I am seventy-seven years old, which means I have had plenty of time to collect bad habits. One of them was worrying.

I got good at it. I worried about money when I had none, then worried about money when I had some. I worried about work, deadlines, doctors, banks, insurance companies, plumbing, cholesterol, passwords, taxes and people who said, “Your call is important to us.”

I lived in the United States most of my life. West Hartford, New York, Tucson, other places in between. I worked as a journalist for decades. Journalism is a profession built around the idea that something has gone wrong and you need to find out what it is before five o’clock. That trains you.

Then I got older. I had heart surgery. I had cancer. Parts of me have been removed, repaired, replaced or improved by people with better tools than God had available in the original workshop.

Eventually I wound up in Guanajuato.

I have been here four years now, and I did not come here looking for wisdom. I came here because life brought me here. That has been enough.

Guanajuato is a ridiculous city. I mean that affectionately. The streets go up when they should go down. You walk somewhere for fifteen minutes and discover you are directly underneath where you started. The city seems to have been designed by someone who had a personal grudge against straight lines.

There are tunnels everywhere. Motorcycles come through alleys wide enough for one nun and a grocery bag. Cars enter streets where no reasonable person would take a bicycle. The drivers do not seem concerned. Neither do the pedestrians.

I remain concerned for everyone.

Then there are the sounds. The gas truck has a song. The water truck has another song. Someone sells vegetables through a loudspeaker. Someone else sells mattresses. A man comes through sharpening knives and blows a whistle that sounds like a bird having a nervous breakdown.

The dogs bark. The church bells ring. Fireworks explode for birthdays, saints, weddings, football victories, funerals and private events I never learn about.

Sometimes they begin at six in the morning.

I have asked why. This was a mistake.

There is always an explanation, but the explanation usually leads to another explanation, and twenty minutes later I still do not know why somebody fired a rocket outside my window before breakfast.

Mexico is not quiet. Mexico is alive at high volume. Most days, I love it.

Near the Jardín, I often see an old man walking a little girl to school. I assume she is his granddaughter. She usually looks half asleep. He carries her backpack. Sometimes she drags behind him. He waits. She stops to look at a dog. He looks at the dog too. Then they move another twenty feet.

Nobody is performing kindness. Nobody is making a point. He is walking his granddaughter to school.

That is all.

There are scenes like this everywhere. Three construction workers sit on a curb eating lunch. A woman sells tamales before sunrise. Somebody drives past with six chairs tied to the roof of a Volkswagen. A man carries a ladder twice the length of his truck, secured with what appears to be string.

Nobody around him looks alarmed. I am alarmed enough for the entire neighborhood.

People here improvise. They fix things. They make do. They laugh when things go wrong. This took me some time to understand. I come from a country where something goes wrong and somebody immediately wants to speak to a supervisor.

Here the supervisor might be somebody’s cousin. He might come tomorrow. He might come Thursday. He might already know your neighbor.

By the time he arrives, somebody else has fixed the problem.

I spent a lot of my life believing efficiency was a moral virtue. Get there faster. Finish sooner. Make the call. File the story. Catch the flight. Solve the problem.

Then I came to Mexico and learned about “ahorita.”

Ahorita means now. Or soon. Or later. Or not today. Or possibly never.

You learn through context, except when there is no context. This is good for an old journalist. Journalists do not surrender easily. We believe there is always another phone call.

Mexico has taught me there is sometimes another beer.

People here are also different with one another. I hesitate to make broad claims because somebody will always find the exception, and they should. Mexico has plenty of cold people and America has plenty of warm ones. I am talking about what I see.

People touch more. They stand closer. They remember things. A cashier might remember what you bought last week. A taxi driver might ask where you are from, how long you have lived here, whether you are married, whether your children visit, whether you like Guanajuato and why you have not tried the mole at the place his cousin likes. By the end of the ride, he knows more about you than your cardiologist. Then he tells you where to eat.

This is not networking. Nobody says, “Let’s connect.” Thank God.

I spent many years around journalists, actors, directors, filmmakers and musicians. A lot of conversations had another conversation hiding underneath them.

Who do you know? What are you working on? Who is producing it? Who is publishing it? What comes next?

I participated fully. I was good at it.

Jazz musicians helped cure me of some of that. Musicians understand something journalists forget. Sometimes you are there because you are there. You listen. You talk. You eat. You hang out. Nobody has to monetize the afternoon.

That feeling exists here all the time.

People sit. This is another radical Mexican activity. They sit in doorways, on benches, outside shops, in the Jardín. Old men sit together and talk about whatever old men discuss in every country on earth. Health. Politics. Who died.

I am now old enough to qualify for the meeting.

Death is closer here too. Not in a morbid way. In a practical way. Dead relatives remain in homes in photographs. Families visit graves. Children go with them. Candles appear on sidewalks. Flowers stay around. The dead are not removed from the conversation as quickly.

I once stopped at a little memorial on a sidewalk. A photograph, flowers, a candle. There were thick layers of wax underneath it. Somebody had been relighting that candle for a long time.

People walked past. A woman carried groceries. A motorcycle went by. Somebody nearby was making tacos.

Nobody lowered their voice. Nobody turned the street into a cathedral. The dead person was still part of the neighborhood. That made sense to me.

I have written obituaries most of my life. Some were assignments. Some were people I knew. Some were people I loved.

Journalism teaches you how to handle death professionally. Confirm the age. Check the spelling. Call the family. Get the quote. File the story. Then move on.

At seventy-seven, death is no longer theoretical. You start losing friends, colleagues, musicians you knew, people you assumed would always be somewhere. You also start doing arithmetic you did not do at forty.

Ten years from now sounds different. So does five.

This does not make me sad all day. Quite the opposite. Ordinary things start to matter more. A good cup of coffee matters. My partner laughing in the next room matters. The cats sleeping where they are not supposed to matter. A walk through Guanajuato matters.

Even the hills matter, though I curse them. Guanajuato has an unreasonable number of hills. At my age, every street becomes a cardiology exam. You look up and think, surely there is another way.

There is not another way.

You climb. Halfway up, a woman twenty years older than you passes carrying groceries. This is humiliating. You pretend to be admiring the architecture. I have examined a great deal of architecture this way.

I do not want to turn Mexico into some spiritual alternative to the United States. Mexico has violence, poverty, corruption, family fights, bad government, disappearing plumbers, angry neighbors and people staring at phones.

It is a country. That is exactly why I love it. I do not need it to be perfect. I am too old to believe in perfect countries. I need a place where I feel alive. I found one.

The world feels unstable now. Wars. Politics. Climate. Technology moving faster than most of us understand. People seem angry. Governments seem confused. Every screen tells you what to fear before breakfast.

Then I walk outside. Somebody is selling strawberries. A dog is asleep in a doorway. A woman is sweeping the sidewalk. Teenagers are laughing too loudly. A truck is blocking the street. Nobody knows when it will move. A church bell rings. Then somebody sets off a firework for a reason I will never learn.

And I think, this is a good place to be old.

This is a good place to wake up. This is a good place to have survived long enough to appreciate it.

I do not know how many years I have left. Nobody does. I know I am grateful to be spending some of them here.

Grateful for Guanajuato. Grateful for Mexico. Grateful for the Mexican people who have made room for an old American journalist and filmmaker, with bad Spanish, too many opinions and a lifelong habit of asking questions.

Tomorrow morning I may see the old man and the little girl again. She will drag behind. He will carry the backpack. They will stop for a dog.

I will keep walking. Slowly.

There are hills.

Listening: Lee Morgan - TomCat

Lee Morgan’s Tom Cat stands out for its timing and its band. Recorded in August 1964, it pairs Morgan’s melodic trumpet with Jackie McLean’s biting alto and Curtis Fuller’s trombone, backed by a truly all-star rhythm section: McCoy Tyner, Bob Cranshaw, and Art Blakey (his last recording as a sideman). The three horns give the music weight and texture, while Tyner and Blakey bring unusual firepower to the rhythm section. The title track channels The Sidewinder’s loping groove into richer horn writing, and Tyner’s “Twilight Mist” provides a lyrical counterweight, revealing Morgan’s warm, almost vocal tone.

Despite that chemistry, Tom Cat remained unreleased until 1980, missing the chance to establish its reputation alongside Morgan’s better-known Blue Note albums. Michael Cuscuna, who oversaw its eventual release, considered it among Morgan’s finest sessions, with some of his strongest writing. That sixteen-year delay helps explain its relative obscurity: an inspired record became a discovery for collectors rather than a celebrated part of Morgan’s original run.

Listen to Tom Cat.

Next Tuesday: The Film America Preserved and Wouldn’t Let You See

In 1978, a UCLA graduate student made one of the greatest American films ever produced on leftover film stock with nonprofessional actors for under ten thousand dollars. For nearly thirty years, almost no one could legally see it. The story of Killer of Sheep is also the story of how America treats the lives it claims to honor.

Tomorrow, John Coltrane would have turned one hundred years old. I have been listening to him seriously for nearly sixty years. I was a young man when this music first got into me, and I am not a young man now, but the listening has never stopped. In the past year I wrote a book about Coltrane, about what his life and his music have meant to me across all those decades of paying attention. Writing it did not diminish anything. It deepened everything—each time I sat with a recording I thought I knew, I found it had more to say.

That is what serious engagement with serious art does, if you let it. It keeps finding more of it.

Most things you love for sixty years become familiar. You know where they are going. Coltrane refuses that. After all this time, after all the listening and reading and writing, A Love Supreme still arrives with the weight of something newly discovered. The late recordings still push out past the edge of what I think I understand. My admiration continues to grow—not out of loyalty to a younger version of myself who fell in love with the music, but out of the ongoing evidence that this was one of the greatest artists who ever lived.

Coltrane died in July 1967, forty years old, at the peak of his powers and in the middle of a musical investigation that had no clear endpoint. He had been playing seriously for barely two decades. He left behind somewhere between two hundred and three hundred recordings, a saxophone technique that no one before him had imagined and no one since has fully equaled, and a set of questions about what music can do and what a human life is for.

He grew up in a household shaped by the church. His grandfather was a minister. The preacher’s cadence lived in his phrasing whether he was playing a standard or deconstructing the entire idea of what a standard was supposed to be. That spiritual seriousness—the sense that music was a way to speak to something larger than yourself—never left him. He practiced until his lips bled. He studied music from India and Africa and Japan because he genuinely believed there was something in those traditions that could help him get closer to what he was looking for. He got off drugs because he had a vision and the vision told him his body was not his own to waste. He played free jazz at the end of his life not because the market wanted it but because the search required it, even when it cost him audience members who had loved the classic quartet and couldn’t follow where he was going.

Every recording exists in a state of forward motion. You never catch him coasting. You never catch him repeating himself for the pleasure of a crowd. The first thing this teaches you is the importance of dying with the work unfinished. There is no comfortable late period to settle into, no greatest hits tour, no mellowing. There is no version of Coltrane you can point to and say, “That’s the real one. That’s the peak.” The Coltrane of 1960 is not the Coltrane of 1964, who is not the Coltrane of 1966. Each recording is a report from the frontier.

What holds everything together is something that cannot be taught or manufactured: he was completely himself. There was no gap between the man and the music, no performance of sincerity. You cannot fake that. You cannot perform authenticity. Either the gap exists or it does not.

That is why people in South Africa under apartheid listened to Coltrane. They were not hearing a political statement—though Alabama, his response to the 1963 Birmingham church bombing, is as devastating a piece of political art as the twentieth century produced. They were hearing a human being reaching toward truth with everything he had. That kind of reaching speaks to anyone who is also refusing to accept things as they are.

After sixty years, I understand that this is why Coltrane has mattered to so many people across so many different contexts and struggles. It was not the message. It was the quality of his search. The refusal to accept any answer as final. The obvious commitment to something beyond himself. Every solo was a question. Every session was an attempt to get closer to something true.

One hundred years. He only got forty of them. It wasn’t enough, and it was also somehow everything.

What Coltrane demonstrates across those forty years and the recordings he left behind is what it looks like when a person decides to commit themselves completely to something real. Not to fame. Not to success. To the work itself. To the question. To the reaching.

I think about the young musicians who still spend years trying to understand what he was doing in 1960, in 1964, in 1966. They are not trying to copy it. They are trying to find out what kind of person you have to become to make something that true. That is the real legacy. Not the technique, though the technique is extraordinary. Not the spirituality, though that was genuine. But the demonstration of what it looks like when someone decides that their work is more important than comfort, that the search is more important than arrival, that becoming yourself completely is worth everything you have to pay for it.

That is why people still put the needle down. Not out of nostalgia. Out of ongoing recognition: this was a man who got all the way down to something true and brought it back in a form you can actually receive. And he did it by refusing to be anything other than completely, uncompromisingly himself.

That is the impact that matters. That is what one man can do.

Here is the classic Quartet with Trane, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones, in a 1965 performance.

Next Tuesday: How Mexico Changed My Nervous System

After years of living braced against America’s constant friction, moving to Guanajuato taught me the difference between a slower life and a more human rhythm. In Mexico’s everyday intimacy—shared food, public grief, remembered names, and unremarkable acts of care—I found a culture where people still behave as if they belong to one another. It reminded me that life is not something to manage from a distance, but something to inhabit through tenderness, presence, and repetition.

I wrote about my friend Sonny Rollins just after his passing, this May.

There will be a Celebration of Sonny’s music and life this Saturday in New York at an appropriate venue, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. The Rollins family and the Jazz Foundation of America are producing the Celebration and asked me to put together a video. Here is the video that will be shown at the Celebration, taken from over a decade of interviews I did with the Saxophone Colossus:

I have known famous creators—filmmakers, musicians, playwrights and writers—whose work I admired long before meeting them. We want artists to embody their creations, but fame distorts, mythology fades, and the person behind the work is often painfully ordinary. Living among jazz musicians in New York taught me that a respected musician could make astonishing music and still be a difficult person. Both truths remain: the music does not absolve the person, and the person does not erase the music.

With Sonny Rollins, I stopped trying to separate them.

Sonny was a young man from Harlem who got addicted to heroin, like too many of his generation. He went through withdrawal and came out the other side. He survived when others didn’t. That’s worth noting. But it doesn’t make him special. It makes him lucky and stubborn. After that, he got to work and stayed at work. That’s what he did for more than sixty years.

In 1978, while writing for DownBeat, I was assigned a cover story on Sonny. I climbed the stairs to his house in Germantown. His living room was spare—a few pieces of furniture, nothing decorative. For a jazz star, he showed no interest in displaying what he’d earned. That told me something. He wasn’t interested in the image. He was interested in the work.

His cat jumped onto my lap. “He doesn’t usually do that,” Sonny said. I remember thinking that was a human thing to notice—a small moment between us, nothing more.

When I asked questions, Sonny went quiet. Three minutes. Four. He thought before he spoke. That wasn’t sacred. That was just his way. Each answer was considered. He didn’t waste words. Some people called it intensity. Some people called it difficulty. It was both.

Afterwards, he showed me his Woodshed in a small building behind the house. Books on the shelves—philosophy, history, essays. A saxophone on a stand. He had set up a room where he could work. Not decorated. Not precious. Just functional.

Over the next twenty-five years, we stayed in touch. Phone calls. Postcards from tours. I wrote more cover stories. We talked about music and politics and whatever was happening in the world. He read a lot—philosophy, political writing. He thought about things. That made him interesting to talk to. It didn’t make him enlightened.

What I was actually watching was a man who showed up and practiced. Every day. That’s not mystical. That’s just what he did.

Sonny had a reputation for being smart, opinionated, careful with words, and selective about who he spent time with. People said it came from spiritual seriousness. Maybe. Or maybe he just didn’t like small talk and didn’t pretend to. He held his positions and didn’t change them easily. That made him difficult. It also meant he knew what he believed.

But he also had another side. After gigs, if people were waiting outside, he stayed and signed autographs. He talked to fans. He made time. Not as performance. He just did it. His fans loved him and he returned it. That’s not contradiction at higher levels of consciousness. That’s just a guy who respected the people who cared about his work.

Sonny and Lucille were married for decades. She handled the business side—contracts, money, logistics. She freed him to focus on playing. She was a strong woman who thought differently than he did about politics and a lot of other things. They argued. Sometimes it looked like they were going to break apart. Then they’d be walking through an airport arm in arm. That’s not a spiritual teaching about holding contradictions. That’s just a marriage—complicated, real, holding together because they wanted it to.

When Lucille got sick and died in 2004, it changed him. Of course it did. She had been his center for decades.

After considerable discussion, I was hired to build a website for Sonny, which soon took me back into filmmaking. Digital video cameras were cheaper by then. Computer video editing arrived. Then YouTube showed up. By 2006, I was the Jazz Video Guy. I spent more time with Sonny. We did interviews. I stayed at his house in Woodstock. We became close. I witnessed first-hand what his commitment actually looked like.

On a concert day, Sonny would arrive at the venue around three in the afternoon for an eight o’clock show. He’d go to the dressing room and practice. Sound check at five. Back to the dressing room for two and a half more hours of practice. Then onstage for two and a half hours of playing. He could keep going, one idea splitting into three more ideas, for as long as the gig lasted.

This wasn’t about technique or perfection or transcendence. This was about work. He practiced because that’s how you stay sharp. He practiced because if you show up to play, you should be ready. He practiced because that’s what musicians do.

He was one of the greatest improvisers in jazz history. That’s just a fact. The improvisers I’ve known who take their work most seriously understand something simple: if you’re going to play, you owe it to yourself and your audience to be prepared. The music is the practice. Every time you play, you try to be better than last time. That’s all it is.

Then, in 2014, something broke.

Sonny kept an apartment in Lower Manhattan near the World Trade Center. On September 11, 2001, he went downstairs to see what was happening. The second tower collapsed while he was on the street. Concrete dust, chemicals, smoke, pulverized debris. He got evacuated the next day.

For thirteen years, nothing. He didn’t know.

Then his lungs started failing. He couldn’t make it through a concert. Gigs got canceled. Sonny told his doctor, over the phone he just couldn’t play anymore. I was there when he said it. There’s nothing to say in moments like that.

