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.

Miles Davis was born one hundred years ago on May 26. I've been listening to the Prince of Darkness non-stop lately. Some music rewards that kind of attention. His always has.

Miles Davis once said that if he stopped to think about what people wanted from him, he would be dead. He meant it professionally. He may have meant it literally. The history of his career is a series of rooms he walked out of before anyone else understood why, followed by years of argument about whether he had any right to leave.

He was punished every time. The punishment was real, specific, and delivered by people who had championed him. And he was right every time, which the same people eventually admitted, usually around the moment he was already three moves ahead of the admission.

Birth of the Cool, 1949 and 1950. Miles was twenty-three years old and had already played with Charlie Parker, which meant he had already been inside the fastest, most harmonically advanced music in the world. What he heard inside bebop that nobody else was hearing yet was the cost of all that velocity. The music had reached the outer edge of what speed and complexity could accomplish and was beginning to consume itself. What he did next was slow everything down. The nonet sessions he organized with Gil Evans and Gerry Mulligan produced something quiet, spare, and cerebral, arrangements that left space the way bebop never did. The hardcore bebop world considered it a retreat. Too white, too European, too polite. Miles had looked at the most revolutionary music of his generation and decided it needed to breathe. He was told he was going soft. He was twenty-three.

The first great quintet, 1955 to 1959. Coltrane on tenor, Red Garland on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, Philly Joe Jones on drums. The critical establishment loved this band while simultaneously worrying about Miles personally, the heroin years, the volatility, the famous rudeness to audiences. He turned his back to the crowd. He walked off when he was done playing and didn’t return for applause. The punishment here was social: Miles was brilliant but difficult, gifted but ungrateful, the kind of talent that made critics nervous because he refused to perform appreciation for an audience that felt it was owed some. He cleaned up, kicked the habit cold in his father’s house in East St. Louis, came back harder.

Kind of Blue, 1959. The most important jazz album ever recorded arrived as a rebuke to bebop’s harmonic complexity. Instead of chord changes cycling faster than most listeners could follow, Miles built the music on modes, vast open fields that gave the soloists room to find their own path rather than race through a predetermined obstacle course. It sounds, half a century later, inevitable and obvious. At the time it was a provocation. Some players found it too simple, too open, not enough architecture. The bebop purists who had already complained about Birth of the Cool now complained about this from the other direction. Miles had found a way to be criticized for both too much European refinement and too little harmonic sophistication. He released the album and moved on immediately.

The second great quintet, 1964 to 1968. Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Tony Williams, a band so collectively intelligent that they could dismantle a standard and rebuild it in real time, playing what they called time, no changes, floating free of the harmonic structure while still somehow implying it. This was the most sophisticated music Miles ever made, and the punishment for it was a particular kind of critical bafflement. The audiences who wanted Kind of Blue found this quintet opaque. Miles was accused of abandoning melody. He was abandoning certainty, which is a different thing, but the distinction required listening carefully and critics who had already filed their Miles Davis takes were not always inclined to start over.

Bitches Brew, 1970. This is where the punishment became institutional. Miles plugged in. Electric keyboards, electric bass, wah-wah trumpet, rock rhythms layered in ways that produced a sound with no existing genre. Jazz critics who had spent careers defending him felt personally betrayed. Some refused to review the album. Others declared that Miles had sold out, that he was chasing the rock market, that the music was a commercial calculation. It was none of those things. It was Miles hearing something in Sly Stone and Jimi Hendrix and James Brown that jazz hadn’t figured out yet and deciding to be the one who figured it out. The album sold 400,000 copies in its first year, unheard of for anything adjacent to jazz. A new generation found it thrilling. The old guard never fully forgave him.

Then the body quit. By 1975 the hip problems and the sickle cell anemia and the accumulated damage of twenty-five years of relentless forward motion had ground him down. He retreated to his Manhattan brownstone and the trumpet went silent for five years.

What happened in that brownstone resists easy narration. He drew the blinds, took drugs, watched television, and waited for something to change. For a man constitutionally incapable of stillness, five years of enforced silence was its own kind of violence. The jazz world that had spent decades arguing about him found, in his absence, that it simply missed him. And Miles, who had always defined himself by motion, had to discover what remained when motion was taken away. Nothing in his history had prepared him for the answer.

He came back in 1981 to the most complicated reception of his career. His chops were diminished, his embouchure needed rebuilding, and the music world had moved through disco, punk, and new wave in his absence and was now generating something called hip-hop that Miles, characteristically, found more interesting than threatening. He pursued synthesizers, pop textures, electric everything, and covered Prince and Cyndi Lauper in concert. The old guard recoiled exactly on schedule. But the band had genuine fire and the music was doing what Miles’s music had always done, pulling toward something that didn’t have a name yet. The dismissals this time had a defensive quality, the sound of people who had learned nothing from the previous five times and knew it.

