm guessing Stacey was a girl (they almost all are apart from me and dastardly womanising drug addict and namesake Stacey Keach). Tonight's program follows up a program about Nica De Rothschild and her relationship with Thelonious Monk. And the next Jazz625 features the great man himself. I'll stay up to catch that. It's also sad to see a young Humphrey Lyttleton hosting (he once came to our school to see our Palm Court Orchestra because he was mates with our headmaster). He's sadly missed, as is another legendary polymath of radio comedy gameshows, Clement Freud who died this week.

The program about Nica focussed on her humanity and her great love of Jazz music and the muscians themselves. She stuck two fingers up to prejudice of every type; not only snobbery, but disgusting racism which is realy shocking in the retelling (especially Quincy Jones account of driving all night through endless southern towns just to find one diner that would serve them some food, and passing through a town where a negro effigy hung from the steeple of a church! And despite being accused of being some kind of succubus, and being surrounded by drug-taking, Nica genuinely was above all that and all about the music. Biopics these days tend to demolish reputations in order to get to "the truth", but all they do is just tell a different story; it still isn't truth because the revisionist approach fails to bring forth what one persons life means to someone else, which is why great artists achieve any kind of noteriety in the first place. They are greater than the sum of their misdeeds, as they are greater than the sum of their achievements.

I particularly like programs where great jazz musicians are interviewed. You have to be intelligent to play jazz well, even instinctively, let alone with the calculation of someone like Monk, the fluency of Bird or the spirituality of Coltrane. So to hear them speak is always a blessing. Not enough is heard from philosophical, wise, intellectual black men. When we hear from them it's often Hip Hop speak which, whilst lyrically sometimes brilliant, is often confrontational. It's stridency makes for a certain cleverness at the expense of thoughtfulness. Of course Jazz musicians don't often speak because they have a transcendant language they can use. And because of this (and because Jazz is now a middle-aged niche interest that ranks alongside running steam locomotives and tending lawns, and so not worth more than a fleeting scintilla of the TV schedule), the instances when you hear their thoughts on film or radio or record are rare, and all the more valuable for that.

Watching Thelonious Monk's quartet now, I'm impressed with how the three sidemen seem to allow the same asynchronous, polyrhythmic and pause laden style to overlay their own solo efforts, especially on Hackensack. On Epistrophy Monk himself plays like he is trying to provoke the piano, or maybe like he was trying to decode something and the piano was being intransigent and not offering up all it's secrets readily. The same figure is played with slight variations in timing and position. But he seems like he is perfecting a theme rather than playing around with it. He is not unsatisifed with the results, but it is rather as if he is grasping something fleeting and his urgency inplaying is only to make it reappear just a few more times in a few more guises before it is gone forever.