Pulmonary fibrosis. The poison from Ground Zero had waited thirteen years before presenting the bill.

Sonny had played the tenor saxophone nearly every day since he was twelve. Practice was his occupation, his daily routine, his meditation. The saxophone wasn’t separate from anything. It was just what he did. Sixty years of showing up and working. And then, suddenly, he couldn’t.

Without performances or recordings, there was less reason for me to be around. We stopped working together. He withdrew again. He had done that before—disappeared in the late 1950s and 1960s, vanished to figure things out, then came back. But this time was different. He couldn’t rebuild what he’d lost. There was no comeback from this.

I had asked him once about his greatest challenge. He said: “My greatest challenge every day is to try to wipe out some of the karma, wipe out some of the ignorant things I’ve done in my life—and I’ve done plenty of them. I’ve done some very cruel things in my life that I’m very ashamed of, but that’s all part of the learning experience of life. I’m still alive, so I have a chance to atone for them in some way.”

That’s honest. Most people, famous or ordinary, don’t admit that kind of thing. They certainly don’t sit with it. Sonny did. He knew he’d made mistakes. He knew he’d hurt people. And he kept working on being better. That’s not enlightenment. That’s just someone who decided to pay attention to how he’d treated people and try to do better. It takes work. Not everyone does it. Actually, few people actually do.

When the poison caught up with him and he couldn’t play anymore, something broke. I watched a man lose the thing that had organized his entire life. He didn’t get bitter about it publicly. He just withdrew. He kept working on himself, the same way he always had. Not as spiritual practice. Just as the work of being a person who had done damage and wanted to understand it and do better.

Sonny Rollins was an astonishing improviser and a fascinating man. He was loved around the world. But his real work was the simple one: show up, practice, try to be honest about who you are, try to do better than yesterday. It’s not special. It’s just what serious people do.

I came to know the work first. With Sonny, I was lucky to know the man too. And this man spent every day trying to get better at playing and trying to be someone worth knowing. When he couldn’t play anymore, he just kept doing the second part. That’s not transcendence. That’s just a guy being human about it.

He wasn’t perfect. He was stubborn and difficult and he could be harsh with people who disappointed him. He was also generous and he paid attention to the people around him. He read constantly and thought about things. He cared about his work and he didn’t pretend it was bigger than it was. It was just important to him.

That’s enough. That’s more than enough.

Next Tuesday: On the eve of the 100th anniversary of his birth, The Pursuit: How Coltrane's Demand for Perfection Shaped Modern Jazz.

]

According to its creator, Force of Evil is capitalism itself. Abraham Polonsky feared for a society that valued money above all else believing such a system would invariably lead to unbridled greed and corruption.

Released in 1948, Force of Evil is nominally about the numbers racket, two brothers, a crooked lawyer, and a scheme to bankrupt every small-time gambling operation in New York. But that description is bureaucratic camouflage. The film is really about America as a criminal conspiracy whose members have forgotten they joined. Nearly eighty years after its release, it still speaks a truth most Americans would rather not hear: its indictment of America remains as urgent today as it was in 1948.

John Garfield plays Joe Morse, a Wall Street lawyer with sharp suits, fast talk, and the fatal confidence of a man who thinks intelligence makes him fireproof. Joe works for Ben Tucker, a gangster planning to monopolize the city’s numbers banks. The scheme is beautiful in the way a guillotine is beautiful: efficient, symmetrical, and horrifying once you notice where the head goes.

The trouble is Joe’s brother Leo, played by Thomas Gomez. Leo runs a small numbers bank. He is already a criminal according to the law, but not according to the emotional arithmetic of the film. He knows his employees. He worries about them. His crooked business retains some residue of human obligation. Joe proposes to rescue Leo by crushing him, absorbing his little operation into Tucker’s syndicate and calling the catastrophe progress.

That is the poison at the center of Force of Evil: Joe loves his brother. He genuinely believes he is helping him. Polonsky understands that evil rarely arrives announcing itself as evil. It arrives with projections, efficiencies, economies of scale, and a smart young attorney explaining that resistance is sentimental. Joe does not descend into corruption. He translates corruption into professional language until it sounds like common sense.

And the language! The characters do not merely speak; they chant, jab, circle, and confess. Polonsky’s dialogue has the pressure of blank verse trapped in a telephone booth. A business proposition becomes a prophecy. A threat sounds like scripture. Everybody appears to know that doom is coming, but nobody can stop negotiating long enough to leave the room.

The city itself joins the racket. George Barnes photographs Manhattan as a vertical empire of polished stone and moral vacancy. Offices loom like temples built for a god who accepts only cash. Staircases plunge toward judgment. The final descent to the Hudson River is among the great passages in American film noir: Joe traveling downward through the physical city and into the truth he has spent the whole picture converting into abstractions. At the bottom lies not a balance sheet but a body.

That is why the picture still bites. It refuses the comforting fantasy that organized crime is an infection attacking legitimate business from outside. Tucker’s syndicate does not oppose capitalism; it perfects its most predatory instincts. Consolidate the market. Eliminate the independents. Purchase the officials. Rename coercion as inevitability. Crime and commerce become indistinguishable except that the criminals are occasionally more candid.

This was dangerous territory in 1948, and soon the authorities came collecting.

On April 23, 1951, Garfield appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He denied being a Communist and declined to identify supposed Communists in the film industry. He tried to preserve both his career and his refusal to become an informer. It was an impossible performance before men who had already decided that innocence without betrayal was guilt.

Two days later, on April 25, Polonsky faced HUAC. He invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to name names. Congressman Harold Velde branded him a “very dangerous citizen”—which, translated from the dialect of congressional panic, meant a citizen unwilling to purchase his own safety with somebody else’s ruin. Hollywood blacklisted him. Force of Evil became his last directing credit for two decades. He continued writing through fronts and without credit, including work on Odds Against Tomorrow, but did not receive another screen credit until Madigan in 1968. His directing career resumed with Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here, released in 1969.

Garfield’s story was shorter and crueler.

Born Jacob Julius Garfinkle on New York’s Lower East Side, he had dragged himself from poverty and street fighting into the Group Theatre, then into Hollywood stardom. He brought the street with him. Before Brando became an earthquake and James Dean became a shrine, Garfield put working-class resentment on the screen without cleaning it up for company. He seemed to act with his whole nervous system.

He had also been born with a damaged heart. It kept him out of military service despite his attempts to enlist, though he entertained troops, supported war drives, and sold bonds. None of this protected him when the blacklist machinery selected him. No evidence established that Garfield had been a Communist, but evidence was not the currency of the spectacle. Names were. Confession was. Submission was.

After his testimony, the major film offers vanished. His last movie, He Ran All the Way, appeared in 1951 with a title that now sounds like an epitaph. He returned to Broadway in Golden Boy, playing a boxer whose talent becomes entangled with money—the kind of role that must have felt less like fiction than surveillance.

The pressure intensified. Garfield attempted to clear himself without sacrificing friends or his wife, Roberta, who had once belonged to the Communist Party. According to later accounts, the FBI confronted him with a file on her and offered him an escape route through denunciation. He refused. The man who played Joe Morse would not make Joe Morse’s bargain.

On May 21, 1952, Garfield died of a heart attack. He was thirty-nine. His heart condition was real and longstanding, so it would be reckless to issue a medical verdict declaring that HUAC killed him. But the persecution, unemployment, investigations, threats, and strain formed the atmosphere in which that damaged heart finally stopped. The Harry Ransom Center’s account says the stress of HUAC was believed to have contributed to the fatal attack; Garfield’s daughter later remembered him as devastated by the blacklist. Around 10,000 mourners reportedly came to say goodbye.

So watch Joe Morse descending those enormous stone steps again. He is walking toward his murdered brother, but history has placed other bodies down there. Garfield is among them: a magnificent actor driven out of the industry at thirty-eight and dead at thirty-nine. Polonsky is there too, artistically buried alive for refusing to inform.

Force of Evil predicted today’s American nightmare. A large institution corners individuals, converts fear into cooperation, demands betrayal as the price of survival, and calls the process lawful.

The racket always has a respectable office. Today that is the Oval Office, with its advisors, its lawyers, its machinery of coercion dressed in constitutional language.

The racket always says it is protecting America. What it really does is consolidate power and transfer wealth upward—to the people who run it, who benefit from it, who sleep soundly while the bill accumulates.

And somewhere below, beside the dark river, lies that bill.

When does it come due?

You can view Force of Evil on YouTube. Here’s the trailer:

Next Tuesday: Celebrating Sonny Rollins

On Saturday, September 19, a Celebration of the life and music of Sonny Rollins will be held at the Church of the Saint Devine, in New York, a fitting location for one of New York’s favorite sons. I was asked by the Jazz Foundation of American and the Rollins family to create a video for the event. Next week, you can view the video on this blog, along with my thoughts about the late Saxophone Colossus.

Listening: Marcus Miller - Hannibal

I’ve known Marcus since the late 70s, when Mr. Miller and his friend, drummer Kenny Washington, played with pianist Walter Bishop, Jr.’s group. A decade later Marcus played with Miles and they were collaborators, most notably the album Amandla which features Marcus’ composition, “Hannibal.”

Today Marcus Miller is one of the most influential electric bass players, producers, and composers in modern jazz and fusion. Born in 1959 in Brooklyn, he's known for pioneering the slap bass technique in jazz and contemporary music.

His work with Miles Davis—particularly on Amandla—is considered crucial to understanding that era of Davis's music, where he was integrating electronic sounds and contemporary production into his jazz foundation.

Twenty years later, in 2009, Marcus played “Hannibal” with his quintet at the Auditorium Maurice Ravel in Lyon, France: Marcus Miller (b),
Christian Scott (tp), Alex Han (as), Frederico Gonzales Pena (keyboards), and Ronald Brun, Jr (dm).

Miles would be proud.

Listen:

In 1960, while the official Newport Jazz Festival collapsed into riots, Charles Mingus and Max Roach organized a breakaway event that asked a question the music industry has never honestly answered. Who does the music belong to? This is the story of three days in Rhode Island that exposed a contradiction still running through jazz, and every other art form, right now.

Newport, Rhode Island, 1960. The official jazz festival was collapsing into chaos. Crowds overran the city. Fights broke out. Police shut the whole operation down after riots erupted downtown. Meanwhile, a few miles away, a group of musicians had organized their own festival, on their own terms, and were playing some of the most uncompromising jazz anyone had heard in years.

The Newport Rebels Festival lasted only a few days. It left behind an album, a legend, and a set of questions that never got answered.

The rebellion had been building long before the bottles started flying. Charles Mingus and Max Roach, the two figures most responsible for organizing the breakaway event, had watched jazz festival culture develop throughout the 1950s with growing fury. What they saw was a familiar pattern. Black musicians, the people whose genius had invented and sustained this music across decades, were being positioned as entertainment for wealthy white audiences while promoters, sponsors, and cultural gatekeepers controlled the money, the programming, and the image of the music itself.

Mingus was not a man who tolerated that quietly. He was combative by nature, idealistic to a fault, constitutionally suspicious of authority, and completely unwilling to perform the role of the grateful, obedient entertainer. He viewed jazz as serious art, as political expression, as social criticism pressed into musical form. The idea of it being sanitized into background atmosphere for society events and corporate sponsors was an offense he refused to absorb in silence. Roach shared the anger, though he expressed it differently. Together they decided that if the official festival would not treat musicians with dignity, musicians would build something of their own.

What they created was not just a competing event. It was an argument.

The argument went something like this. Jazz musicians, particularly Black jazz musicians, were the reason anyone came to Newport in the first place. The music drew the crowds, generated the prestige, attracted the press. Yet the artists themselves exercised little control over programming, received modest payment relative to what the festival generated, and were expected to show up, perform brilliantly, and disappear without complaint. The festival culture of the late 1950s had developed an uncomfortable resemblance to an older American arrangement, one where Black labor created value that flowed upward into other hands.

The Rebels Festival gathered artists who understood this and refused it. Ornette Coleman was there, just beginning to reshape what jazz could even mean harmonically. Eric Dolphy brought his extraordinary, angular vision of what an instrument could say. And Roy Eldridge was there, a trumpeter whose career stretched back to the 1930s, who had spent decades playing brilliantly in venues where he was sometimes required to use the service entrance, where he could perform for white audiences but could not sit among them, where his music was welcome and his presence was not. He had not forgotten any of that. Neither had anyone else on that stage.

These were not fringe figures or malcontents. They were central to the history of the music, and they had chosen the rebellion over the institution.

The music reflected the moment. Jazz in 1960 was moving fast, fracturing into new languages faster than critics and audiences could absorb them. Hard bop had already deepened and darkened the bebop revolution. Free jazz was arriving, terrifying to some, liberating to others. The Rebels Festival made no attempt to present the safe, accessible version of the music that festival audiences might have preferred. It embraced the difficult and the experimental. If the official festival wanted polish and palatability, the rebels offered the opposite as a deliberate act.

The album that came out of the rebellion, Newport Rebels, carries that atmosphere. It does not sound like a prestige recording designed to impress critics or sell to the mainstream. It sounds like musicians playing for each other and for anyone willing to actually listen, which is a different thing entirely.

The official festival, meanwhile, was not experiencing a great weekend. The chaos that descended on Newport in 1960 reflected something larger than bad crowd management. American culture in the late 1950s and early 1960s was under enormous pressure from every direction. The civil rights movement was intensifying. Postwar prosperity had created new audiences and new money but had not resolved the old contradictions about who this society actually served and recognized. The riots that shut down Newport were not really about jazz. They were about everything else that was about to break open across the decade.

The Newport Jazz Festival survived. It returned, it persisted, it eventually became an institution durable enough to outlast several generations of controversy. The Rebels Festival became a footnote, a legendary gesture that proved for three days that musicians could organize on their own terms. But the rebellion did not alter the underlying architecture of power. The music industry continued to function exactly as it had before.

This is the hard part of the story. The Newport Rebels demonstrated that another arrangement was possible. Musicians could control their own presentation, set their own terms, invite their own audiences, and play whatever the music demanded rather than whatever the market would comfortably absorb. They did this brilliantly, defiantly, and then it ended. The contradictions remained. The problem persisted.

Decades later, the structure shifted but not the equation. Streaming platforms now sit between musicians and audiences exactly as festival promoters did in 1960. They control access, set the terms, curate what gets heard, and extract the significant share of what the music generates while the people who make it negotiate from positions of structural weakness. The faces changed. The architecture did not.

What happened to the Newport Rebels? What happened to Mingus and Roach’s insistence that musicians deserved control over their own work? The answer is that nothing happened. Spotify did not read that album and learn a lesson. The music business did not reorganize itself around the dignity of artists. Individual musicians and small collectives continue to find ways to maintain some authority over their work. They always have. It has never been enough to change the system itself.

Jazz has always carried this tension inside it. Music built under conditions of exclusion and exploitation, transformed into something that outlasted both. At Newport in 1960, for a few days in someone’s backyard, musicians refused to let the institutions that packaged their work decide what they would play. They asserted control. They played like the music belonged to them.

It did. But that ownership was temporary. The system that tried to control the music in 1960 adapted, evolved, and continues to function in essentially the same way today. Musicians still find moments of rebellion. The rebellion still never sticks.

The question the Newport Rebels asked remains unanswered not because no one has tried to answer it. Musicians have tried repeatedly across decades. The question remains unanswered because the people who profit from controlling the music have more power than the people who make it.

Listen to the Newport Rebels Full Album

Alto Saxophone – Eric Dolphy
Bass – Charles Mingus, John "Peck" Morrison
Drums – Jo Jones, Max Roach
Piano – Kenny Dorham, Tommy Flanagan
Tenor Saxophone – Walter Benton
Trombone – Jimmy Knepper, Julian Priester
Trumpet – Benny Bailey, Booker Little, Roy Eldridge
Vocals – Abbey Lincoln
..............................................................
Mysterious Blues
Cliff Walk
Wrap Your Troubles In Dreams
Tain't Nobody's Bizness If I Do
Me And You
..............................................................
Recorded - November 1 and 11, 1960.

Watching - Naked City - The TV show

Naked City was a detective/crime drama that ran from 1958 to 1963 on ABC television. It followed the cases of NYPD detectives working street-level investigations in New York City. The show was notable for its gritty, realistic approach—it shot on location in actual New York neighborhoods rather than in studio sets, which was distinctive for television at the time.

The series starred Paul Burke and Horace McMahon as detectives and had a rotating cast of supporting players. It’s considered a precursor to the more naturalistic cop shows that came later. The title “Naked City” comes from the idea of exposing the raw, unglamorous reality of the city and its crimes. The great director Jules Dassin made a Hollywood movie with the same title and theme in 1948 that provided the inspiration for the series.

Someone colorized many of the episodes and has posted them on YouTube. I’ve been watching them and enjoying seeing that version of New York, depicting the city at the time I first began seriously visiting. And also, the guest stars are New York actors getting their first break in television, many of whom would go on to stardom including Dustin Hoffman (who looks about fifteen on the show), James Caan, Robert Duval, Martin Balsam, Robert Redford, Jack Warden, Eli Wallach and Gene Hackman.

The episode where Hackman plays a reporter, was particularly well written by Stirling Silliphant, who helped create this show, and another of my favorites, Route 66. This is the story of one of the detectives on the show witnessing the execution of a man he arrested and was titled “Prime of Life.” It’s about the value of life, exploring a subject most tv shows of the era would prefer to avoid.

The episode featured a memorable closing line: "Until a man faces the finality of death, he cannot understand the preciousness of life."

Next Tuesday - The America I Did Not See

I missed why seventy million Americans voted for Trump—not understanding the real pain of factory closures, wage stagnation, and rapid cultural change. Trump didn’t solve these problems; he named enemies and offered belonging. My failure was judgment instead of understanding. The deeper question: what systemic failures created the desperation that made his message work? Those forces remain, and another populist could emerge smoother and more calculated.