Miles Davis recorded nine studio albums in his last decade. He painted. He collaborated with hip-hop producers. He did not look back, which in his case was not nostalgia avoidance but something more like a physical inability to face that direction. He died in 1991.

By then Bitches Brew was canonical. Kind of Blue was canonical. The second great quintet was being studied in conservatories. Birth of the Cool had been recognized as the seed of an entire movement. Each act of punishment had been quietly commuted, each verdict reversed, each exodus from a room he’d been told he had no business leaving vindicated by the subsequent history of the music.

He was not gracious about any of it. He was not built for gracious. He was built for whatever was coming next, and the critics who wanted him to stay in one place were, in his view, not really listening to the music at all. They were listening to what the music used to be, which is a different instrument entirely, and one Miles Davis never learned to play.

Watch Miles play Time After Time from the North Sea Jazz Festival 1985, with John Scofield on guitar, Bob Berg on saxes, Robert Irving on keyhboards, Darryl Jones on bass, Vince Wilburn Jr. on drums, and Steve Thornton on percussion.

John Cassavetes believed that truth in art came from spontaneity. Charles Mingus believed it came from a composer's fully realized vision. In 1959 they tried to make a film together, and the argument between those two positions produced one of the most important American movies ever made.

Shadows and the Sound of Refusal

There is a line near the end of Shadows that functions less as a credit and more as a declaration of war. “The film you have just seen was an improvisation.” Whether literally true in every frame or not is almost beside the point. As a statement, it was aimed directly at Hollywood’s throat.

The year was 1959. American cinema was a machine. Scripts moved through development processes designed to sand away anything too strange, too uncomfortable, too alive. Actors hit marks on spotlessly lit sets. Dialogue was engineered to sound natural while being anything but. The emotional truth that human beings actually carry around in their bodies — the hesitation, the interruption, the sentence that trails off because the feeling outran the words — none of that had much place in American movies.

John Cassavetes looked at all of it and decided something was missing at the center. And when he looked for a model of how art might recover that missing thing, he looked, as so many restless American minds of that era did, toward jazz.

Jazz had already solved the problem Cassavetes was trying to solve in cinema. It had found a way to hold structure and spontaneity in the same breath. A jazz musician working through a standard was not simply playing a song. He was thinking in real time, responding to what his bandmates had just played, discovering the music rather than executing it. The emotion was not pre-planned and then delivered. It was generated in the moment of performance. That was exactly what Cassavetes wanted from his actors.

The Night People

The film began, improbably, with a radio show. Cassavetes had been conducting workshops for aspiring actors at the off-Broadway Variety Arts Theatre in Manhattan, working with Burt Lane against the grain of Method acting’s ascendance in New York. One exercise became the core of what would become Shadows: a light-skinned Black woman dating a white man, who recoils when he encounters her Black brother. Cassavetes knew he had to put it on film.

In February 1957, he appeared on Jean Shepherd’s Night People show on WOR, ostensibly to promote Edge of the City. Instead he went off-script, criticizing the studio system and spinning out a vision of what real cinema could be. When Shepherd, skeptical, asked how something like that could possibly get financed, Cassavetes replied without hesitation: if people really wanted to see a movie about people, they should just contribute the money themselves.

It was a provocation. It was also a direct appeal. Listeners started mailing money to the station. Within days, roughly $2,000 had come in — most of it in amounts of five dollars or less. A dollar at a time, from the city’s night people: the insomniacs, the bohemians, the taxi drivers and jazz fans and restless minds who made up Shepherd’s audience, people who already understood themselves to be living outside the mainstream culture that Hollywood was busy reflecting back at itself.

What Shepherd did next mattered as much as the initial broadcast. For the next two years, he kept his listeners updated on the making of Shadows, describing it on air as “their film.” He had built a genuine ownership relationship between the project and an audience that had never been asked to own anything before. When the film was finally finished, Shepherd announced the screenings on his show. Three free midnight showings, no admission.

The $2,000 from the radio audience was seed money, not a budget. Additional funds came from Cassavetes’s contacts — Joshua Logan, Hedda Hopper, William Wyler, Robert Rossen, José Quintero, his agent Charlie Feldman. The rest of the roughly $40,000 budget was borrowed. Cassavetes hired German cinematographer Erich Kollmar, the only crew member besides Cassavetes with any film experience, and borrowed camera equipment from independent filmmaker Shirley Clarke.

The Composer

Which is why, when he needed someone to score Shadows, the person he turned to was Charles Mingus.

The choice made sense on every level. Cassavetes was filming guerrilla style on the streets, tenements, and dive bars of mid-century New York, and Mingus at that precise moment was producing some of the most ambitious and emotionally raw music in jazz — compositions that moved between tenderness and fury, between written structure and collective improvisation, between the blues tradition and the outer edges of the avant-garde. His was music that felt lived rather than performed. It seemed like a perfect marriage.

What actually happened in the recording studio was something considerably more chaotic, and considerably more revealing about what both men actually believed.

Cassavetes wanted completely improvised music played spontaneously while the musicians viewed the film for the first time. Mingus arrived having composed specific pieces, without having had access to the finished film. Two artists who shared a deep commitment to emotional authenticity had reached completely opposite conclusions about how authenticity was achieved. Cassavetes believed it came from the immediate, the unplanned, the reactive. Mingus believed it came from a composer’s vision, fully realized and then performed with discipline and feeling. The session produced nothing usable. Studio costs mounted. Both men stared at wreckage.

What came next deserves more than the phrase that has been used to describe it — “an exercise in disaster salvation” — because what emerged from that wreckage was genuinely remarkable. Starting over, with Cassavetes calling for improvised percussion pieces and bass solos that could be cut behind the action, Mingus and his band — tenor saxophonist Booker Ervin, drummer Danny Richmond, pianist Horace Parlan — produced recordings that became the score. The jagged, disjointed quality that resulted from the chaos ended up fitting the film perfectly. Mingus valued the music enough to carry two pieces into his own catalogue: “Nostalgia in Times Square” appeared on Jazz Portraits, and “Self Portrait in Three Colors” became part of the landmark Mingus Ah Um. The collision produced art that neither man had intended and both could claim.

But to understand why this collaboration mattered beyond its formal innovations, you have to reckon with what Shadows was actually about.

This was not merely a formally experimental film. It was a film about race — about three mixed-race siblings navigating identity, desire, and confusion in New York City. Its most explosive scene involves Lelia, who appears white to most people, watching her white boyfriend visibly recoil when he encounters her Black family. In 1959 America, that material carried a social charge that went well beyond drama. It named something the culture was working very hard not to name.

Mingus had spent his entire career fighting racism within the music industry while making some of the most politically charged jazz of his era. He understood, from the inside, what it meant to move through America in a body that made certain people uncomfortable. The film needed someone who knew that specific weight. The contentious collaboration — two uncompromising artists refusing to subordinate their vision to anyone else’s convenience — almost deepens the meaning. They made something together that neither could have made alone, and the friction is audible in every frame.

The City as Instrument

Cassavetes shot on location using handheld cameras and available light. The city breathes into every frame. Cars pass. Noise interrupts scenes. People talk the way people actually talk, sentences colliding, feelings outrunning language. The parallel to jazz was not merely metaphorical. It was structural. A jazz soloist discovers a phrase the way a Cassavetes actor discovers a reaction — in the moment, under pressure, in response to what is actually happening rather than what was planned.

The impact moved slowly through the culture the way important things often do. But the proof of concept Shadows established — that a feature film could be made outside the studio system, in actual streets, with actors discovering rather than executing their scenes — restructured what American independent cinema believed was possible. You can draw a direct line from this film to Scorsese’s restless camera, to the wandering naturalism of Jarmusch, to the long unscripted conversations that define Linklater. What Cassavetes demonstrated here, they inherited.

And running underneath all of it, in more ways than one, was the sound of Charles Mingus, doing exactly what he always did: refusing to simplify, refusing to collaborate on anyone else’s terms, and producing, in spite of everything, music that was unmistakably and irrevocably alive.

Watch 1959’s Shadows:

A lifelong insomniac traces his sleeplessness back to adolescent nights spent listening to Long John Nebel’s midnight radio program on WOR, a show devoted to UFOs, the occult, and certified maniacs that rewired his relationship with nighttime permanently. Decades later, past seventy and living in Mexico, the problem has shifted from falling asleep to staying there, with four AM arriving reliably to deliver a full tribunal of regrets, bad decisions, and betrayals rendered in high definition. The same darkness that once felt thrilling now runs a criminal investigation against itself, and the only comfort is that Long John Nebel, broadcasting lunacy into the night from a New York radio station, somehow made more sense than anything the wellness industry has managed since.

I have been at war with sleep since adolescence.

Normal teenage boys were sleeping. Growing. Developing character. Preparing for the future.

I was lying in bed at two in the morning listening to a man named Long John Nebel interview UFO cultists, hypnotists, vampires, psychic surgeons, anti-communist paranoids, ex-priests, failed mystics, and people who looked at clouds and saw messages from Saturn.

This was not considered healthy behavior in suburban America during the Eisenhower years. Then again, neither was jazz, interracial dating, or reading books without pictures.

The Long John Nebel Show came out of WOR in New York and ran from midnight until six in the morning, five nights a week. Midnight to six. The graveyard shift. Radio for insomniacs, taxi drivers, amateur schizophrenics, lonely alcoholics, and teenagers already drifting toward the outer darkness.

Nebel himself looked like a man who had witnessed at least three government cover-ups and possibly caused one. Calm voice. Dry wit. Professional skepticism wrapped around a carnival barker’s instinct for madness.