Henry Kissinger hit 100 and the internet reacted the only way the internet knows how. Half the population posted the same joke. Death took one look at Kissinger and quietly backed out of the room. Meanwhile, the obituary page in Peoria was filling up with a respiratory therapist, 61. A welder, 63. Somebody’s favorite uncle who spent forty years hauling drywall until his spine filed for divorce.

People have noticed this pattern forever. The bastards seem to linger. The decent disappear halfway through the movie.

Part of the illusion comes from bad bookkeeping. Monsters who keel over at fifty-eight don’t become legends. They vanish before anyone builds the mythology. Survivorship bias is one hell of a publicist.

Then the statistics arrive carrying a baseball bat.

Raj Chetty’s massive 2016 study in JAMA looked at tax records and life expectancy. Richest one percent of American men. Poorest one percent. The difference wasn’t a few birthdays. It was about fifteen years. I used to quote ten. Reality raised the bill.

The IRS keeps meticulous records. Income. Deductions. Capital gains. One thing missing from the forms is a checkbox marked “War Criminal” or “Pathological Narcissist.”

Science has tried to pin longevity on personality. The results refuse to cooperate with the revenge fantasy. Chronic hostility, rage, and cynical mistrust tend to kill you sooner. Cardiologists have spent decades watching furious men sprint toward heart disease. Living in a permanent state of outrage is less fountain of youth than express lane to the catheter lab.

So much for the theory that evil itself preserves the body.

Money does.

Money buys distance from stress. Distance from eviction notices. Distance from lifting fifty-pound boxes at age sixty-three. Distance from double shifts, impossible bosses, and four sleepless years caring for a dying parent because nobody else showed up.

The Whitehall studies in Britain found the same ugly pattern. Same government employer. Same national health system. Same buildings. Yet every rung lower on the employment ladder meant a shorter life. Your body keeps score of your place in the pecking order even when everyone carries the same insurance card.

Donald Trump turned eighty this year, still performing marathon rallies while surviving on a diet that looks like a prank played on nutrition science. People point at him and announce the mystery solved.

Wrong mystery.

He isn’t demonstrating the biological benefits of being difficult. He’s demonstrating insulation. Problems arrive at the gates of his kingdom and get intercepted by assistants, lawyers, security staff, communications directors, and people whose job description begins with, “Don’t let this reach him.” And, Natalie Harp. Stress gets outsourced. Consequences get delegated. Most people don’t have employees standing between themselves and reality.

The fantasy is satisfying. The facts are irritating.

If you’re waiting for history to improve because certain old men finally exit the stage, bring snacks. The actuarial tables are not on your side. The work gets done while they’re alive, not afterward. Elections. Courts. Agencies. Institutions. Those are the only weapons with decent odds.

Kissinger, for the record, received full military honors.

History has a vicious sense of humor. Sometimes the punchline lasts another fifteen years.

Listening - Mr. Natural - Stanley Turpentine

Recorded at Van Gelder Studio in September 1964, “Mr. Natural” brought together Stanley Turrentine with Lee Morgan, McCoy Tyner, Elvin Jones, Bob Cranshaw, and Ray Barretto. On paper, an all-star lineup; in practice, they sound like they’ve rehearsed for years, which is not surprising because they played together in a number of Blue Note recordings.

Turrentine’s tenor is warm and conversational, leaving space for confident blues phrases. McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones bring the Coltrane Quartet’s rhythmic engine without overpowering Stanley (Interesting to compare their playing here, with what they were playing with Trane in ‘64). Lee Morgan plays with restraint, complementing rather than competing. Ray Barretto’s congas add rhythmic depth, and Rudy Van Gelder’s engineering captures the tenor beautifully with weight and body.

The album wasn’t released until 1980—sixteen years later—because Blue Note considered Turrentine’s soulful, bluesy approach less commercially viable than progressive albums they prioritized, and the label faced a massive recording backlog.

The secret ingredient remains the combination of Turrentine with the Coltrane rhythm section. The music sits between hard bop, soul jazz, and modal jazz, occupying a rare space that keeps it sounding fresh sixty years later.

Listen to Turrentine’s composition Shirley, written for his wife at the time, Shirley Scott:

Watching - Wings of Desire - Wim Wenders

Wim Wenders, probably best known his film, The Buena Vista Social Club, shoots like every frame owes somebody money. Landscapes don’t decorate the story. They interrogate it. Roads, deserts, empty streets, and broken skylines become the loudest voices in the room.

His people drift through life without GPS, chasing versions of themselves they barely remember. Nobody rushes toward answers. Wenders leaves you stranded inside the uncertainty, which feels closer to real life than Hollywood’s addiction to closure.

He refuses to yank your emotions around with plot tricks. He shows you what happened, then walks away and leaves you alone with it.

His films ache, but they never surrender to cynicism. Paris, Texas. Wings of Desire. The American Friend. They don’t end. They haunt.

His 1986 cult classic, Wings of Desire, starring Peter Falk and Bruno Gans is about a trenchcoat-wearing guardian angel who falls in love with a trapeze artist and wishes to become human. This breathtaking film ably tackles questions of love, life and metaphysics.

You can watch the film on Netflix or HBO Max.

Next Tuesday: The Night That Jazz Fought Back

In 1960, while the official Newport Jazz Festival collapsed into riots, Charles Mingus and Max Roach organized a breakaway event that asked a question the music industry has never honestly answered. Who does the music belong to? This is the story of three days in Rhode Island that exposed a contradiction still running through jazz, and every other art form, right now.

The tape from Birdland is hard to listen to, and not for the reason you’d expect. September 30, 1964. Bud Powell, back in New York after five years in Paris, working the club named for Charlie Parker, with John Ore on bass and J.C. Moses on drums. Francis Paudras, the French commercial artist who had more or less kept Powell alive in Paris and flown home with him that August, hid a microphone near the club’s piano mic and recorded the set. It surfaced later as Return to Birdland, 64.

At one point Powell stops in the middle of a solo and asks what tune he’s playing.

Some history, because the tape makes no sense without it. In January 1945, Philadelphia police arrested Powell and beat him around the head. He was 20. Nearly everyone who knew him drew a straight line from that night to everything after: Creedmoor and Pilgrim State, electroshock, heavy medication, drinking, the gradual loss of the speed and sureness that had made him Bud Powell in the first place. The clubs booked him regardless. His name drew.

The name came from what he did to the instrument. Long right-hand lines at tempo over sparse left-hand jabs, harmonic nerve nobody at the keyboard had shown before. Parker is said to have called him just “the piano player.” Put on Evans, Hancock, Tyner, almost anyone since 1950, and you’re hearing Powell, filtered once or twice.

So the hard part of the Birdland tape isn’t the fumbling. It’s the stretches where the fumbling clears and the old phrasing comes through, a few bars at a time, then goes under again.

He’d just turned 40 that week. He stayed in New York when the run ended, though Paudras wanted him back in Paris. He died in Brooklyn on July 31, 1966, of tuberculosis, malnutrition, and alcoholism, two months short of 42.

Watching - Twelve Angry Men

Twelve Angry Men started as live television, a Reginald Rose teleplay from 1954, and you can feel the DNA. One set, real time, actors who have to get it right as it happens. Henry Fonda co-produced the film version himself, hired Sidney Lumet, who had never directed a feature, rehearsed the cast for two weeks as if it were a play, and shot the thing in about three weeks. It lost money. 1957 audiences wanted CinemaScope and color, not twelve sweating men arguing around a table in black and white. The movie had to wait for television, of all places, to find its audience, which given where it came from has a certain justice to it.

The famous technical stunt still works on me every time. Lumet and his cameraman began with normal lenses shot at eye level and, as the deliberation wears on, moved to longer lenses and dropped the camera lower, so the ceiling starts pressing into the frame and the men’s faces crowd each other without your quite registering why. By the last half hour that jury room is a cell. The cameraman, incidentally, was Boris Kaufman, who won an Oscar for On the Waterfront and whose brother was Dziga Vertov, the great Soviet avant-garde documentarian.

There’s no cutting away, that’s the discipline. No flashbacks, no scenes of the accused, no courthouse corridors. So every flipped vote has to be earned in the room, out of testimony re-examined and tempers giving way, and the script mostly earns them. Not always at the same level. A couple of the conversions come easier than they should. Doesn’t matter much when the hard ones land: Lee J. Cobb’s Juror 3 held up alone at the end by nothing except his rage at his own son, or the moment during Juror 10’s bigoted tirade when, one by one, the others stand up and turn their backs, and Lumet just lets the room go quiet around him.

Fonda’s Juror 8 gets remembered as the hero, and people misremember what he actually does. He never claims the kid is innocent. He says, over and over, that he doesn’t know, and neither does anyone else at the table, and that not knowing is the whole point of the exercise. His weapon is the question nobody else wants to sit still for. Meanwhile the heat does half the writing: shirts soaking through, the broken fan that suddenly works, the rain when it finally comes.

Then the verdict, and Lumet’s last trick. After ninety minutes of tightening, he cuts to a wide-angle shot of the courthouse steps, open air, room to breathe. Two jurors, Fonda and the old man, exchange names, the only names we ever get, and walk off in different directions into the city. That’s it. That’s the ending. Names, weather, strangers again.

Listening - Grover Washington, Jr.: Inner City Blues, Mercy Mercy Me

Grover Washington, Jr. earned his reputation as one of the most fluid and soulful saxophonists to come out of the CTI/Kudu stable, and this Chateauvallon performance shows why. Playing alongside a rhythm section as formidable as Bob James, Ron Carter, and Jack DeJohnette would expose a lesser player, since each of those three was capable of pulling the music in unpredictable directions. Washington doesn’t just keep pace, he pushes back, weaving long, unbroken phrases that shift between gritty blues inflections and the kind of harmonic sophistication that made him equally credible in straight jazz and R&B circles.

What made him such a compelling improviser was his sense of pacing. He rarely rushed to prove his technique, letting tension build across a solo so that when he did unleash a run of notes, it landed as release rather than showmanship. That instinct, restraint married to raw power, is what separated him from the more technically flashy saxophonists of the era, and it’s exactly what an all-star rhythm section like that one would have demanded from a soloist: someone who could match their interplay without getting swallowed by it. Washington’s willingness to take real chances in that setting, stretching phrases against DeJohnette’s shifting time and Carter’s harmonic curveballs, is a good measure of how serious a musician he was, well before the smoother, more commercial sound he became known for later in the decade.

Listen:

Next Tuesday - Evil Comes with Free Cholesterol Medication

There’s a rumor moving through the republic, an escaped lab virus: the decent die young, the monsters refuse to leave. Every generation watches a polished predator hit eighty-five while teachers, nurses, and neighbors disappear twenty years early, worn down by mortgages and impossible jobs. The universe seems to have developed a taste for cruel jokes — kale smoothies for one man, a state funeral for another who spent seventy years poisoning rivers and lying through capped teeth.

Kitty Bruce died in May at seventy. She was eight when she lost her father, and she spent most of her life afterward keeping his archive together so the rest of us could still hear him. This post is for her.

I found Lenny at thirteen, the same year I found bebop, and it took me decades to understand why the two arrived together. My friend Mark Kaplan, already a serious tenor player, and I memorized whole routines off the records, “The Palladium” above all. I’ll come back to that.

Bruce called himself an oral jazzman, which sounds at first pass no different from self-branding, the kind of thing a comic said in 1959 to seem current. He meant it as a description of how he worked. The ideal, as he described it, was to walk onstage the way Bird walked to the microphone, with no set list and no destination, and blow, whatever came, in the order it came.

You can check this against the tape. Listen to the Curran Theater recordings from November 1961. He opens on capital punishment, wanders into a bit about a Jewish man explaining Passover to his Black neighbor, breaks mid-sentence into a judge who sounds the way Edward G. Robinson sounded, and eventually gets back to capital punishment from an angle I still can’t diagram after sixty years of listening. I’ve tried describing these sets to people who haven’t heard them and it never works, which I suspect is the point, or at least the proof. An act with loose joints can be summarized. This can’t.

Albert Goldman’s biography traces the method to the strip clubs of the San Fernando Valley in the mid-1950s, where nobody in the audience had come for comedy and there was accordingly nothing to protect. Goldman writes that Bruce, who until then had been a mediocre mimic with a conventional act, shed his restraints in those rooms and began to blow with the freedom of the modern jazz players he’d started spending his nights around. Blow was the word Goldman chose because it was the word Bruce used.

It helps to remember what stand-up was at the time. A comic had an act that he’d tested on the road and then essentially froze, and the delivery might breathe a little from night to night but the material didn’t move. Bruce regarded that model about the way the beboppers regarded the late swing bands, as something that had traded its nerve for a salary. He’d also absorbed the musicians’ vocabulary so thoroughly that it stopped being slang in his mouth and became the terms of the argument. When he called somebody square he meant a person who had at some point quietly agreed to stop noticing things, and most of what he did onstage amounted to noticing things out loud at high speed in front of witnesses.

He wasn’t visiting that world, either. He was involved for years with Annie Ross, whose singing ran on the same exposed intelligence, and he worked rooms where bebop was the house music. When the San Francisco police arrested him for obscenity in 1961 it happened at the Jazz Workshop, and I’ve always thought the address tells you something the charge doesn’t. The charge concerned one word. But the word had been circulating in American mouths for a few centuries without landing anyone in night court, and I’ve never been able to believe it was really the word. A man improvising in public about religion, race, sex, and the police, in whatever order his head produced them, was a newer kind of problem, and the obscenity statute happened to be the tool lying closest to hand.

The fullest statement of what he thought comedy and jazz had in common is the television pilot he produced in 1959, The World of Lenny Bruce. The booking alone makes the argument: Buddy Rich, Sweets Edison, Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, and a quartet of Cannonball Adderley, Bill Evans, Philly Joe Jones, and Teddy Kotick, who had played bass with Parker himself. Bruce had the band improvise off great paintings and then waded in. There’s a stretch where the quartet plays “Au Privave” while Bruce and Philly Joe trade riffs about Bela Lugosi. Watch how the drummer listens to him. And how Lenny plays money. The pilot aired once on local New York television and no network touched it.

The Parker comparison gets drawn constantly, usually on the grounds that both men improvised, both used heroin, and both died young, Parker at thirty-four in 1955, Bruce at forty in August 1966, on his bathroom floor in Hollywood. I’d rather not make the drugs part of the aesthetics; addiction killed plenty of comics with frozen acts too. The difference worth dwelling on is that nobody ever prosecuted Parker for the content of a solo, while Bruce was arrested again and again for the content of his talk, and the trials took his bookings, his money, and eventually his attention. By the end he was standing onstage reading aloud from his own court transcripts, which the audiences hadn’t paid to hear. You could say the legal system succeeded where it usually fails, in that it actually managed to make him boring, for stretches, before it made him dead.

About “The Palladium.” BrotherMark and I traded its sections back and forth the way we traded Bird heads, and what I understand now, and couldn’t have said at thirteen, is that we were memorizing camera moves. The bit cuts between the comic dying onstage and the view from the wings and the manager and the band, scene to scene, the way a film cuts. “Father Flotski’s Triumph” works the same way. We just knew that whatever was on the comedy records was also on the jazz records, and we spent that year trying to get closer to wherever it was coming from. I’m apparently still at it.

Listening - Weather Report: Unknown Soldiers

The Weather Report track I hand people who think fusion means noodling is “Unknown Soldier,” from I Sing the Body Electric, 1972. Strange album to begin with: one side studio, one side carved out of a live Tokyo concert, as if the band couldn’t decide yet which animal it was. The studio side is where “Unknown Soldier” lives, and it’s Zawinul’s piece, and it doesn’t behave the way jazz records behaved in 1972. It barely behaves the way this band behaved.

It opens as a kind of dirge, spare, slow, the theme carried as if at a funeral pace, and for a while you’re not sure anything is going to happen. Then the thing loosens into collective playing, everybody moving at once, nobody stepping forward in the old way, and near the end there are voices, crowd sounds, chanting, and the title stops being decorative. Zawinul spent his boyhood in Vienna during the war. I don’t know how directly that fed the piece and I’m wary of critics who claim to, but a man who was eight years old under the bombing didn’t need to research the subject.

About that “nobody stepping forward”: Zawinul had a line he gave interviewers for years, that in this band we always solo and we never solo. Bandleader talk, usually. Bandleaders say things. The annoying part is that the records bear him out. Since bebop, a jazz performance had meant a hierarchy, the horn out front, the rhythm section holding the floor, everyone waiting his turn. Weather Report just declined the arrangement. Listen to “Unknown Soldier” trying to locate the soloist and you keep coming up empty; the foreground keeps dissolving and reforming somewhere else.

The pedigree is the part everyone knows. Zawinul and Shorter both came out of Miles’s electric bands, In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew, and the easy version of the story makes Weather Report a continuation of all that. I’ve never fully bought it. Miles’s electric music stayed rooted in the blues however abstract it got. Zawinul and Shorter, with Miroslav Vitous on bass in those first years, headed somewhere more composed, more orchestral, less sweat and more architecture. Whether that was an advance or a trade depends on which of their records is playing and, frankly, on my mood.

They’d become enormous later, Jaco, “Birdland,” arenas. That’s a different band and a different argument. In 1972 they were still mostly a rumor with two LPs, and “Unknown Soldier” is the sound of them finding out what the rumor was about.

Listen to “Unknown Soldiers” by Weather Report:

Watching - The Sweet Smell of Success at 70

Alexander Mackendrick’s 1957 film about a Broadway gossip columnist and the press agent who grovels for his favor didn’t age into a period piece. It aged into a diagnosis.

J.J. Hunsecker, played by Burt Lancaster with a stillness that reads as menace, makes and breaks careers from a newspaper column. Sidney Falco, Tony Curtis at his most desperate, will do anything to get an item planted. Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman wrote the dialogue as a knife fight conducted in the form of conversation. Lines don’t build to a point; they cut and move on. Nobody in the picture says what he means, and everybody understands exactly what’s been said.

What holds up isn’t the nightclubs or the fedoras. It’s the mechanism. Hunsecker never needs to write a lie. He decides whose career lives, and the machinery around him does the rest. Swap the column for a platform and the film describes the influence economy with more precision than most things written about it since. The gossip column was the feed, first draft.