The timing of the show was perfect. Television had just mugged radio in a dark alley and stolen its lunch money. Entire stations across America were panicking. Executives wandered hallways in sweat-soaked suits asking each other if anybody still listened to radio.

So WOR handed Nebel the worst time slot imaginable and essentially said: “Fine. Put the lunatics on after midnight and let them discuss flying saucers until the transmitter explodes.”

Instead, the thing became a phenomenon.

Every night Nebel assembled an all-star team of certified maniacs. UFO abductees sat beside theologians. Mad scientists debated spiritual healers. One guest claimed Atlantis had relocated to New Jersey. Another insisted the government was hiding giant skeletons somewhere beneath Arizona.

Nobody laughed them out of the studio.

That was the genius of the show.

Nebel understood something America has since forgotten. People are starving for mystery. Starving for weirdness. Starving for any conversation not engineered by corporate lawyers and pharmaceutical sponsors.

Sometimes Nebel moderated the insanity. Other nights he simply stepped out around three in the morning and let the guests argue among themselves while the nation slept uneasily beneath electric blankets and Cold War dread.

By fifteen, I was ruined.

I had become nocturnal. Falling asleep in algebra class. Drifting through high school in a fog, a junior-league beat poet with hormonal problems and a radio addiction. Teachers thought I lacked discipline. In truth I had simply discovered the American subconscious too early.

The damage compounded slowly, the way bad habits do. Through my twenties I kept musician’s hours without being a musician, which is a particularly pointless form of self-sabotage. In my thirties the insomnia calcified into something structural, a nightly negotiation between exhaustion and a brain that refused to stand down. By my forties I had accumulated enough sleep debt to bankrupt a small country.

Over the years I tried every sleep remedy known to desperate civilization. Meditation. Breathing exercises. Herbal teas brewed by smiling frauds in health food stores. Prescription pills with side effects that sounded curses read aloud from a medical textbook nobody wanted to finish.

Some worked briefly. Most did not.

Now I am over seventy, which means insomnia changes shape. In youth the problem is falling asleep. In old age the problem is staying there. The body turns traitor around four in the morning and throws you back into consciousness, a bouncer ejecting a drunk from a casino.

Four AM.

A cursed hour.

The hour when every mistake you ever made returns wearing brass knuckles.

During the day I am functional enough. Rational. Civilized. I can still convince myself my life made a certain amount of sense.

At four in the morning all of that collapses.

The brain becomes a prosecutor with unlimited evidence and no interest in the defense.

Suddenly I am replaying every catastrophe with the obsessive patience of a man who has watched the same accident footage a thousand times hoping the outcome will change. Every wrong turn. Every idiot decision. Every person I trusted despite overwhelming evidence they were operating on entirely different principles than the ones they advertised.

Why did I go left instead of right? Why did I stay in situations long after the walls started burning? Why did I doubt myself when my instincts were screaming? Why did I spend years trying to win approval from people whose souls resembled damp cardboard?

The mind loves these questions at four in the morning because there are no distractions. No sunlight. No traffic. No social performance.

Just you and the tribunal.

And the worst part is the bizarre certainty insomnia produces. At four AM every bad memory feels mathematically conclusive. Every humiliation becomes eternal. You start mentally auditing your entire existence, a drunken accountant trapped in purgatory.

Friends who betrayed you reappear in high definition. Conversations from thirty years ago suddenly return with improved dialogue. Tiny embarrassments swell into Greek tragedies.

Meanwhile the body lies there exhausted while the brain conducts a criminal investigation against itself.

This is the dirty secret about aging nobody explains honestly. The body weakens, yes. But memory grows claws.

You become haunted less by death than by reruns.

Some nights I walk around the house in darkness, an aging private investigator searching for evidence that my life contained hidden coherence. Maybe I missed something. Maybe there was a pattern. Maybe all the disasters connected elegantly somehow.

Usually the answer is no.

Usually the answer is: “You were a human being making decisions while confused.”

Which should be comforting.

Instead it feels like discovering the pilot of your airplane learned navigation from astrology charts and bourbon.

So there I sit at four-thirty in the morning listening to distant dogs bark across Mexico while my nervous system reenacts the entire twentieth century.

And somewhere in the back of my mind I still hear Long John Nebel introducing another midnight guest claiming telepathic contact with Venus.

Honestly, he made more sense than most modern wellness experts.

Before I moved to Mexico, I thought I understood time. It took leaving America entirely to discover I had been living inside a machine I could no longer see. This is the kind of insight that sounds profound until you realize it took me sixty-plus years to figure out something every person sitting in a Mexican plaza already knew.

Americans and Mexicans live inside fundamentally different clocks.

The American clock is aggressive. Extractive. Neurotic. Every hour feels monetized before it even begins. Time exists to be managed, optimized, leveraged, saved, and converted into measurable output. The language itself reveals the sickness. “Productivity.” “Efficiency.” “Falling behind.” “Wasting time.” These are not neutral words. They are the vocabulary of a culture that treats time as an enemy combatant.

By the time I left America, I had internalized this machinery so deeply I no longer recognized it as abnormal. My nervous system lived in a permanent low-grade state of acceleration. Even moments of supposed leisure carried the underlying anxiety that I should be doing something else. Reading became productivity. Walking became exercise optimization. Friendship became networking. Rest became recovery strategy. Nothing simply existed anymore. I was, in the clinical language I would have used at the time, crushing it.

Then I came to Mexico.

At first the difference felt frustrating. Things moved slower. Conversations stretched. Meals lasted forever. People stopped in the middle of sidewalks to talk. Appointments operated with a flexibility that would have triggered cardiac arrest in my old life. I once waited forty-five minutes for a repair person who arrived cheerful, unhurried, and completely unbothered by the concept of 10 a.m. The American brain interprets all of this as inefficiency. My American brain was losing its mind.

Then something strange happens.

Your pulse changes. Not immediately. Slowly. Almost invisibly. You begin noticing entire categories of human experience that speed had erased from your life.

People here linger. That sounds trivial until you realize how rarely Americans linger anywhere anymore. In the United States, everybody moves with the haunted urgency of people trying to escape invisible explosions. Coffee is consumed while walking. Meals happen in cars. I once watched a man eat a burrito in an elevator, eyes closed, jaw working steadily, with the focused expression of someone completing a quarterly objective.

Mexico still permits unstructured human time. People sit in plazas for hours doing nothing measurable. Families gather without agenda. Old men argue about football with the gravity of medieval theologians debating salvation. Street musicians play songs no algorithm selected for engagement metrics. Nobody appears concerned about optimizing the afternoon. It’s destabilizing, frankly, if you arrive from a place where even your leisure time has KPIs.

The first few months, I checked my watch constantly, a detoxing addict reaching for a phantom cigarette. For the first three months I checked it with the frequency of a man defusing a bomb. Nothing was happening that required a watch. I checked it anyway. Then one evening in Guanajuato I noticed something startling.

I had stopped caring what time it was.

Not completely. Civilization still requires clocks. But the psychological relationship had shifted. Time had stopped feeling like a predator hunting me through the day. Mexico had quietly reintroduced me to duration.

I felt this most strongly at night. American nights increasingly resemble extensions of daytime productivity. Screens glow endlessly. Work bleeds into personal life. Achievement haunts the bedroom.

Mexican nights still belong partially to the streets.

People walk. Talk. Eat. Laugh. Gather. Music drifts through neighborhoods from open windows and distant cantinas. Public squares fill with families. Couples sit together on benches older than the United States itself. Children chase each other beneath church towers while old women gossip nearby. Nobody appears in a hurry to conclude the evening efficiently. The evening is not a deliverable.

Sitting in a plaza one night, watching all of this, something painful became visible. I realized how much of my previous life had disappeared without being experienced. Not stolen. Not taken. Simply passed through at a speed that made perception impossible. A reformed clock-watcher, now writing about clocks in a plaza, deeply aware of the irony.

America’s relationship with time produces a strange emotional amnesia. Days become interchangeable units of labor and distraction. Years vanish in administrative blur. People wake up at sixty wondering where everything went. I know this because I was one of them, and because sixty came and went while I was answering emails.

Mexico slowed the film down enough for me to notice existence again.

Morning light hitting stone buildings. The sound of distant church bells echoing through the hills. Street vendors setting up before sunrise. Conversations unfolding without urgency. The texture of afternoons. The physical feeling of weather. Silence returning between thoughts.

None of these things are dramatic individually. Together they reconstruct attention. And attention, it turns out, is what a life is actually made of.

A culture moving too quickly eventually loses the ability to perceive itself clearly. Everything becomes reaction. Reflex. Consumption. People stop inhabiting time and begin merely surviving it. I think Americans sense what they have lost, even if they struggle to name it. You see it in the exhaustion. The anxiety. The wellness industries worth billions of dollars attempting to repair nervous systems damaged by the very culture producing them. There is probably an app for what I found by moving to Mexico. It would cost $12.99 a month and include breathing exercises.

People do not need another productivity app. They need time to become human again.

Mexico reminded me that life is not a problem to solve efficiently. It is something to inhabit slowly enough that you can feel it passing through your hands while it is still here.

I walk slower now. I notice more. I no longer panic during silence.

And some evenings, sitting in a plaza while church bells roll across the hills and families drift through the streets beneath the fading light, I experience something that had become strangely rare in my old life.

Time stops feeling scarce.

And starts feeling alive.

Some people find God. Others find something more useful. This is the account of a man born into one ancient tradition who walked away from its theology but kept its hunger, and what he found when he stopped looking for permission to look.

I was born into the tribe. Not by choice. By blood, noise, argument, appetite, history that sticks to your bones and inherited neurosis. A Jew by culture, by the kind of memory that hums under your skin whether you want it or not. But religion never got a clean shot at me. No rabbi carved commandments into my spine. No synagogue wired my nervous system.