Here’s the part film writers usually skip and I can’t. The band on the nightclub stand is real. That’s the Chico Hamilton Quintet backing Steve Dallas, the young guitarist courting Hunsecker’s sister, and Hamilton himself gets a few lines of dialogue. This wasn’t a generic jazz combo hired to fill the frame, either. Hamilton’s group in 1957 was one of the odder and more beautiful bands on the West Coast: Fred Katz’s cello up front where a piano would normally sit, Paul Horn on flute and reeds, Carson Smith on bass, chamber jazz before anyone had agreed on the term. Horn would later become famous, or notorious depending on your shelf, for recording flute meditations inside the Taj Mahal, but here he’s still a hard-working West Coast player, and you can hear it.

Martin Milner, of course, couldn’t play. The guitar you hear is John Pisano, the quintet’s actual guitarist, and the guitar you see is mostly Milner, because James Wong Howe shot the close-ups so the two could be cut together without embarrassment. That’s of a piece with everything Howe does in this movie. His black and white Manhattan, all sharp angles and smoke, a city built for people to disappear into, still resembles nothing else from the period. A man that meticulous wasn’t going to let a faked solo break the spell.

I’ve sometimes wondered whether Mackendrick understood what he had in that bandstand. The whole picture is about manufactured reputation, items planted, careers arranged, and the one thing in it nobody fakes, hand-doubles aside, is the music. Maybe that’s an accident of casting. I doubt it, but I can’t prove otherwise, and the film works either way.

Seventy-plus years on, the suits changed and the method didn’t. And on the nights the movie’s cruelty wears on me, there’s always the band.

Next Tuesday - Bud Powell Comes Back To Birdland

Bud Powell’s final performance at Birdland in the mid-1960s was not a comeback. It was a confrontation, the man who had invented bebop piano returning to the cathedral of the music he built, diminished by a police baton, electroshock treatments, and two decades of institutional abandonment. Even so, the genius was still audible, which turned out to be the most devastating part.

The first thing you notice is the body.

Jackie Wilson does not merely enter a song. He attacks it. He drops to his knees as if struck by lightning, springs back up before gravity can file the paperwork, spins across the stage without losing a syllable, and then—somehow—finds enough oxygen to drive a love song straight through your ribs. The man is immaculate and unhinged. Gospel fire in a sharkskin suit. A prizefighter armed with a microphone.

They called him Mr. Excitement because “The Human Detonation Device” would not fit on the marquee.

Watch the footage now and you can see the future arriving in real time. James Brown is in there. Michael Jackson is in there. Generations of soul singers, rock frontmen, and pop idols are waiting inside those knee drops and impossible pivots. Wilson changed not only how American music sounded, but how it moved.

Then America did what it so often does with Black genius: it swallowed the invention, paid everybody standing near the inventor, and misplaced the receipt.

The record business of the 1950s and ‘60s was not a carnival but a protection racket designed to look like opportunity. Here’s how it worked: A label signed an artist for a percentage of sales—usually 3 to 5 percent of wholesale revenue, sometimes less. Before the artist saw anything, the label subtracted studio costs, production, marketing, promotion, and distribution. Then came the manager’s cut—typically 15 to 25 percent of gross earnings, taken off the top before calculation. Then the booking agent, taking another slice. Then the lawyer. By the time money reached the performer, it had passed through so many hands that its relationship to the fortune the voice had generated bore no resemblance to the original sum.

I once interviewed Al Kooper who co-founded Blood, Sweat and Tears, and wrote most of their early hits. I asked him if he was still collecting royalties and he laughed. He told me that the way the contracts were written, he still owes Colombia Records money. Every time they reissue those greatest hits recordings, the artist get charged again for the production.

Wilson had hit after hit. “Lonely Teardrops” in 1958 rocketed up the charts and blasted through the barricades separating rhythm and blues from respectable white radio. “To Be Loved” followed. Then “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher” in 1967—one of those records that sounds less like it was recorded than uncorked. These were not accidents. Wilson was helping design the architecture of soul music: ecstasy welded to anguish, church testimony fused with nightclub sexuality, absolute control performed as total abandon.

And yet, with each success, Wilson’s actual bank account remained thin.

The solution was always the same: tour more. The machine required fresh blood, and Jackie Wilson was expected to provide it nightly. Venues booked him two, three, sometimes four shows a week. His body became a product with an inventory that needed constant replenishing. He traveled by bus between cities, performed in smoke-filled clubs where the air itself seemed designed to wear down a human voice, then traveled again. The money that came in from these performances was supposed to compensate for what the record industry had taken. It rarely did.

In 1961, during an argument in a New York apartment, Wilson was shot. The bullet entered his stomach and nearly killed him. He survived. Then he went back to work.

Of course he did. In America, survival for a performer is mistaken for consent. If the artist returns to the stage, the industry assumes the wound has healed. Nobody asks whether the stage is the only place left to go. Nobody considers that for a man with mounting medical debt and a family depending on his income, the stage is not a choice but a requirement.

Wilson kept performing. He kept moving. He kept selling tickets that generated money that flowed through the same channels, reaching him diminished.

Then came the event that no choreography could survive.

In 1970, Wilson’s sixteen-year-old son, Jackie Jr., was shot and killed during a robbery at the family home in Detroit. The body of this boy who carried his father’s name lay in a hospital. The funeral arrangements required payment. The grief required space to breathe. But the touring schedule had already been booked. The promoters had already sold tickets. The venues expected their show.

Wilson continued performing. Not because he wanted to. Because the machine had already been fed and would not allow a pause.

On September 25, 1975, Wilson stood onstage at a nostalgia show in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. He was singing “Lonely Teardrops,” the song that had helped make him immortal. He was forty-one years old. His body, which had spent more than two decades as an instrument of precision and revelation, was exhausted in ways no audience could see.

Then his heart stopped.

Some people in the crowd reportedly thought the collapse was part of the performance. Why wouldn’t they? Jackie Wilson had spent years teaching audiences that the human body could fall, twist, tremble, and rise on command. They waited for him to spring back up.

But this time he did not rise.

CPR kept him alive, but the oxygen deprivation caused severe brain damage. Mr. Excitement—the man whose body had served as both instrument and revelation—could no longer perform or speak coherently. The voice that had driven love songs through ribs could no longer form words.

What followed was not a gentle fade but a grinding institutional aftermath. Wilson spent the next nine years in facilities, his body present but unreachable. The disputes over his money continued even as he lay incapacitated. Managers and lawyers argued about contracts and royalties. The industry that had extracted everything from his motion now hovered around his stillness, still calculating percentages.

He received no settlement. No buyout. No dignity clause written into his contracts that might have provided security when his body finally failed. He remained, as he had always been, a resource that had been fully consumed.

Wilson died in January 1984, broke and only forty-nine years old.

There is no clean moral here, no sentimental fade-out where opening chords wash away the ugliness. Posthumous honors cannot reimburse a stolen life. Wilson entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987, three years after his death—a correct verdict delivered by a court that had adjourned too late.

His story is bigger than one artist’s misfortune. It is the American entertainment industry rendered as an X-ray: Black brilliance burning at the center while managers, labels, imitators, and institutions gather around the glow. Michael Jackson called Wilson a profound influence. James Brown studied him. Elvis Presley admired him. But American culture has a peculiar accounting system: the artists who carry an innovation into the largest marketplace become immortal, while those who forged it are reduced to trivia questions.

Jackie Wilson gave popular music a new body. He taught it to drop to its knees, spin through pain, leap toward ecstasy, and come down perfectly on the beat.

The culture kept the moves.

It should remember the man.plainly.

View Jackie Wilson singing “Lonely Teardrops”

Listening - Facing You - Keith Jarrett

Keith Jarrett was on tour with Miles Davis in 1971 when ECM’s Manfred Eicher suggested he come into the studio on a day off to record his first solo piano outing, Facing You. With Miles, he was playing all electric instruments, and to my ears, the music came alive. I got to hear him live several times with that incarnation of Miles’ groups. But after a couple of years with Miles, he never really played electric again.

After Facing You, he began playing more solo concerts, including The Köln Concert (1975) his best-selling album and the best-selling solo piano recording in history. Created under difficult circumstances on an inferior piano, it became a classic because of its melodic flow and emotional immediacy. He basically invented: start-to-finish spontaneous improvisation with zero prepared material.

Facing You features shorter studio improvisations. It’s intimate, lyrical, and one of his most accessible recordings. Jarrett’s improvisational voice is present throughout. The music blends jazz, classical influences, gospel, folk, and lyrical melody into a highly personal style. For many longtime Jarrett listeners, Facing You remains one of his most balanced studio recordings, combining memorable compositions with the spontaneous feeling that became his signature.

Listen to Facing You.

Watching: Ben Hecht and the Kiss That Killed the Ordinary Noir

When Kiss of Death arrived in 1947, it looked like another crime drama. Based on Eleazar Lipsky’s novel Stoolpigeon, it followed a familiar story. A thief turns informant after personal tragedy, struggles with his conscience, and seeks redemption. Director Henry Hathaway gave the film documentary realism by shooting in New York locations, and Victor Mature delivered a restrained performance. On paper, nothing suggested a classic.

Ben Hecht changed that.

Working with Charles Lederer, Hecht added one unforgettable creation who barely existed in Lipsky’s original story. Tommy Udo serves almost no plot function beyond terror. He doesn’t need a motive. He doesn’t seek revenge or profit. He simply erupts into violence because he feels like it.

Hathaway later said the notorious scene in which Udo pushes a woman in a wheelchair down a staircase came directly from Hecht. Hecht envisioned Udo as an unpredictable addict, someone who “will shoot you or stab you, they’ll do anything.” No backstory explains his behavior. That absence of logic is exactly what makes him frightening.

Every other character in Kiss of Death operates through bargains. The prosecutor exchanges leniency for testimony. Nick Bianco risks everything to protect his daughters. The film revolves around transactions. Udo stands outside that system. He cannot be reasoned with because he isn’t playing by the same rules.

Richard Widmark’s chilling performance, especially the famous giggle, became legendary. Yet Widmark was filling a shape Hecht had already designed. Udo appears briefly, disappears for much of the film, yet dominates every scene after his introduction. That is exceptional screenwriting. Hecht understood that a villain doesn’t need constant screen time. One unforgettable act leaves the audience carrying the fear for the rest of the movie.

This instinct runs through Hecht’s best work. Menace comes from specificity, not repetition. A vague threat fades. A wheelchair tumbling down a staircase never does. The image lingers because it is concrete and unexpected.

The Academy recognized Widmark with an Oscar nomination, while Hecht’s structural brilliance faded into the background. Yet Tommy Udo remains one of cinema’s greatest villains because Hecht understood a simple truth. One character who refuses every rule is enough to transform an ordinary noir into an unforgettable one.

Next Tuesday: The Oral Jazz Man

Lenny Bruce called himself an oral jazzman literally: he improvised onstage the way Charlie Parker soloed, unscripted and uncensored, shaped by the audience’s pressure rather than aimed at pleasing it. He picked up this method in mid-1950s strip clubs, absorbing it from the modernist jazz musicians around him, then used it to blow apart stand-up’s safe, scripted form the way bebop had blown apart swing. His 1961 arrest came not at a comedy club but at San Francisco’s Jazz Workshop, and it exposed the real difference: Parker got away with playing too fast for comfort, but Bruce, talking just as honestly about religion, sex, race, and power, found that language could be prosecuted in ways a saxophone couldn’t. Both men died young from total commitment to their art; only Bruce was arrested for it, and he kept blowing anyway.

At a certain age, birthdays stop being celebrations and become accounting problems. The end is closer than the beginning. This is not pessimism. It is arithmetic.

I’m not frightened. If anything, these reminders inspire me to use my remaining time wisely. I have a long to do list and nowhere near enough calendar days.

After seventy, the body begins filing formal complaints.

Mine arrived after a large birthday dinner. Something felt wrong—wrong in the unmistakable way a machine sounds wrong just before a belt snaps and comes flying through the casing.

I already knew I had aortic stenosis, a genetic defect in my heart valve. It was a family gift, the sort nobody wraps. Doctors had told me it would eventually need repair. Apparently “eventually” had arrived.

I went to the hospital. They ran tests, examined the evidence and sent in a cardiologist to deliver the verdict: open-heart surgery, and soon. They connected me with the best heart surgeon in Tucson, where I was living then. He was originally from Japan and carried himself with the quiet confidence of a man who did not need to advertise. I trusted him immediately, everything about how he worked said he knew what he was doing.

Eight weeks after the operation, I was almost completely healed. The body, for all its treachery, remains a remarkable animal. You cut it open, stop the heart, repair the defective part and stitch the whole contraption back together. Then, if everyone has done his job, the patient gets up and begins complaining about hospital food.

The surgery changed something in me beyond the valve.

I stopped spending so much time prosecuting my younger self. I had been running a private courtroom for years, reopening old cases, examining bad decisions and calling witnesses who were either dead, absent or imaginary. It was exhausting, and no verdict changed anything.

I also stopped worrying so much about the future. After all, the future has never once consulted me about its plans.

My doctrine now is borrowed and simple: stay in the moment and deal with what is directly in front of you. It lacks grandeur, but it works.

When you’ve lived this long, there is a great deal of material to process. Every life becomes a warehouse filled with broken furniture, old records, unpaid emotional invoices and a few mysterious boxes nobody remembers packing.

I used to ask why I made one choice instead of another. Why did I take that road? Why didn’t I take the other? But this assumes the person making those decisions knew what he was doing.

He didn’t.

None of us do. We choose a road because someone smiled at us, because rent was due, because we were horny, frightened, ambitious or bored. Forty years later we invent a philosophy to explain it.

These days I prefer returning to what was good. Why interrogate every happy memory until it asks for a lawyer?

After my first semester of college in 1967, my parents refused to let me into the house until I cut my hair. So I cut it. Revolution has limits when your laundry is inside. By 1971, my father had grown a mustache and wore his hair over his ears. We never discussed this reversal. Families are full of historical events everyone agrees not to recognize.

Thanks to Maynard G. Krebs on the Dobie Gillis show, I came of age with Lenny Bruce and Charlie Parker. Then the Beatles arrived in 1964, a few months after Dallas, and something in the atmosphere shifted. America had watched a president’s head explode in a motorcade, and then four young men from Liverpool appeared with guitars, jokes and indecent quantities of hair. The national nervous system was already smoking.

As the Beatles changed, their music became my music. When the San Francisco sound arrived, it reached me too. I felt at home immediately. The counterculture was already lurking in me; I simply hadn’t known what to call it.

Lately I’ve been watching short documentaries about how the Beatles built each album. The mechanics interest me because making anything new is usually a miserable business. Inspiration is the public-relations department. The actual work involves repetition, arguments, accidents, bad ideas and long hours spent wondering whether the whole enterprise is fraudulent.

Then something catches fire.

The distance between where the Beatles began in the early sixties and where they landed at the end of the decade still looks miraculous. They went from clever love songs to making records that seemed to arrive from another civilization. They did it while the world watched, which is even more unreasonable.

Coltrane made a similar journey, though he died in 1967 at forty. In his final ten years, his music underwent a transformation that was technical, emotional and spiritual. He kept pushing until the instrument sounded less like a saxophone than a man trying to tear a hole in the ceiling of the universe.

That journey has remained one of my great inspirations. I wrote a book about how deeply Coltrane affected me, because sometimes admiration becomes a debt and writing is the only currency you have.

Plenty of other music and film have mattered to me over the past fifty years, but lately most of the roads lead back to those early discoveries.

I feel alienated from much of what is being made now. Music, film, whatever we’re calling the endless sludge pouring through the screens. This is part of aging, and I’m not alone. My readers and viewers tend to be over sixty. We are the demographic advertisers approach with cholesterol medications, retirement warnings and outdoor bathtubs.

Fine.

What has kept me going, both now and for most of my life, is my own work: writing and making films.

There is more “content” in the world than anyone could consume in a thousand lifetimes. Content is what we call art after removing the dangerous parts. The market is flooded with it. Finding an audience is difficult. Keeping one is worse.

I don’t spend much energy worrying about that anymore. I just do the work and enjoy the process.

I was never going to be rich or famous. Somewhere along the way this became obvious, and the realization was oddly liberating. The point was always to make something that meant something.

Ten years ago, I could not have predicted where I would be today. During that decade I had prostate cancer, went through a divorce, met my soul mate at seventy and moved to Mexico.

That is a lot of plot for the final act.

I feel lucky. Most days begin with gratitude in my garden. Gratitude sounds suspiciously wholesome until you have survived enough things to understand it isn’t virtue. It’s astonishment.

In 1968, the Beatles went to India to study with the Maharishi. The expedition went badly. Within a year, two of them were publicly calling it a mistake. Spiritual enlightenment had collided with personalities, money, sex and publicity.

I began transcendental meditation and yoga around 1972 or 1973. By then the search had become visible, including the failure. That was important. The Beatles did not prove enlightenment existed. They proved you could make a public fool of yourself looking for it and remain alive afterward.

I also took LSD during that period, more than once. I learned something from it. The meditation outlasted the drugs by fifty years and counting. That may be the most responsible sentence I have ever written.

I started writing professionally for DownBeat in 1977. When I discovered that persoal computers could do word processing, I bought an Apple 2e in 1984. It came with a modem and I discovered online interaction. In 1994 I helped create Jazz Central Station, the first major jazz website. A jazz blog emerged in 1997, Bird Lives, before the phrase had been rubbed into cliché, and then live webcasts from Birdland in 1999.

People sometimes ask where the do-it-yourself instinct came from. My answer depends on the day. Sometimes I credit the Beatles. They wrote their own songs and started their own label when neither was normal. By the time the internet appeared, I had absorbed the idea that if no platform existed, you built one yourself instead of standing outside an office waiting for permission.

On other days, that explanation sounds like a story assembled afterward to make the accidents appear intentional. The truth may be simpler: I couldn’t stand asking permission. Nobody can trace their own wiring.