The old sky accountant could wait.

Belief bored me.

I wanted a path. Not commandments thundered from a mountain, but a road I could walk until my feet hurt. Something you test in the gut, not recite in a room of folded chairs and polite nods. No surrender of intelligence at the door.

Then a book slipped a knife between the ribs. Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha arrived as contraband and detonated quietly.

No angels. No thunder. Just recognition. The rare hit of truth you already carry but never named. Hesse pulled a stunt. His man meets the Buddha, nods with respect, then walks away. No discipleship. No secondhand salvation. No spiritual hitchhiking on someone else’s enlightenment.

That was the signal. Direct experience or nothing. No doctrine as substitute for seeing. No institution as substitute for practice. No scripture as substitute for consciousness.

Years later I drifted into the orbit of Nichiren Buddhism, dragged there by jazz. Of course jazz. The only honest religion left for people who refuse dead systems. Herbie Hancock. Wayne Shorter. People who had traveled through genius, discipline, improvisation, and inner weather, and found something in Nichiren’s teachings worth carrying.

I understood why the moment I was in the room.

New York, 1978. Backstage before a VSOP concert at Avery Fischer Hall. My friend Walter Bishop Jr. gets me in. Herbie, Wayne, Freddie Hubbard, Ron Carter, Tony Williams. Five musicians who between them had already reinvented jazz twice over, standing in a corridor that smelled like instrument cases and adrenaline, about twenty minutes from walking out in front of several thousand people. Wayne looks at me without ceremony and says, come chant. We go into his dressing room.

He moves through the Lotus Sutra as a man who has lived inside it for years. Not performing devotion. Inhabited by it. I stumble alongside him, a drunk learning a new alphabet. But something in the rhythm catches. Breath and repetition doing what argument never could. The same mechanism jazz uses. Listen. Respond. Stay awake. No passengers.

The room held all of that at once. Sacred and sweaty and completely alive.

Nichiren practice hands you one clean fact. Enlightenment is not a retirement plan. It is not waiting in the clouds with better lighting. It is here, in the mess. Bills. Bodies. Time. You earn clarity in traffic, not in heaven.

Eventually the chanting stopped. No drama. No exit wound. You walk long enough, you shed skins. Institutions build walls. Insight burns them down. I kept what worked. Dropped what didn’t.

No organization. No hierarchy. No committee guarding the gates.

Many mornings I sit in my garden in Guanajuato. High altitude. Sharp light. Birds arguing territory as minor dictators. Leaves minding their own business.

I start with breath. Pranayama. You slow it down and the mind stops acting like a busted radio. Static drops. The mud settles.

Then I sit.

No visions. No fireworks. No guru projections. Just sound. Wind. Light moving across stone. The whole world shows up and nothing needs to be fixed.

This is where the split happens. Religion wants belief. Buddhism wants proof. The Buddha made the boldest offer in the history of human thought. Don’t believe me. Test it.

That changes everything.

Watch the mind. See what creates suffering. See what reduces it. Repeat. Your life becomes the lab. Results depend on honesty.

The Four Noble Truths never felt bleak. They felt precise. There is friction. You add to it with craving and resistance. You can stop adding. There is a method.

Non-attachment gets butchered all the time. People think it means going numb. Wrong. It means you love without trying to own the thing you love. You hold life without squeezing it to death. You drop the panic.

Then you hit the real question. Consciousness. What if awareness is not a side effect. What if it is central. What if attention shapes you more than any system or belief.

Because many religions sell escape. Buddhism offers transformation.

I hold the short game and the long arc. Cause and effect. Karma as continuity. Every thought lays track. Every action builds structure. You become what you rehearse.

And impermanence. The blade. Everything moves. Everything goes. Sounds brutal until you need it. Then it saves you. Pain leaves the same way joy does. Gone.

After all these years, I don’t carry beliefs. I carry tools. Breath. Attention. Silence.

So I sit in a garden in Guanajuato, somewhere between inhale and exhale, watching the whole operation come online again. Not as theory. As fact. The mind, before the world gets its hands on it.

No sky god required.

A man leaves a country and thinks he is escaping something. He arrives somewhere older and finds out he was only escaping himself. What follows is a report from the other side of that discovery, filed from a city that has been outlasting empires since before the United States existed as an idea.

Mexico has a public relations problem in the United States. The country exists in the American imagination as a rotating slideshow of cartel shootouts, spring break blackouts, gated resorts, tequila marketing, and frightened cable-news graphics designed by men who look like undercooked shrimp. Ask the average American what Mexico feels like and you get answers assembled from airport televisions and movies where every scene south of the border is filtered yellow, as if the entire nation exists inside a nicotine-stained hallucination.

Then you arrive in Guanajuato and the whole cheap cardboard mythology catches fire.

I know because it happened to me.

I have lived in the capital city of Guanajuato for nearly four years now with my partner Sherrie and our cats Mango and Melon, and the first thing this place does to your brain is destroy your appetite for simple explanations. Mexico is too old, too layered, too contradictory, too alive for the lazy summaries Americans love to slap onto foreign countries between bites of drive-thru chicken.

Guanajuato state alone contains enough cultural density to occupy several nations.

This is the birthplace of the Mexican War of Independence. The fuse was lit here. Miguel Hidalgo stood in Dolores Hidalgo in 1810, rang the church bell, and kicked open the door to a revolution that reshaped an entire continent. Americans talk about 1776 with endless cinematic reverence. Here, the revolutionary story still breathes in the streets instead of hiding behind gift shops and historical reenactors sweating through polyester uniforms.

Then there is the silver.

For centuries the mines of Guanajuato pumped unimaginable wealth into the Spanish Empire. Mountains were hollowed out to feed European ambition. Entire cities rose from the ore buried beneath these hills. The capital itself looks less like a planned city than a fever dream suffered by a baroque architect trapped inside a canyon with access to dynamite and religious obsession.

The city crawls vertically. Houses climb hillsides in impossible colors. Alleyways twist through stone. Roads disappear underground into tunnels carved directly through the mountain. At night the whole place glows as if someone spilled a jewelry box down the side of a ravine.

And unlike many historic cities preserved in amber for tourism, Guanajuato still behaves like a real place. Students stumble through plazas at 2 a.m. Old women carry groceries up staircases steep enough to qualify as religious tests. Street musicians drift through the callejones singing songs that bounce off the stone walls hard enough to rearrange your emotional chemistry.

The university matters here. Art matters here. Language matters here. Every October the Festival Internacional Cervantino floods the city with theater, dance, experimental music, symphonies, puppets, political performance art, jazz, avant-garde chaos, and enough intellectual intensity to make parts of the United States look spiritually embalmed.

You sit in a plaza drinking wine while a string quartet performs beside a church built before the United States existed. Then you walk ten minutes and hear college kids blasting banda music beside a taco stand at one in the morning while somebody’s uncle argues about football Mexicano loud enough to wake the dead.

That is Guanajuato. Nothing cancels anything else out. The contradictions stack on top of each other until they become the identity.

The religious life here carries the same complexity. American coverage of Catholic Mexico tends to flatten faith into either exotic spectacle or political talking point. Living here changes the scale of it. Holy Week in Guanajuato is not content production for tourists with expensive cameras. Entire families move through the rituals with emotional seriousness. Pilgrims walk long distances into the city. Churches fill with music, silence, grief, incense, exhaustion, devotion, boredom, gossip, children, old men, teenagers checking phones, candles, flowers, and actual human life instead of curated spirituality packaged for social media.

Then you leave the capital and the state mutates again.

León feels industrial and muscular. Leather factories, shoe manufacturing, warehouse corridors, business hotels, traffic. An economic engine disguised as a city. It produces a staggering percentage of the footwear for Latin America while still holding onto neighborhood markets and old plazas where people sit for hours talking with no visible concern for productivity metrics.

Then there is San Miguel de Allende, the city Americans love to turn into a metaphor for themselves.

San Miguel has been colonized by American self-mythology so thoroughly that certain blocks feel less like a Mexican city than a therapy retreat with better architecture. Pink church spires rise above cobblestone streets while retirees from Oregon discuss property values over artisanal cocktails priced high enough to qualify as financial crimes in nearby towns. The colonial Disneyland reading is not unfair.

But the place still has genuine gravity underneath the boutique hotels and wellness branding, and the reason is not the aesthetics. Artists keep arriving because something in the city still resists full domestication. Writers, painters, musicians, filmmakers, exhausted professionals trying to remember whether they once had souls. The architecture hits you in the chest. Light behaves differently there. And no amount of green juice tourism has fully extinguished what the city was before Americans decided it was the perfect backdrop for their reinvention narratives.

Drive north and the terrain opens into ranch country where charro culture still exists as lived inheritance rather than nostalgic performance. Men ride horses because horses remain useful. Families gather around charreadas with the casual familiarity Americans reserve for Little League games. The culture survives because people continue practicing it, not because tourism boards printed brochures.

The music changes with the geography. Mariachi. Huapango. Banda. Ranchera. Brass bands in plazas. Funeral processions with live musicians. Teenagers carrying tubas through side streets. Old men singing heartbreak songs in bars where the walls smell like beer, dust, and thirty years of accumulated loneliness.

Music here does not wait politely inside concert halls. It leaks into ordinary life.

And everywhere you encounter the collision between old Mexico and industrial Mexico. Colonial churches beside cellphone stores. Seventeenth-century plazas beside factories manufacturing auto parts for the global economy. Desert pueblos sitting a few hours from luxury wine tastings and rooftop jazz clubs.