Four years ago, I moved to Guanajuato, Mexico, one of the best decisions of my life.

Last November, some neighbors took me to the cemetery for Día de los Muertos. A woman two graves away had arranged food and photographs beside the dead. A boombox played rancheras at full volume. Children ran between the headstones.

I stood there caught between being moved and feeling intrusive, a guest at another family’s grief. Nobody treated me as an intruder.

I was raised to whisper in cemeteries. Nobody there was whispering.

That struck me as healthy. The dead were not hidden or sterilized. They remained part of the family. They got music, food, flowers and company.

I'm aging in Mexico, and I'll die there too, though I can't predict when. It seems a better country for both than the one I left, where elderly people are stored out of view and the dead are handled by professionals behind the word “arrangements.”

A kid at the corner store has started calling me joven (which means young person in Spanish). Maybe he calls every gray-haired man that. Maybe it’s a joke. I don’t care. It still beats New York, where at my age you mostly register as an obstacle on the sidewalk.

Meanwhile, I buy tomatoes and avocados. And every morning, I sit in meditation as I have since 1973.

The heart keeps beating. The clerk keeps subtracting. The garden keeps growing.

Watching - The Front

The end credits of The Front list the years several cast and crew members were blacklisted, including writer Walter Bernstein, director Martin Ritt, Zero Mostel, Herschel Bernardi and Lloyd Gough. The film reveals their personal connection to the story only at the end, without a speech or musical flourish. That restraint reflects its broader tone: rather than presenting the blacklist solely as a political tragedy, it uses uneasy comedy to explore its everyday workings.

Woody Allen plays Howard Prince, a cashier and small-time bookmaker who submits television scripts under his name for blacklisted writers and keeps ten percent of their fees. Bernstein had used fronts himself, and the film captures the practice through commissions, contracts, meetings and the constant risk of exposure. Howard initially thrives, gaining money and status from work whose real authors cannot claim it. The comedy darkens through Hecky Brown, a blacklisted performer played by the great Zero Mostel, in one of his most important performances. Hecky’s decline was influenced partly by actor Philip Loeb, Mostel’s friend, who was forced off The Goldbergs and died by suicide in 1955, giving the performance unmistakably personal weight.

Although the institutions of the blacklist have changed, the film’s depiction of careers destroyed through private pressure, withdrawn opportunities and guilt by association remains recognizable. It avoids forcing that modern analogy, just as it avoids turning Howard into a conventional hero. He remains compromised and largely apolitical until he appears before the committee and refuses to cooperate, answering with two profane words. His achievement is smaller than heroism but more believable: when it finally matters, he says no.

You can watch The Front on YouTube.

Listening - Abbey Road Medley: The Beatles

Most people think the “Abbey Road medley” was performed. It wasn’t. The Beatles never played that sequence from start to finish. What you hear is construction masquerading as spontaneity. George Martin and Geoff Emerick didn’t record a moment. They assembled one.

By 1969, the Beatles were fragments themselves. McCartney had scraps. Lennon had beginnings. Harrison had ideas that went nowhere. Rather than finish anything, McCartney saw a solution in collage, something classical composers understood but rock musicians didn’t: you can make fragments feel inevitable if you cut them the right way.

This is the invisible achievement. The medley doesn’t feel edited because editing is where it lives entirely. Each transition erases the seam. “You Never Give Me Your Money” doesn’t fade into “Sun King”—they’re made to feel like one impulse split across takes. The repeated motif of “You Never Give Me Your Money” during “Carry That Weight” feels like thematic return when it’s actually engineering. Martin and Emerick discovered what film editors know: the right cut makes the artificial feel like fate.

The final line, “In the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make,” has weight not because of how it’s sung but because they placed it there, the last word after everything fragments and resolves. They didn’t write an ending. They edited one.

Abbey Road mattered because the Beatles learned to think like editors instead of performers. That’s why it still sounds like a single achievement, more than fifty years later. The work is invisible. That’s the whole point.

Listen to the Beatles “Abbey Road” medley:

Next Tuesday - The Tragedy of Jackie Wilson

Jackie Wilson was one of the architects of soul music, a performer of such physical and vocal intensity that Michael Jackson, James Brown, and Elvis Presley all studied and borrowed from him. The industry extracted his labor, mob-connected managers drained his earnings, and after his teenage son was murdered in 1970, he never fully recovered. He collapsed onstage in 1975, spent nine years brain-damaged and institutionalized, and died broke at forty-nine.

Freddie Redd died in the spring of 2021. He was ninety-two, which surprised people who assumed he’d been gone for decades, and the obituaries mostly had one album to talk about. Fair enough. It’s some album.

The story behind it is stranger than the record’s reputation suggests. In 1959 Jack Gelber wrote a play called The Connection for the Living Theatre, about junkie jazz musicians sitting around a room waiting for their dealer, and the production’s gimmick, or its honesty, was that the band onstage was real. Redd wrote the music and played it live, eight shows a week, with Jackie McLean beside him on alto, both of them acting a little and playing a lot, in front of audiences who’d come expecting a play and got something closer to surveillance. Nobody involved needed research for the subject matter. When Shirley Clarke filmed it in 1961, the discomfort survived the transfer, and Blue Note put out The Music from The Connection with the working band.

I think the nightly grind is the secret of the record. Most jazz albums document a band two or three days into knowing the material. This one caught a book of tunes that had been played hundreds of times in dramatic context, to silence, to walkouts, to whatever a 1959 Off-Broadway crowd did when confronted with the thing itself. The music came out lean. Hard bop by then had its signals, the gospel changes, the backbeat shout, the cathartic closer, and Redd’s score mostly declines them. “Who Killed Cock Robin,” “Music Forever,” “Melanie.” That last one is the one I’ve returned to for years and I still can’t fully account for it. Sparse but not unfinished, sad but dry-eyed. McLean’s tone helps; there was always something in his sound that refused to be pretty, and Redd kept writing him rooms where that refusal made sense.

As a pianist Redd is harder to describe, which may be part of the commercial problem. Some Monk in him, the willingness to leave a note sitting somewhere odd and let it sit. Powell’s fingerprints too, as on every pianist of that generation. But he didn’t have Monk’s strangeness or Powell’s velocity, and he doesn’t seem to have wanted either. Musicians rated him. Musicians rating you has never once paid a rent.

The rest of the catalog is thin and good. “Shades of Redd” from 1960 puts McLean next to Tina Brooks, a tenor player who’s his own whole essay in obscurity, dead at forty-two with four Blue Note sessions to his name, and the two-horn writing on that date is some of Redd’s best. “Redd’s Blues” sat unissued for years. I’ll resist calling these lost masterpieces, because they aren’t; they’re strong records by a distinctive composer, which ought to be enough, and in a saner accounting it would be.

Why the career stalled is not much of a mystery and I won’t dress it up. Heroin took years out of him at exactly the wrong times. He spent long stretches in Europe, off the American radar. And the music itself made a poor legend: no famous quintet, no documentable innovation you can pin a chapter to, no early death, and then, almost comically, no death at all for another sixty years. He just kept turning up. There’s footage of him in his late eighties playing club dates, the tunes from “The Connection” still in the book, the touch lighter but recognizably his.

Somebody who knew him told an interviewer he was among the gentlest men in the music. I never met him, so I pass that along at face value. What I can vouch for is “Melanie” at midnight, which after all these years still sounds less performed than remembered, and I notice that’s the second time I’ve failed to say it better than that.

Listen to Music From The Connection

Let’s start with what nobody wants to say out loud: the robots aren’t the problem. We are.

Technology has been sold as salvation my entire adult life. Rock and roll was going to liberate us. Television was going to educate us. The internet was going to democratize us. Each time we took the shiny new thing, handed it to the people with the most money and the least conscience, and watched them turn our hopes into a subscription service.

AI is going to be different, they tell us. Sure it is.

The science fiction version of this story features a malevolent superintelligence that decides humans are inefficient and starts optimizing us out of existence. Good box office. Also a distraction. The actual threat is more familiar and a lot less cinematic: the same greed, tribalism, and lust for control that drove human behavior when we were hitting each other with rocks, now running on a vastly more powerful lever.

Look at who’s building this and why. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman. Four men who have shown, repeatedly and in public, that their operating instinct is more. More money, more market share, more of whatever the scoreboard happens to be measuring that quarter. They’re not villains. They’re something more dangerous: ordinary men with no checks on them. Zuckerberg built a company that ran its own internal research showing Instagram worsens body image in teenage girls, and kept running the product anyway. That’s not a hypothetical about the future. That already happened.

AI doesn’t create new human impulses. It amplifies the ones we’ve got. Fear, resentment, tribal loyalty, the hunger for certainty in an uncertain world. Social media didn’t make people tribal. It gave tribalism a megaphone and a business model, and in Myanmar that business model helped fuel a genocide, with Facebook’s own commissioned report admitting the platform enabled the spread of hate speech against the Rohingya. AI is the same machine with a bigger amplifier.

The surveillance angle should worry you more than it does. Clearview AI scraped billions of photos off the internet without consent and sold facial recognition access to police departments across the country before anyone passed a law about it. China’s Skynet system already tracks hundreds of millions of cameras tied to facial recognition at national scale. AI doesn’t invent the appetite for watching citizens. It just makes indulging that appetite cheap.

Then there’s manufactured reality. In 2024, a deepfaked robocall impersonating Joe Biden’s voice told New Hampshire voters to skip the primary. It worked well enough that people believed it. That’s the cheap version, done by amateurs. The expensive version is coming, and it will be indistinguishable from the thing it’s faking.

The jobs question gets asked constantly and answered dishonestly. Jobs always change. The real question is who captures the wealth the new technology creates. Every large-scale study of the industrial revolution says the same thing: productivity gains flowed to capital first, labor second, and only after decades of organizing did workers see their share. Nothing about the current owners of AI suggests they intend to wait for labor to organize this time.

None of this means turn the machines off. Drug discovery, climate modeling, accessibility tools for people who’ve never had them: the benefits are real and worth having. The mistake is treating the technology itself as the site of danger, when the danger is who holds it and what they want.

We’ve survived powerful new technology before, not because the technology got safer but because society eventually built laws, regulation, competitive markets, and public pressure strong enough to keep it from becoming a pure instrument of control. Antitrust law. Labor protections. Independent journalism. All of it arrived late, and all of it arrived because people demanded it before the harm became permanent.

Technology moves faster than institutions. By the time regulation catches up, the landscape has already changed and the people who built it have already banked the winnings.

So ask who controls the systems making decisions about your life. Ask what they want. Ask what happens when what they want conflicts with what you need.

The robots were never the threat. The men holding the leash are.

Listening - Just a Gigilo - Louis Prima

Louis Prima’s “Just a Gigolo/I Ain’t Got Nobody” (1956, with Sam Butera and The Witnesses and Keely Smith) worked because of the arrangement, not just their performance. Prima fused a mournful 1920s waltz about a man aging out of relevance with a frantic jump-blues number, turning self-pity into swagger. That slow-into-fast structure became the blueprint for Vegas lounge music afterward. Butera’s tenor sax and the Witnesses gave it the rhythmic teeth of an R&B combo rather than a crooner’s backing band, which is what let Prima’s shouted, half-comic vocal style land as exciting instead of novelty.

The group’s popularity came from the triangle on stage: Prima mugging and grinning, Smith standing deadpan next to him, Butera cutting loose on sax breaks. It was as much a comedy act as a music act, which is why the Sahara lounge residency became the ticket in mid-50s Vegas. It also solved a real problem for Prima: rock and roll was pulling his audience away, and this format let a bandleader in his 40s stay commercially relevant without abandoning swing.

The record’s reputation got a second life from David Lee Roth’s 1985 cover, which introduced the song to listeners with no context for lounge acts. The original still holds up against that cover, which is unusual and probably explains why people still describe it as powerful decades later.

Listen:

Watching - Paris, Texas

In 1984 a German director drove into the American Southwest and saw something Americans had stopped seeing because they had lived inside it too long. He made a film about silence, guilt, and the particular loneliness of people who disappeared before anyone noticed they were gone. Forty years later it still knows your name.

There are films you watch and films that watch you back. Paris, Texas belongs to the second category. Wim Wenders’ 1984 masterpiece approaches America the way you might approach a dream you only half-remember after waking. It strips away nearly everything commercial cinema depends on: plot momentum, emotional manipulation, constant forward motion, the reassuring sense that someone is managing your experience. What remains is silence, landscape, distance, and accumulated emotional pressure so precise it feels almost physical by the time the film reaches its conclusion.

The achievement is inseparable from the convergence of forces behind it, each one working toward the same emotional frequency without any of them overreaching.

Wenders brought to the American Southwest the particular fascination of a European who sees the country’s mythology more clearly because he stands slightly outside it. The highways and motels, the neon signs burning against desert darkness, the vast empty spaces between one human encounter and the next. For Wenders these were not simply locations but the physical expression of something embedded in American culture: the mythology of disappearance, reinvention, loneliness, drift. Americans accept these things as landscape. Wenders understood them as spiritual conditions. Under his direction the Southwest becomes simultaneously documentary and dreamlike, simultaneously real and haunted.

Next Tuesday - From Woodstock to AI

I turn 77 on August 1, and the number feels precise, not heavy. I’ve been deep in short, album-by-album Beatles documentaries, and what holds me isn’t the hits, it’s the process: the friction, the ideas that detonated late, the one holding it all together while everyone else set it on fire. Coltrane did the same work on a tighter clock, treating mastery as a starting line, not a finish line. Neither act let arrival become an excuse to stop moving, and that’s the inheritance I want. This last decade brought illness, divorce, meeting Sherrie, a new life in Guanajuato. None of it calcified me. I stayed open, and I kept working.

Booker Little died in 1961 at twenty-three, before most people knew who he was. That remains one of jazz history's most consequential losses, and one of its least discussed.

Memphis, Tennessee has given jazz some of its most vital voices, but none more heartbreaking in what was left unfinished than Booker Little. Born there in 1938, he arrived in the music at precisely the moment when hard bop was beginning to crack open into something wilder and more searching. He was present at that threshold, one hand reaching back toward the lyrical tradition, the other pointing into unmapped territory. And then, in October 1961, at the age of twenty-three, he was gone. Kidney disease took him, uremia most likely, and the cruelest part is that many of the people around him did not fully understand how sick he was until near the end.

What he left behind in those few years of recorded work constitutes one of the most unjust silences in jazz history.

The word underheard gets used casually, but in Little’s case it carries real weight. Here was a trumpeter who had already developed a voice so distinctive that it defied the dominant influences of the era. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a young trumpet player had two enormous gravitational forces to navigate: Miles Davis on one side, Dizzy Gillespie on the other. Nearly everyone bent toward one or both. Little did not. He carved out something that belonged entirely to himself, a sound that was lyrical but tense, emotionally raw but intellectually constructed, precise without ever turning cold. His phrasing had a quality of fragility threaded through urgency, as though he understood, even in his early twenties, that nothing was guaranteed.

That originality alone would make him remarkable. But it was his partnership with Eric Dolphy that pushed his work into genuinely essential territory.

Dolphy, who would himself die tragically young in 1964, was among the most restlessly inventive minds in jazz at the time, a musician who could move between the alto saxophone, bass clarinet, and flute with complete mastery, always finding new ways to stretch a musical idea past its comfortable edges. When he and Little played together, something rare happened: two musicians of equal imagination and equal seriousness found a shared language that was freer than hard bop but never abandoned emotional depth. Their collaboration on “Far Cry” captures this beautifully. The interplay is conversational in the deepest sense, two voices thinking out loud together, pushing each other toward discoveries neither might have reached alone.

Then there is “Out Front,” Little’s 1961 album and arguably his fullest statement as a leader. The record is astonishing when you consider his age. There is nothing tentative about it, no sense of a young musician still finding his way. The compositions are structurally ambitious, the playing is assured, and the emotional range moves from tenderness to something close to anguish without ever losing coherence. “Out Front” is the work of a mature artist, which makes it simultaneously thrilling and devastating. This was not a promising early effort. This was a fully formed creative vision. It simply ran out of time to unfold.

His associations tell the story of a musician operating at the highest level of the music. Max Roach, one of jazz’s supreme intellects, recognized something in Little and made him a key voice in his ensemble, appearing on “Percussion Bitter Sweet.” John Coltrane, already deep into his own transformation, shared space with him on “Africa Brass.” These were not casual connections. Musicians of that stature chose their collaborators carefully, and the fact that Little moved in that constellation says everything about where he stood.

So the question that jazz listeners and musicians have circled for decades is inescapable: what would he have become?

The 1960s were about to explode. The free jazz revolution that Ornette Coleman had sparked was gathering force. Coltrane was moving toward his most radical period. Miles Davis would soon begin the long journey toward fusion. The entire architecture of jazz was being rebuilt, and Booker Little was positioned, by temperament, by training, and by association, to be one of the central voices in that rebuilding. His willingness to explore freer structures, combined with his grounding in genuine lyricism, was exactly the combination that the music needed and would hunger for throughout that decade.

Would he have followed Dolphy into the furthest reaches of avant-garde expression? Would he have found a way to bridge the free players and the more traditionally rooted musicians, the way only a handful of artists managed to do? Would he have led his own bands into territory we can barely imagine? These questions have no answers, and that is precisely the injustice.

There is a particular grief that attaches to artists who die before their arc completes. It is different from mourning a long life fully lived, as we just did with Sonny Rollins, who was 95 when he passed. With Booker Little, you are not mourning what was. You are mourning what was forming, the half-built cathedral, the novel with pages torn out, the conversation interrupted in the middle of a sentence that was heading somewhere extraordinary.

His recordings stand as evidence of a genuine original, someone who heard the music differently and had the technique and the courage to translate that hearing into sound. “Out Front” alone should be in every serious jazz collection. The work with Dolphy at the Five Spot, documented on “Live! at the Five Spot,” captures two musicians in that rare state of mutual discovery, feeding each other ideas faster than either could have produced alone.

But perhaps the most honest tribute to Booker Little is simply to listen, and to hold the silence that follows with some awareness of what it contains. That silence is not empty. It is full of music that was never made, collaborations that never happened, albums that exist only as the faintest shadow of possibility. Uremia stole all of it in 1961.

He was twenty-three years old. He had already changed the way the trumpet could sound. He was just getting started.

Listen to “Fire Waltz” by pianist Mal Waldron, from Eric Dolphy and Booker Little Quintet at the Five Spot - Fire Waltz (1961). Personnel: Booker Little (trumpet), Eric Dolphy (alto sax), Mal Waldron (piano), Richard Davis (bass), and Ed Blackwell (drums).

Listening - Night Train - Maynard Ferguson

“Night Train” is a blues locomotive designed to be simple. Jimmy Forrest’s original, made famous by Oscar Peterson and then Ray Charles, is a groove vehicle, not a showcase piece. It earns its power through repetition and momentum. Taking that into a Maynard Ferguson big band context risks either crushing the blues feeling under too much arrangement or letting the band just coast. What pianist and arranger Mike Abene understood, and what makes the track land, is that the arrangement serves the pocket rather than escaping it. The band’s weight becomes the train itself rather than commentary on it. Ferguson’s trumpet doesn’t try to domesticate the blues or transcend it; he rides it.

The album holds up sixty years after its release, for a related reason: it’s a farewell without sentimentality. This was the end of one of the great working orchestras in jazz, and nobody appears to be treating it that way. There’s no valedictory self-consciousness. The band, augmented by some superb studio players, plays like it expects to show up next week. That unselfconsciousness is what gives recordings longevity. The ones that know they’re historic usually sound it in the wrong way.

The other thing working in the album’s favor is the rhythm section. Richard Davis on bass and Mel Lewis on drums are not Ferguson band regulars; they’re first-call New York studio musicians at the peak of their powers. That rhythm section could make anything breathe.

Listen to “Night Train” - from The Blues Road by Maynard Ferguson, arranged by Mike Abene with an alto solo by Charlie Mariano:

Watching - The World Cup

The championship game of the 2026 World coming is coming this Sunday at 3pm EST.

The World Cup happens once every four years, so every tournament carries weight a regular season game can’t match. Players get one shot every four years to define their career on this stage — that raises stakes for everyone watching.

National stakes without the messiness of real nationalism most of the time. You get to feel tribal, loud, and emotionally invested in a group of strangers because they’re wearing your country’s shirt. It’s identity and belonging without much personal cost.

The format rewards drama. Single elimination knockout rounds mean one bad half can end a great team’s tournament. That unpredictability is what makes the group stage matter and the knockout rounds unbearable in a good way.

Low scoring raises the value of every goal. Because scoring is rare, each goal is an event, not a routine occurrence. That’s part of why celebrations are so extreme and why a single moment can decide a match.

Global simultaneity. Billions of people are watching the same 90 minutes at the same time, which is increasingly rare in a fragmented media world. That shared experience amplifies the emotion of it.

Next Tuesday: Don’t Fear AI, Fear Those Who Own It

The robots aren’t the problem. We are.

Every technology gets sold as salvation, then handed to the people with the most money and the least conscience. AI won’t be different. It doesn’t create greed, tribalism, or the hunger for control, it just amplifies what’s already there, at a scale that makes Facebook look like a mimeograph machine.

The real question isn’t whether AI becomes conscious and turns on us. It’s who controls it, what they want, and what happens when that conflicts with what the rest of us need.

America has traded human warmth for marketplace logic, turning every social interaction into an economic evaluation and every citizen into a self-managing brand. Mexico, for all its corruption and chaos, has preserved something the United States has nearly destroyed: the ability to simply exist together in public, across generations, without needing to justify it. Living in Guanajuato makes that contrast impossible to ignore.

I have lived in Mexico long enough to notice something that has become nearly extinct north of the border.

People here still recognize each other as human beings.

Not consumers. Not brands. Not ambulatory LinkedIn profiles with teeth whitening and startup podcasts. Human beings.

The realization hit me one night in Guanajuato watching three old men argue about football with the intensity of Cold War diplomats negotiating missile treaties. One had a cigarette hanging from his mouth like a fuse. Another was waving a cane dangerously close to a child chasing pigeons through the square while church bells exploded overhead and somebody nearby sold roasted corn dripping with enough mayonnaise to kill a horse.

Nobody was in a hurry. Nobody was monetizing the moment. They were simply there, alive, occupying space together without needing an app to justify it.

Standing in that plaza, I understood how profoundly insane the United States has become.

America now feels like a giant airport terminal operated by pharmaceutical executives and marketing consultants. Every interaction carries the faint smell of financial evaluation. People meet and immediately begin probing each other for economic data. “What do you do?” Innocent on the surface. But beneath it lurks the real interrogation: How much money do you have? How important are you? Should I pretend to respect you?

The country has absorbed marketplace logic so completely that Americans now evaluate each other the way investors evaluate distressed commercial property. Human value gets tied to productivity, visibility, personal branding. The soul gets flattened into a résumé. Every citizen becomes a tiny corporation managing perception around the clock.

Even children have become optimization projects. Soccer practice. Coding camp. Advanced placement. The whole culture vibrates with nervous exhaustion.

Then you come to Mexico.

This is not a Disneyland hallucination for spiritually dehydrated expatriates in linen pants talking about authenticity over artisanal mezcal. Mexico has corruption, violence, poverty, and bureaucratic nightmares capable of driving a sane person into the Sierra Madre with nothing but tequila and a stolen goat.

But beneath all that chaos, something America has nearly exterminated still survives.

Human warmth.

You notice it in small moments your American nervous system no longer expects. The cashier looks you in the eye. An old woman selling flowers speaks to you with dignity even if you buy nothing. Entire families occupy public spaces at night — grandparents, teenagers, infants, dogs, wandering musicians — human beings colliding in real time under actual moonlight instead of staring into glowing rectangles while sitting three feet apart.

Mexico still understands public life. America understood it once, before the tech companies and hedge fund logic got hold of the culture and turned the population into isolated dopamine addicts living inside algorithmic slot machines.

The difference begins with children. Mexican kids grow up understanding that other people matter. Not the fake respect of diversity seminars run by emotionally hollow HR executives. Real respect, the old-fashioned kind rooted in presence and attention. Grandparents remain part of daily life instead of warehoused in institutional exile until death arrives with daytime television and low-sodium pudding. Children learn social warmth organically because they are surrounded by people interacting across generations. Human beings teaching other human beings how to exist together.

In America, children increasingly learn life through screens supervised by exhausted parents trapped inside economic systems designed by sadists. The United States became one of the richest societies in human history while simultaneously producing staggering levels of loneliness, anxiety, addiction, and spiritual malnutrition. That is an achievement worthy of a bald eagle wrapped in antidepressant prescriptions.

Mexico remains materially poorer and emotionally richer in ways Americans have forgotten how to measure. Because the most important parts of human life are gloriously inefficient. Friendship is inefficient. Long meals are inefficient. Old men arguing in plazas for three hours about football formations from 1987 is wildly inefficient. And thank God for that. America worships efficiency the way medieval peasants worshipped saints’ bones — desperately, blindly, in the belief that the ritual will save them from something they cannot name.

It won’t.

Then there is death, which reveals more about a culture than almost anything else.

America treats death like an embarrassing accounting error. The entire culture conspires to hide it behind hospital curtains, pharmaceuticals, and wellness influencers selling immortality through mushroom powders and cold plunges. Mexico looks death directly in the skull and laughs. The Day of the Dead alone contains more psychological wisdom than the entire American self-help industry. Skeletons dance. Families picnic in cemeteries. Children grow up understanding what modern America desperately denies: you are going to die, everyone you love is going to die, so stop behaving like a frightened stockbroker at a networking brunch and enjoy the music while it plays.

That wisdom changes a culture.

Civilization is not GDP, not military hardware, not billionaires launching themselves into space while public infrastructure collapses beneath them. Civilization is whether old people are respected. Whether children are loved. Whether strangers are acknowledged. Whether people still know how to sit together in the evening without requiring entertainment delivered by satellite.

One night in the plaza, children chased each other between benches older than the United States itself. A couple leaned against a stone wall. Somebody played guitar badly but with total commitment. Old women gossiped. Vendors shouted. Dogs barked. Church bells thundered through the valley.

Nobody was optimizing. Nobody was building a brand. Nobody was performing a lifestyle for an audience of strangers.

They were just there together — and after years inside the cold fluorescent machinery of modern America, that turned out to be everything.

Listening - Science Fiction - Ornette Coleman

By 1971, Ornette had been largely absent from recording for years and Science Fiction was his creative rebirth after that silence, The album sits between Coleman’s past and future, combining the fire of his Atlantic years with early hints of the electrified, globally conscious experiments that were coming. You can hear where he’d been and where harmolodics was heading, in the same listening session.

The expanded ensemble, which includes Don Cherry and Dewey Reman, features busy rhythms percolating underneath sustained chords and melodic figures, and the dream-like vocals contain the kind of tradition/anti-tradition dialectic that would show up in much of his new music that followed.

Listen to the entire recording.

Watching - Looking for Ornette

Jacques Goldstein sets out on a wild chase after a ghost. Not the kind rattling chains in a haunted house. This one drifts through the history of jazz, elusive, misunderstood, impossible to pin down. His name is Ornette Coleman.

The world finally caught up with Ornette’s music. The records that once sparked outrage now sit among the most celebrated achievements in modern jazz. Yet the man himself remained hidden behind layers of mystery, speaking in riddles, sidestepping labels, refusing to explain himself.

Goldstein follows the trail. He tracks down musicians whose lives and careers were altered by Ornette’s arrival. They tell stories, offer clues, share memories. Piece by piece, a portrait begins to emerge. Not a tidy biography, but a collage of impressions, contradictions, and revelations.

Out of the fragments comes the outline of a singular figure. A visionary who broke the rules and ignored the consequences. A man who searched for beauty where others heard chaos. A man convinced that beauty was one of the rarest things on earth.

Looking for Ornette can be seen on YouTube.

Next Tuesday:

Booker Little died in 1961 at twenty-three, before most people knew who he was. That remains one of jazz history’s most consequential losses, and one of its least discussed.

I recently rewatched The Trip on TCM. Roger Corman’s 1967 film, script by Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda tripping through its Technicolor dreamscape, isn’t great cinema by any serious measure. But that’s almost beside the point. What it is, exactly, is a document of a very particular moment in American life: the summer the center stopped pretending to hold. Watching it again, I felt something give way inside me, and suddenly I was back there.

1967 arrives in memory not as a single year but as a series of vivid exposures, each one overlit, the colors slightly off, the way photographs look when the film has been pushed too hard in the developing.

My drift toward the counterculture had actually begun five years earlier, when I got serious about jazz. The catalyst, oddly enough, was a television character: Maynard G. Krebs on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, bongos, poetry, Thelonious Monk, a hip vernacular that felt like a private language someone had carelessly left within reach. I started subscribing to the Village Voice, buying Lenny Bruce records, working my way through Kerouac and Ginsberg, making notes in margins with a seriousness I now find touching. Day-long pilgrimages to Greenwich Village. The round trip train from Hartford to Grand Central was $6.12.

Then came the first Kennedy assassination, the Beatles, and American culture began moving fast enough that you could feel the wind of it on your face. I was an early Baby Boomer, a generation that felt genuinely discontinuous from our parents, a mutation rather than a continuation. My father was a pianist, so he got the jazz. But the rest of it, the protests, the Civil Rights movement, the psychedelic fashions, arrived on him like dispatches from a country he’d never been issued a visa for.

By April of 1967, I went to New York for the first Be-In which took place at the Sheep Meadow in Central Park where thousands of us arranged on the grass like a vast, unruly orchestra without a conductor. Sgt. Pepper dropped that June, a few weeks before my high school graduation. I remember the needle going down, the hiss before “A Little Help from My Friends” came surging through the speakers, and the sense that something had irreversibly shifted. I turned eighteen on August 1st, already deeply curious about LSD and marijuana though I hadn’t tried either yet, paying close attention to how the media was framing all of it, the way a man watches an oncoming wave, half in terror, half in longing.

I had one friend who’d actually been there: a barber, ten or fifteen years older than me, with a small apartment above his shop that smelled of clove cigarettes and patchouli. Country Joe and the Fish murmuring from a transistor radio on the windowsill. I watched him smoke weed, though I declined when he held the joint out to me. He spoke about acid the way people do when something has genuinely rearranged them, quietly, without drama, as though describing a place you could visit if you knew how to read the maps.

Timothy Leary was everywhere that year. Talk show after talk show, those pale eyes radiating calm authority, making his case for LSD with the measured cadences of the Harvard professor he’d once been, arguing that the drug could liberate people from the invisible architecture culture had quietly erected around them, the ceilings they didn’t know were ceilings, the walls they’d mistaken for open sky. That argument landed on an eighteen-year-old like a summons.

By that summer I was on the verge of leaving suburban West Hartford for New York. I’d been watching foreign films obsessively, Godard, Antonioni, Bergman, Fellini, and had decided I wanted to make films. The moment that crystallized it was a film forum where a young Francis Ford Coppola appeared, just after writing the screenplay for Patton. He spoke about cinema the way my barber friend spoke about acid, as though it were a technology for dismantling and rebuilding consciousness, frame by frame.

Two events that year foretold everything that followed.

The June before graduation, my senior class held a Class Night talent show for which I had made a short film. For the soundtrack, I included “A Day in the Life” from Sgt. Pepper. When I screened it for the principals beforehand, they were horrified, insisting the song glorified drug use and demanding I cut it. I agreed. Then ignored them completely.

After introducing the film at the event, I slipped into the projection booth and locked the door behind me. The moment those opening piano notes hit, the principals came running, pounding on the door, frantic to shut it down. They didn’t get in. The song played through.

The next day the Vice Principal of Discipline called me in. He gave me a detention, but he also phoned my father with a warning that carried more weight than the punishment itself: he was concerned, he said, that I appeared to be developing into someone who would defy authority by any means necessary. Probably become one of those protestors.

He wasn’t wrong.

That October, I learned that Francis Ford Coppola was shooting a film out on Long Island. I had written to him the previous year asking about the path to becoming a filmmaker, and he had written back with a genuinely encouraging letter. So I reached out again, bold enough to ask if I could meet him for breakfast at the Garden City Hotel where he was headquartered. He said yes.

We spent an hour together one morning, and then he took me outside and showed me something he was building: a truck that housed everything needed to shoot a film, a fully mobile production unit, long before portable filmmaking was even a concept. Standing beside it was the young man constructing it for him. Coppola introduced us. His name was George Lucas.

This was five years before The Godfather. Nearly a decade before Star Wars. I was eighteen years old, standing in a parking lot on Long Island, and I had absolutely no idea what I was looking at.

I should have asked to stay. An unpaid internship, a grunt job, anything, just to be on that set. I would have learned more about filmmaking in a few months than I ever did at NYU Film School. But I was eighteen, short on confidence, terrified of what my parents would say. And so I shook hands and went back to school.

I’ve thought about that morning many times. Not with bitterness exactly, more the way you think about a door you watched close. What’s on the other side remains unknowable, and eventually you stop trying to imagine it. I found my way to filmmaking anyway, just by a much longer, more circuitous route.

That year, the war in Vietnam stopped being something distant. By 1967 I could no longer just read the headlines and turn the page. When I got to New York, I went to my first real demonstration, part of a crowd that stretched farther than I could see, all of us moving together with a sense of purpose I had never felt before.

Then the mood shifted. The police moved in, and I turned to find a mounted officer bearing down on me, the horse enormous in the middle of the street. I ran. He chased me for what felt like a long block, hooves hammering the pavement right behind me, the officer yielding a billy club, until I managed to cut between parked cars and lose him. I was shaking. I was angry. And I was more certain than ever that I had landed on the right side of this.

Looking back across everything that followed, the films, the cities, the collaborations, the marriages, the failures and the occasional luminous successes, 1967 stands apart from every other year. It was the year the current I’d felt moving beneath still water finally reached the surface and began, unmistakably, to run.

Listening - Soul Perfection Remix - Marvin Gaye’s Mercy Mercy Me

Soul Purrection is a YouTube channel that remixes popular music to expose what’s already there, pulling key elements out of the original recording and giving them room to breathe.

When Marvin Gaye brought “What’s Going On” to Motown in the early seventies, Berry Gordy rejected it. Too jazzy. Not commercial. Gaye was certain the music mattered, and maneuvered a single into the hands of radio DJs anyway. It became an immediate hit, and Gordy reversed course, ordering an album built around it. What Gaye delivered was a suite, not a collection of songs. Tracks flowed into each other. Politics, ecology, spirituality, all of it wrapped in orchestration that Motown had never attempted. “Mercy Mercy Me” sat in the middle of that album like a wound, Gaye’s voice riding above strings and rhythm in a lament about a planet being destroyed by the people living on it.

Soul Purrection strips that recording back and lets you hear what Gaye and arranger David Van DePitte buried in the mix. What you thought was background turns out to be the whole argument.

Watching: Dynasty: The Murdochs and the Empire That Ate Itself

There’s a line early in Liz Garbus’s four-part Netflix documentary that lands like a verdict: “He wasn’t raising children. He was raising possible successors.” Everything that follows in Dynasty: The Murdochs is the consequence of that sentence playing out across half a century of money, media, and managed cruelty.

The series follows the story from Rupert’s earliest empire-building to the final reckoning: a court battle and a $3.3 billion settlement paid to the three children who lost when Lachlan Murdoch was handed control of Fox. Dynasty: The Murdoch exists because the family drama played out on the world’s stage, and Fox News’ impact on our political and social fabric has stakes for all of us.

The family declined to be interviewed, which turns out not to matter much. Thousands of pages of documents, emails and text messages never before seen paint a portrait of a ruthless patriarch who raised his four eldest children less as a family than as gladiators, pitting them against each other for his affection and his empire.

“Rupert got everything he wanted, but it ripped his family apart.” Four episodes. Worth your time.

Next Tuesday The Country That Optimized Away It’s Soul

The United States doesn't have a community problem. It has a marketplace problem. Every social interaction has been quietly converted into an economic transaction, every citizen into a walking brand. Mexico, corrupt and chaotic as it is, never made that trade. Next week I'll explain why living in Guanajuato made that impossible to unsee.

There are funny movies, and then there are films that sneak into your nervous system wearing a fake mustache and steal your wallet while you’re laughing.

Mel Brooks didn’t make a Western. He staged a laboratory experiment with horses, whiskey, dynamite, and the American id. He dumped racism into a controlled environment, shook the cage, and waited for the rats to eat each other.

The diagnosis was immediate.

Racism isn’t merely immoral. It isn’t merely cruel. It’s profoundly stupid. It lowers the collective IQ of everyone infected with it. Brooks understood this fifty years ago, long before cable news turned national idiocy into a subscription service.

The genius of Blazing Saddles is that Bart never defeats anyone through brute force. He wins because every racist in the film arrives already defeated. Their prejudice has done the work for him.

Take the hostage scene. One of the greatest comic moments ever filmed.

Bart points a gun at his own head.

“Nobody move or the Nigger gets it!”

The mob freezes.

Think about the insanity for a second. Hundreds of armed white citizens suddenly become helpless because one Black man has weaponized their own racist assumptions against them. They’re so trapped inside the prison of their own thinking that they fail to notice the gun is pointed at the only person holding it.

Brooks isn’t telling a joke. He’s demonstrating a theorem. Hatred makes people predictable. Predictable people become easy prey.

The lesson echoes through every frame, church bells ringing in a madhouse.

Lyle demands an old minstrel tune. Bart answers with Frank Sinatra. Within seconds the racist is performing the degrading minstrel routine himself while Black railroad workers watch in amusement.

The hunter has wandered into his own trap carrying the bait.

Nobody even bothers to explain the joke. Brooks trusts the audience to feel the universe briefly correcting itself.

Then comes Gabby Johnson, staggering into town speaking a language apparently developed during a concussion. Every syllable sounds like a drunk buffalo choking on gravel.

The townspeople applaud.

One solemn citizen declares the speech displayed “a courage little seen in this day and age.”

Nobody understood a damn word. Nobody cared. Confidence replaced meaning. Noise became wisdom.

Watching the scene today feels less like revisiting a comedy than accidentally switching on C-SPAN.

Then there’s Hedley Lamarr, intoxicated by his own vocabulary.

“My mind is aglow with whirling transient nodes of thought careening through a cosmic vapor of invention.”

Taggart’s response?

“Ditto.”

One word.

The balloon explodes.

Every pompous fraud in history dies a little death in that single exchange. Brooks understood something every con man eventually forgets. Grandiosity only works until somebody refuses to play along.

Governor Le Petomane, played hilariously by Brooks, might be the most terrifying character in the picture because he isn’t terrifying at all.

He’s cheerful. Distracted. Half asleep.

He signs documents without reading them. Conducts an affair behind a curtain while running the state. Throws racial slurs around like confetti, then politely adds, “No offense.”

That’s the machine. Bigotry doesn’t require snarling villains twirling waxed mustaches. Sometimes it wears a grin, shrugs its shoulders, and asks what’s for lunch.

Then there’s Boris the executioner.

Lamarr wants another hanging.

Sorry. They’re booked solid. Mass murder reduced to appointment scheduling.

Hannah Arendt spent years trying to explain the banality of evil after the Holocaust. Mel Brooks wrapped the same idea inside a punchline and somehow made it even more horrifying.

The bureaucrat doesn’t stop the execution because it’s wrong. He stops because Tuesday’s calendar is full.

And through all of this walks Bart. Not as a saint. Not as a victim. Not as a symbol.

As the smartest man in every room he enters. He speaks with elegance. He performs. He improvises.

He’s always three moves ahead, watching these self-appointed masters of civilization repeatedly trip over the same intellectual potholes they’ve dug for themselves.

Even while sinking in quicksand, he’s explaining quicksand. Even while surrounded, he’s directing the scene. The racists think they’re hunting him. Bart realizes he’s conducting them. That’s the difference.

Mel Brooks never believed racism made white people stronger. He believed it made them gullible. Clumsy. Easy to manipulate.

He understood that prejudice isn’t a weapon. It’s brain damage masquerading as confidence.

By the final act, Hedley Lamarr has assembled an army of thieves, killers, bikers, Nazis, Klansmen, and assorted American lunatics to destroy Rock Ridge.

It looks unstoppable. It collapses like a cheap carnival tent. Because hatred isn’t a foundation. It’s dry rot. Every structure built on it eventually caves in under its own weight.

People still call Blazing Saddles a satire. They’re underselling it. Satire exaggerates reality. Brooks barely exaggerated anything.

He simply pointed a camera at America’s oldest disease, poured gasoline on it, and invited us to laugh at the smell while the patient insisted he was perfectly healthy.

Fifty years later, the symptoms are still everywhere.

The diagnosis hasn’t changed.

Today is Mel Brooks’ 100th birthday.

I got to him early. Growing up in West Hartford, Connecticut in the late 50s and early 60s, I watched the 2000 Year Old Man on television more times than I can count. Carl Reiner would play straight man, and Mel would improvise a man who had personally witnessed the invention of God, language, and fear. It was the funniest thing I had ever seen, and I had no framework for why.

Then came the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and before that, a late-night hour with Steve Allen where Mel seemed to understand that television was a place you could get away with things. He used that knowledge every time. In 1968, he wrote and directed The Producers -- a film that belongs in the permanent record of American comedy.

What I didn’t understand then, but do now, is that Mel was teaching me something I couldn’t have named. He said it himself, years later: “I cut my finger. That’s tragedy. A man walks into an open sewer and dies. That’s comedy.” That’s not a joke about comedy. That’s a definition of how the universe is actually organized, and Mel was the only one honest enough to say it out loud. A joke either lands or it doesn’t, and the difference lives in one word, one beat, one held silence. There is no almost funny. Once I understood that, everything else I heard got measured against it.

A hundred years. He outlived the century he was born to satirize.

The writing room for Blazing Saddles was its own controlled experiment. Mel assembled a freewheeling group that included Richard Pryor, Norman Steinberg, Andrew Bergman, and Alan Uger -- a veteran of Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows running a room where the rules were that there were no rules. Pryor’s fearless humor and firsthand experience with racism shaped many of the film’s sharpest scenes and dialogue.

One of the most famous anecdotes from those sessions came from the late Norman Steinberg, who described the first day like this: Pryor arrived about two hours late. As everyone began discussing the story, he pulled out a vial of cocaine and started snorting it at the table. He then held the vial toward Brooks and asked, “Brother Mel?” Brooks looked at him and replied, “Me. Never before lunch.”

Everyone laughed, Brooks declined, and they got to work.

A year and a half before Blazing Saddles opened, fate intervened. Coming back from a weekend in Fire Island on the LIRR, I took the last empty seat, next to Mel Brooks. We spoke and he acknowledged my appreciation of his work, but said he had no time to talk because he had a briefcase full of work.

Fifteen minutes later he began to tell me the story, sometimes bringing a character to life with vocalizations. He was naturally funny storyteller and suddenly he had a performance opportunity. For some moments he was inches from my face, holding the scene until I broke. When I laughed he’d stop, stay in character, and wait. Not for the laugh to die down. For me to come back to him. Then he’d continue.

Forty-five minutes. The other passengers had no idea what they were watching. Judging by the looks we got as we left the train, they’d reached a unanimous verdict: Bellevue, both of them.

When Blazing Saddles opened, I was at the Beekman Theatre in New York for the first show of the first day. Sitting in the dark, certain lines came back to me before the actors delivered them. Certain bits arrived and I already knew the shape of them. I had seen this movie. On a commuter train, performed by one man in a polo shirt, to an audience of one.

That’s how I learned what Mel Brooks actually was. Not a comedian. A force of nature that happened to be wearing a person.

Read: 100 Reasons to Love Mel Brooks

In 1957, Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg made a film about a charismatic drifter who uses television to seduce a nation, and critics called it unrealistic. Nearly seventy years later, A Face in the Crowd plays less like a period piece than a document someone left behind after watching what was coming.

There’s a drunk in an Arkansas jail who’s about to become the most powerful man in America.

He can’t help himself. He’s funny, loose, dangerous, and magnetic in ways that make you lean toward him even when something in the back of your brain is sending signals you’re choosing to ignore. His name is Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes, and Elia Kazan put him on screen in 1957, which means the film has now spent nearly seven decades being more relevant than it was the year before.

If you haven’t seen it, stop reading, scroll down watch it first. If you have seen it, you already know what I’m about to say.

Kazan made A Face in the Crowd with screenwriter Budd Schulberg, fresh off On the Waterfront. Both men were carrying complicated personal freight — they’d each named names before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Schulberg in 1951, Kazan in 1952. Both were condemned by significant portions of the Hollywood left, and that condemnation followed them. When Kazan received his honorary Oscar in 1999, thanks to the intervention of Martin Scorsese, a substantial number of people in the audience sat on their hands and stared at the floor. Kazan wrote in his autobiography that what drove the making of this film was their anticipation of the power television would have in the political life of the nation. What they actually made was something darker and more personal than a political warning — a film built by two men who understood betrayal from the inside.

That knowledge gives the film a density that a simpler morality tale wouldn’t have.

Lonesome Rhodes is not just a villain. He’s a product. His raw, folksy charm makes him an instant hit on local radio, and the machine takes it from there — television, sponsors, politicians, handlers. As his power grows, so does his contempt for the audience that made him. He holds his followers in private disdain while publicly celebrating them as the heartland soul of America. The film understands something that most political films miss entirely: authenticity itself can be manufactured, and the more real someone seems, the more carefully that realness has been constructed.

When it was released in 1957, critics called it unrealistic. Too paranoid. Too on the nose. That’s worth sitting with for a moment — the scenario that seemed like exaggeration then is now just Tuesday.

Andy Griffith’s performance is the reason the film works at the visceral level. He had almost no film experience before Kazan cast him, and that rawness is inseparable from what he does on screen. There’s no technique getting in the way. He’s loose and unpredictable in a way that feels genuinely uncontrolled, which is exactly what the role demands. The specific thing he pulls off, and it’s extraordinarily difficult, is simultaneity — you can watch him be charming and contemptuous at exactly the same moment. The grin that doesn’t reach the eyes. The folksy warmth delivered with a predatory alertness underneath. Most actors play one layer and let you infer the other. Griffith plays both at once, which is more disturbing by an order of magnitude.

Kazan reportedly called it one of the finest performances he ever directed. Given that Kazan worked with Brando at his peak, that’s not a throwaway remark.

What haunts the film is knowing what came after. Griffith spent the next several decades deliberately burying this performance under Andy Taylor and Matlock — the gentle, trustworthy American — and apparently found the role disturbing enough that he had no interest in revisiting that territory. That choice tells you something about what he understood he had accessed in himself.

Patricia Neal is the film’s structural backbone, even though Griffith gets most of the attention. She discovers Rhodes in that Arkansas jail, recognizes something in him, and gives him his first platform. That initial recognition is crucial — Marcia Jeffries isn’t naive. She’s smart and ambitious, and she chooses him. The film implicates her judgment from the start.

What Neal tracks across the film is a specific kind of disillusionment — not the clean kind where you simply stop believing in someone, but the messier kind where you’ve invested your own identity in what you believed, so the unraveling takes you apart along with it. Marcia doesn’t just lose faith in Rhodes. She has to reckon with what it says about her that she created him, promoted him, and loved him. Her feeling for him isn’t just professional investment — she loves him, and that love persists past the point where she clearly sees who he is. Neal holds that contradiction without resolving it prematurely, which is the hardest thing to do in a role like this.

Her final act — turning on the microphone so the audience hears what Rhodes really thinks of them — is the film’s moral climax. It’s not a triumphant moment. Neal plays it as something closer to grief. She’s not saving democracy. She’s destroying something she built and loved, and the cost is visible on her face.

The comparison to Donald Trump gets made every time this film is discussed, and it holds up to a point. The billionaire performing as populist, the television personality who understands the medium as a tool of dominance rather than information, the contempt that surfaces in unguarded moments, the persona of success constructed over a private reality of failures. Rhodes and Trump share the same operating mechanism.

But the comparison reveals where the film’s imagination ran out. Rhodes is ultimately destroyed. The hot mic moment — caught mocking the very people who worship him — ends him. Schulberg and Kazan still believed in a rational audience that could be shocked back to its senses. That faith looks genuinely touching now, the faith of men who lived before the complete dissolution of shared reality.

Trump’s supporters processed every exposure, every revelation, every unguarded moment, and stayed loyal. The mask slipped repeatedly and it didn’t matter, because the audience had decided the mask was the point. What Kazan and Schulberg couldn’t anticipate was social media removing the last gatekeepers, so that the Lonesome Rhodes dynamic now operates at a scale and speed that makes 1957 network television look like a church bulletin.

The film identified a structural vulnerability in media democracy — that charisma plus television produces a kind of power that bypasses argument and rational persuasion entirely. What it couldn’t imagine was an audience that already knew, and didn’t care.

There’s one more layer worth naming, the one that makes the film genuinely uncomfortable rather than just prophetic. Lonesome Rhodes is also, at some psychological level, a portrait of the informer. Someone who tells the crowd what it wants to hear. Someone whose public warmth conceals private calculation. Someone who betrays the people who trusted him to protect and advance himself. Kazan and Schulberg both did exactly that before HUAC. Whether they were conscious of encoding that self-portrait into the film is unknowable, but the psychological logic sits there in every frame.

They made a film about the moral rot of a man who performs sincerity while operating from pure self-interest, and they made it from experience.

The drunk in the Arkansas jail is still on television. He just has better production values now, and nobody’s reaching for the off switch.

Watch A Face in the Crowd. Note: if you can’t watch this because it’s blocked in your country, it’s also available on Tubi in some areas: View on Tubi

Listening - Doug Carn’s Revelation

Revelation marks the peak of Doug Carn’s Black Jazz period, pulling together the spiritual jazz, gospel, soul, modal improvisation, and social consciousness he had been developing on Infant Eyes and Spirit of the New Land into one fully realized statement. Jean Carn’s voice is central to that achievement. On the Coltrane and McCoy Tyner pieces, she doesn’t sing as a frontwoman backed by a band; she contributes wordless passages and hymn-like affirmations that function as part of the ensemble itself. Their “Naima” makes the shift clear: Coltrane’s original is intimate and romantic, but Doug’s electric keyboards build a floating bed under Jean’s voice, turning the tune devotional and expansive.

Listen to Doug Carn’s Revelation

Watching: Orwell: 2+2=5

Raoul Peck is a Haitian filmmaker known for blending political history with personal and essayistic storytelling. He briefly served as Haiti's Minister of Culture in the mid-1990s and is best known for I Am Not Your Negro (2016), built from James Baldwin's unfinished writings, which earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature.

Netflix has his most recent film, Orwell: 2+2=5, released in 2025. Peck uses Orwell's own writing, drawing especially on his essays and "1984," to draw parallels between Orwell's warnings about totalitarianism, propaganda, and truth distortion and contemporary politics.

Mr. Peck brings a healthy dose of sympathetic rage to his exploration of Orwell’s worldview, and sensitivity to his life story. The rich selection of archival material is punctuated by new footage, clips from a fascinating cross-section of documentaries and dramas, including several screen iterations of 1984a nd Orwell’s novella Animal Farm, and outstanding graphics — notably a catalog of books that have been banned stateside and around the globe and a real-world Newspeak glossary that alone is worth the price of admission.

Next Tuesday

In Locked in the Projection Booth: My Year of Living Dangerously, I remember the week before high school graduation, in 1967, when I was nearly expelled for refusing to censor my first film.

I first heard Chick Corea in the mid-1960s, and I never stopped following him. That turned out to be a full-time job. The man changed directions the way Miles Davis changed bands — constantly, deliberately, and without apology.

Chick Corea did not enter jazz. He smashed through the wall fleeing federal agents with a stolen synthesizer under one arm and a stack of Bartók scores under the other. Bebop, flamenco, avant-garde shrieking, classical counterpoint, electric noise, Latin grooves, psychedelic distortion. The man treated music as an all-night casino buffet. Grab a little of this. Pour hot sauce on that. Add voltage.

And somehow, through all the beautiful wreckage, the man still swung.

I first heard Chick in the mid-1960s on some Blue Mitchell records for Blue Note. Strong playing. Sharp edges. You noticed him immediately because he sounded restless, somebody already bored with the furniture in the room. Then came Now He Sings, Now He Sobs with Miroslav Vitous and Roy Haynes, one of those records that makes you stare at the speakers wondering if the musicians are cheating somehow. The trio moved as a pack of thieves escaping through alleyways.

Around the same time, word spread that Chick had replaced Herbie Hancock in Miles Davis’s band. Nobody replaced Herbie Hancock. That amounted to replacing your central nervous system with experimental machinery from a Soviet submarine. But Miles loved mutation. Stability bored him. He wanted musicians who sounded slightly dangerous.

Their first major statement together came on Filles de Kilimanjaro, where Chick played both acoustic piano and electric keyboards. You could hear the weather changing. The old jazz structures still stood, but cracks had appeared in the walls.

By the late 1960s the entire jazz world had split into hostile tribes. The acoustic purists stood guard over hard bop as medieval priests protecting sacred scrolls while amplifiers and rock rhythms crawled out of the counterculture and infected everything with electricity, chemicals, and volume. Into this chaos stepped Miles Davis, high priest of mutation, assembling a rotating gang of musical outlaws to invent fusion whether the critics approved or not.

Chick sat behind a Fender Rhodes during this madness and played as a man receiving coded transmissions from a dying satellite. The Rhodes did not sound warm or tasteful in his hands. It sounded metallic. Unstable. Hallucinatory. A nightclub hovering above a riot while helicopters circled overhead.

This was not cocktail jazz. Nobody sipped martinis to this music unless they wanted to spill the damned thing down the front of their silk shirt while confronting the collapse of Western civilization.

Then came In a Silent Way. Quiet and electric at the same time. Floating grooves replaced dense chord changes. Space became part of the composition. With Chick, Herbie Hancock, and Joe Zawinul painting different colors across the music, Miles created something suspended in air between jazz, rock, ambient music, and a nervous breakdown. I played that record endlessly. We all sensed the future crawling toward us through the speakers.

Then came March 1970 at the Fillmore East. Miles with Chick, Wayne Shorter, Dave Holland, and Jack DeJohnette. Right after they recorded Bitches Brew. Triple bill with Steve Miller and Neil Young. Somewhere in America, hippies passed joints the size of traffic flares while this band detonated the room.

I sat about ten rows back. At one point Wayne Shorter walked to the edge of the stage, lifted the soprano to his lips, and held a single note so long the air around it seemed to change temperature. That was the moment I understood something irreversible was happening.

That was Wayne’s last performances with Miles. The music lurched, floated, exploded, then vanished into whispers. No maps. No safety rails. The band sounded as five men trying to outrun the 20th century.

A few weeks later, Bitches Brew hit the streets and the jazz establishment reacted as somebody had set fire to the Vatican. Critics screamed betrayal. Purists cried sacrilege.

From the first note I knew it was a masterpiece.

But Miles already moved on. By June he returned to the Fillmore East for four nights with another transformed band. Chick, Dave Holland, and Jack DeJohnette remained. Airto arrived on percussion. Steve Grossman replaced Wayne on saxophone. And then there was Keith Jarrett on electric keyboards.

Keith on one side of the stage. Chick on the other.

I sat about ten rows back staring at the stage in total disbelief. A few years earlier I had heard Keith’s solo on Forest Flower and nearly drove off the road. Nobody sounded like him. When he soloed, the reaction arrived immediate and primitive. Who the hell is THAT?

The Fillmore concerts became the live album Miles Davis at Fillmore. After Miles finished I walked straight out into the East Village, too stunned to sit through another note from anybody. I wandered the streets for hours trying to process what I had heard.

Soon after, Gary Bartz replaced Steve Grossman and the band played the Isle of Wight Festival before the largest audience jazz had ever seen. Half a million people. A sea of mud, drugs, rain, and human confusion stretching to the horizon while Miles’s band played music from another planet.

Then Chick quit Miles entirely and formed Circle with Dave Holland, Barry Altschul, and Anthony Braxton. Total whiplash. One minute he helped invent fusion in front of arena crowds. The next he made fiercely abstract avant-garde music for audiences who looked as graduate students recovering from nervous collapses.

Circle debuted at the Village Vanguard in November. By then my own chemical research program had accelerated dramatically. Earlier that evening Miles was downtown at the Cafe Au Go Go with a new band featuring bassist Michael Henderson from Stevie Wonder’s group. Henderson changed everything. Thick electric bass lines. Dirty grooves. Jarrett was attacking electric keyboards as a man trying to start a prison riot. Before Miles even played, Richard Pryor came out and delivered a set so ferocious it would have made Lenny Bruce sit silently at the bar reevaluating his profession. Then Miles hit the stage with a wah-wah pedal and the whole room tilted sideways.

After the set we staggered uptown to the Village Vanguard for Circle’s New York debut. What a contrast. Miles had sounded as the future of urban America after midnight. Circle sounded as four intellectual arsonists dismantling music molecule by molecule.

One night. Two bands. Two different futures.

And Chick Corea stood at the center of both storms, some cosmic double agent refusing allegiance to any single form of music for more than fifteen minutes.

Inspired by Miles, the floodgates burst open and the mutants came charging through. Weather Report. The Headhunters. Mahavishnu Orchestra. The Tony Williams Lifetime. Suddenly jazz had split into a thousand radioactive fragments. Bebop still lived. Avant-garde wild men still howled in basement clubs. Fusion arrived carrying amplifiers, distortion pedals, and enough volume to loosen dental work in the back row.

The old order never recovered.

After a few years with Circle, Chick assembled Return to Forever. I caught the original lineup with Joe Farrell on tenor and flute, Stanley Clarke on bass, Flora Purim singing, and Airto detonating percussion instruments as if summoning tropical storms. With Flora and Airto in the band, the Brazilian influence ran deep. The music breathed. It danced. It swung with joy and danger at the same time. Nobody else sounded remotely similar.

Then Chick changed direction again because standing still never interested him. Return to Forever kept evolving. Heavier. More electric. Then more abstract. Then lyrical again. By the late 1970s he was touring in duos with Herbie Hancock, two keyboard sorcerers pushing each other into strange corners of harmony and rhythm while audiences sat there grinning in disbelief.

Chick spent his entire career chasing the next sound over the next hill. He approached music the way prospectors approached mountains during the gold rush, convinced another vein waited underground if he kept digging. I heard most of those bands live and every one felt different. New angles. New risks. New madness.

Then the computer age arrived, and most musicians my age looked at it the way medieval villagers looked at incoming plagues. I saw something else entirely. A doorway. The same instinct that drew Miles toward electric instruments pulled me toward the internet. By 1994 I had jumped headfirst into the digital circus and co-founded Jazz Central Station, one of the first major jazz websites, back when the internet still felt as lawless and wide open as fusion did in 1970.

At the 1995 International Association for Jazz Education convention in Atlanta, we attempted something bordering on science fiction. An online chat with Chick Corea speaking directly to fans around the world through the internet. Today this sounds primitive. Back then it felt as if we were trying to communicate with Mars using kitchen appliances and stolen Pentagon equipment.

The internet was still wet cement. No streaming. No video. Barely any audio. Most people still thought email was suspicious. Yet there we were in a cramped Atlanta hotel room while modem signals screeched through phone lines across the planet.

Then everything went sideways.

Fifteen minutes before Chick was supposed to appear, we learned his flight had only just landed. Hundreds of people logging on from around the globe. And Chick still trapped somewhere between baggage claim and Atlanta traffic.

For one brief terrifying moment I considered the unthinkable. Would I have to impersonate Chick Corea? Could I survive ten minutes pretending to possess the musical intelligence of one of the greatest pianists on Earth?

Salvation arrived in the form of the late Ron Moss, Chick’s manager and former trombonist in one incarnation of Return to Forever. Ron possessed one of those early cell phones the size of a cinder block. The appointed hour arrived. Questions poured in from around the world. Ron relayed each question to Chick over the giant phone. Chick dictated answers somewhere in transit through Atlanta. Ron repeated the answers to me. I typed them into the computer while praying the entire operation would not collapse into smoke and humiliation.

Thirty minutes of organized panic. Then Chick burst into the hotel room and took over in person, slightly out of breath, completely unbothered, as if arriving late to your own worldwide internet debut was the most natural thing in the world.

The session ended. We stood up laughing, shaking our heads. We hugged the way survivors hug after crawling out of a wrecked airplane together.

That was Chick. Warm. Open. Curious. No ego armor. No superstar attitude. He approached technology the same way he approached music. Another frontier. Another experiment. Keep moving forward. See what happens next.

Then, near the beginning of the Covid era, a rare form of cancer took him away far too soon.

The recordings remain. Every phase still alive somewhere. Acoustic Chick. Electric Chick. Avant-garde Chick. Latin Chick. The eternal restless explorer. And every time I hear those records, I remember that hotel room in Atlanta, the giant cell phone, the panic, the laughter, and the feeling that the future had arrived twenty years early.

View Chick Corea and Return to Forever at the 1972 Molde Norway Jazz Festival with Chick on Fender Rhodes, Joe Farrell on soprano sax, Stanley Clarke on bass, Airto Moriera on drums and Bill Tragesser on percussion. Stanley had just turned twenty one and was already a powerhouse And so nice to hear Airto on trap drums instead of his usual array of percussion. They play Chick’s “500 Miles High”.

Listening - Silver ‘n Brass

Released in 1975 as part of his "Silver 'n" series, the album gave Silver's hard bop sensibility an unusual processional weight -- brass arrangements that by rights shouldn't coexist with his funk and gospel undertow, but do, because he kept the groove locked while the horns stacked up around it. Horace’s mid-70s group was one of his best and included Bob Berg on tenor and Tom Harrell on trumpet. The series landed during fusion's moment of maximum critical distraction, and the sale of Blue Note records to a much bigger corporation, which is why it got undervalued. Silver wasn't interested in electronics or crossover. He was going deeper into his own thing, and this is one of the clearest records of what that thing was.

Watch: The Mad Magazine Documentary

Finally caught up with When We Went Mad! On Netflix, looking at Mad’s history and influence on American satire and comedy.

Mad’s parody format, lampooning movies, TV shows, and ad campaigns, gave readers a model for media literacy. You couldn't watch a commercial the same way after Mad had spent a few pages tearing apart its logic and hypocrisy. Alfred E. Neuman's "What, me worry?" became shorthand for a kind of cheerful nihilism about institutions.

Mad mattered because it taught a generation of Americans to distrust authority and media before they had the vocabulary for it. It took aim at advertising, politics, Hollywood, and the wholesome self-image of postwar America at a time when that kind of mockery was rare in mainstream culture.

For jazz and counterculture history specifically, it’s part of the same postwar current of American irreverence that runs through Lenny Bruce, the Beats, and early rock and roll critics, all pushing back against the conformity of the era. Even Sonny Rollins had a subscription.

Next Tuesday: A Face in the Crowd

In 1957, Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg made a film about a charismatic drifter who uses television to seduce a nation, and critics called it unrealistic. Nearly seventy years later, A Face in the Crowd plays less like a period piece than a document someone left behind after watching what was coming.

As we age, the cast of characters changes. We lose our friends, our loved ones, our cultural icons. And eventually, we join them. The closer we get to the end, the pace quickens. Coming from America, where death is feared, living in Mexico has taught me an entirely new perspective. I’m grateful.

The first time I attended a Mexican wake, I didn’t know what to do with the laughter.

It was four years ago, a neighbor of a friend, someone I had never met. I went because Sherrie thought we should, because that’s what people do here. The body was in the front room. Children ran through the house. Someone had brought a guitar. By midnight the stories had grown louder and more specific — this man’s stubbornness, his appetites, the time he drove his truck into a ditch and blamed the road — and I sat there holding a small glass of tequila thinking: in America we would have all gone home by now.

I grew up with the other kind of death. The neutral carpeting. The three days of bereavement leave. The casseroles from neighbors, and then the silence, and then the unspoken expectation that you will compose yourself and return, because grief held past a certain point begins to feel, in American professional culture, like a character flaw. I lost people over the decades and I processed them the way I was taught — quickly, privately, with the urgency of someone who has a schedule to maintain. The country corrected me the way reality always does — slowly and without apology.

Mexico does not process the dead. It keeps them.

When someone dies, people gather in homes. The stories get louder as the night continues. Music enters the room. Children stay present rather than being quarantined from mortality as though exposure might damage them. The dead person becomes socially alive again through recollection — and crucially, the recollection is honest. Their flaws survive. Their humor survives. Their appetites survive. Nobody transforms the deceased into a flawless motivational poster, which is both more truthful and more loving than the sanitized eulogies American funeral culture tends to produce.

The cemeteries here are built into neighborhoods, not exiled to suburban edges the way Americans situate things they find threatening. People speak of deceased relatives with startling immediacy, as though the relationship continued rather than concluded. During Día de los Muertos, entire cities stop pretending that memory is pathology. Grief is not the opposite of love here. It is one of its expressions, and it does not resolve on a schedule convenient for anyone.

Mexico laughs at death constantly. Skeletons dance during festivals. Cartoon skulls grin from every surface. Death appears familiar, a neighbor you have known long enough to stop fearing. When something has been integrated into ordinary life rather than sealed behind institutional walls, it loses its power to terrorize.

I have lost people I loved. I am 76 years old and the list is long now, and some of those losses I carried badly — sealed off, managed, filed. Four years in Guanajuato did not teach me to stop grieving them. It taught me that grief is not a problem requiring a solution. It is the price of love. It is worth paying.

The dead here still have addresses. They still receive visitors. Families clean the graves and bring flowers and tequila and music and eat nearby and tell stories that keep the dead present rather than filing them away.

They get a seat at the table.

After that first wake, I walked home through the callejones at two in the morning, the city quiet around me, and I felt something I hadn’t expected. Not sadness. Not the particular American dread that death tends to trigger. Something closer to relief.

This is the shape of things. You can live inside it.

Listening

In 1973, while record shopping, I discovered Rudolph Johnson's The Second Coming. on a new label, Black Jazz Records, out of LA. The guy behind the counter caught me reading the liner notes and dropped the needle without a word. Half a century later, Rudolph Johnson — a tenor saxophone master who spent years on the road with the Ray Charles Big Band — still stops me cold. One of the key spiritual jazz recordings of the 1970s, the album puts Johnson's Coltrane-influenced tenor at the center of a group that moves fluidly between post-bop, soul jazz, and the transcendent. Pianist Kirk Lightsey anchors it all. Listen and you'll hear why.

Watching

My criterion for memorable film is simple: am I still thinking about it a week later?

A woman fed up with her deadbeat kids boards a Greyhound to Montana and reclaims herself with the help of a Native American community. Clark Johnson directs with a light hand. The film knows exactly what it has: Alfre Woodard. She carries every frame. Her fourth-wall monologues alone deserved an Academy Award nomination. They didn’t get one. Juanita is not a complicated film. It doesn’t need to be. Woodard makes it necessary. It’s on Netflix.

Next Chick Corea

Next week I’m going deep on Chick Corea. I caught him just before Miles, followed him everywhere after that. There’s a reason he never stopped surprising people — the night he shared the Fillmore East stage with Keith Jarrett, two piano giants rewriting the rules in real time, I understood something about what Miles had passed on to him. Surprise wasn’t a trick. It was a discipline.

Sonny Rollins is gone. And with him, something in me closed.

I first met Sonny in 1978, when I interviewed him for a DownBeat cover story. He was already the Saxophone Colossus — I could feel it in the way he filled a room, the way silence gathered around him before he spoke. But what struck me then, and never left me across four decades of friendship, was that he carried his greatness lightly and his pain quietly.

He had survived the heroin epidemic that took so many of his generation. His closely knit West Indian family held him while his own fierce will drove him through cold turkey on Riker’s Island, and a few months at the federal narcotics hospital in Lexington, Kentucky. And from the moment he came back — rejoining Max Roach and Clifford Brown in one of the great small groups in jazz history — he never stopped. His life became one continuous improvisation: a musician pushing every boundary, a seeker chasing something beyond the notes, a spiritual being who found his practice in the act of playing, a survivor who turned damage into art. The celebrated sabbatical on the Williamsburg Bridge was just the most visible pause in a journey that never really stopped moving.

From 2004 to 2018 I produced his website and made lengthy interviews, performance, and documentary footage with him. I sat with him at his house in Woodstock, at the earlier one in Germantown, in his New York apartment, and on the road. We spent countless hours on the telephone. Sonny Rollins was unlike anyone I have known. Ferocious musical individuality. An unrelenting search for truth. And underneath all of it, traces of a young man from Harlem who had seen too much too soon and never fully stopped carrying it.

Contradiction held in one body. He was gentle and volcanic. Generous and immovable. A seeker who could also dig in like bedrock.

The generosity showed up everywhere, most visibly after gigs. It didn’t matter where in the world he was playing, what venue, what hour. If fans were waiting outside in the cold because the doors had closed, Sonny stayed. He signed autographs, talked, made each person feel seen. Not as an obligation. As a calling. His fans loved him with a loyalty that bordered on devotion, and he returned it in kind, one freezing sidewalk at a time.

Then there was the other side. Once, backstage at a Central Park concert, I brought Mark Kaplan — a friend since childhood, a fellow jazz obsessive — to meet him. Mark has a genuinely inexplicable gift: he can play music by striking his head with his fists, modulating the intensity of the blows and adjusting his breathing to produce actual melodies. That night he played the William Tell Overture. I watched Sonny’s face cycle through disbelief, helpless laughter, and something approaching philosophical crisis. I have never forgotten the look on his face.

But Sonny could be mercurial in his own quiet way, and if you found yourself on the wrong side of a Rollins conviction, you knew it.

Working with him on the website, I learned this early. He had no computer, no television, no interest in either. He understood the value of a web presence, but the mechanics of the internet were a foreign country he had no desire to visit. One Saturday morning he called me, upset. A friend had flagged something on the site: I had been rotating appreciations from fellow musicians about Sonny’s influence, and that week it was Joe Lovano. Somehow this had been read not as tribute but as intrusion — another musician on Sonny’s homepage. I explained, carefully, what it meant and why it was there. It was not an easy conversation. Once Sonny formed a view, dislodging it required patience, persistence, and the full knowledge that you might not succeed. He held his positions the way he held a note — for as long as he decided, not a moment less.

We didn’t always see eye to eye. But I never doubted him. He was a real friend and, in a unique twist of fate, also my generous employer. Sonny had the heart of someone who genuinely cared about the music, the people, and getting it right.

Jazz Video Guy began because of people like Sonny. It grew into 3,000 videos, 135,000 subscribers, 50 million views, and 20 years of documented history.

But Sonny’s death put a period at the end of that sentence. Not a question mark. Not a comma. A period.

I am not walking away from the music. Jazz doesn’t work that way, and neither do I. But I am done producing it. Done chasing interviews, building channels, maintaining archives. That chapter is complete.

What pulls me forward is something I have wanted to return to since I sat in Martin Scorsese’s classroom at NYU Film in the late 1960s: the making of visual fiction. Narrative. Story. Imagined lives that tell the truth. Sonny spent sixty years proving that the deepest truths don’t announce themselves — they have to be discovered in the act of making something. I learned that watching him and listening to him practice, backstage before gigs. Now I want to find out what it means in my own work.

The tools have changed. AI has handed me a new camera, and I intend to use it. Not as a shortcut. As an instrument — the way Sonny used everything available to him in service of what he was trying to say.

Jazz Video Guy built something real. Now it’s time to find out what else I can build.

Watch Sonny Rollins solo on “Tenor Madness” live in Japan, 1997.