Americans often speak about Mexico as though it were unfinished. Living here reveals the opposite. The country feels ancient in the deepest sense. Not old-fashioned. Not backward. Accumulated. Layer upon layer without erasing what came before.

The United States often demolishes its past every few decades and replaces it with parking lots, chain stores, and newer parking lots. Mexico leaves the previous centuries standing beside the current one. Sometimes literally. You walk past a colonial church, a taco stand, a university protest, a funeral march, a German car factory, and a mariachi band within the same afternoon.

You stop talking about “the real Mexico” because the phrase itself becomes absurd. Which Mexico? The intellectual Mexico? The industrial Mexico? The indigenous Mexico? The Catholic Mexico? The artistic Mexico? The ranch Mexico? The urban Mexico? The luxury tourism Mexico? The mining Mexico? The student Mexico? The exhausted working-class Mexico? The deeply traditional Mexico? The experimental contemporary Mexico?

They all exist simultaneously, often on the same block.

I am not Mexican. I will not pretend otherwise. I remain an outsider learning the language, learning the rhythms, learning when to shut up and observe. But living here long enough strips away the fantasy version Americans inherit through media repetition.

Mexico is not the cartoon.

It is stranger than the cartoon. Older than the cartoon. Funnier, harsher, warmer, more chaotic, more sophisticated, more communal, more exhausting, more emotionally alive. And if that makes you reach for your cable news graphics and your yellow filter, the problem is not Mexico.

The problem is you.

“Body and Soul” is one of the most recorded songs in jazz history. It is a love song, written in 1930, built on longing and loss. For decades, jazz musicians used it as a showcase — a chance to prove how deep they could dig into a beautiful melody.

When Coleman Hawkins recorded it in 1939, everything changed. Hawkins essentially invented modern jazz tenor saxophone playing in those three minutes. He barely touched the melody at all, improvising so freely and so intelligently over the song’s structure that listeners had to lean in and follow where he was going. It was a revelation. He proved that a saxophone could think.

John Coltrane inherited that tradition. Then he went somewhere Hawkins never imagined.

Coleman Hawkins: Mastery

Hawkins sounds like a man completely in command. His 1939 recording is warm, sophisticated, almost architectural in the way he builds his lines. You feel the romance of the song even as he transforms it. There is confidence in every note. He is saying: I know exactly where I am, and I know exactly where I am going.

John Coltrane, 1960: The Craftsman

By 1960, Coltrane was one of the most celebrated musicians in jazz. His album Giant Steps had already announced him as someone operating on a different level — someone who had developed his own harmonic language, a way of moving through chords in great rushing cycles that came to be called “Coltrane changes.”

His 1960 studio recording of Body and Soul, released on the album Coltrane’s Sound, is a masterpiece of control and intention. The arrangement had been carefully worked out. It opens with a slow, swaying piano introduction that settles the room. Then Coltrane enters with the melody, ornamented with fills and phrases that he had practiced and refined to the point where they were part of the arrangement itself — not improvised in the moment, but shaped with the same care a composer gives to a score.

The mood is dignified. Elegant. Deeply respectful of the song’s beauty and its long history. McCoy Tyner plays a piano solo in the middle, and the piece closes with a composed ending that has an almost hymn-like quality.

What you hear is a young master making a personal statement out of someone else’s song. He is saying: this is mine now. And he means it as an act of love toward the tradition.

John Coltrane, 1962: The Search Begins

By 1962, something had shifted. A live recording from Birdland in New York captures Coltrane at a moment of transition. The playing is sparser. More patient. He leaves silences where another musician might rush to fill them. When notes arrive, they arrive with tremendous weight — as if each one has been considered and chosen rather than reflexively played.

The emotional center has changed too. The 1960 version feels like a musician honoring a song. The 1963 version feels like a man talking to himself in public, working something out. Less romance. More reckoning.

John Coltrane, 1965: The Explorer

The final recording we have of Coltrane playing Body and Soul comes from a concert in Seattle on September 30, 1965. It runs over twenty-one minutes. When you first hear it, you might wonder if this is even the same song.

Almost everything that made the 1960 version feel settled and structured has been loosened or dissolved. The opening vamp sounds nothing like the arranged introduction from five years earlier. The beat, while still present underneath, is no longer something you can easily tap your foot to. Solos stretch out for what feels like a very long time, not because anyone is showing off, but because each musician seems to be genuinely searching — following a thread deep into the music to see where it leads.

Coltrane’s saxophone playing has moved into territory that jazz had rarely entered before. He uses techniques that push the instrument beyond conventional sound — notes that split into chords, textures that are more like breath and pressure than melody. He is not decorating the song. He is excavating it.

And yet the song is still there. The key is the same. The underlying structure of the bridge — that section where the harmony lifts and turns — still follows the path Coltrane had mapped out in 1960. The piece ends with almost exactly the same composed coda as the studio recording, like a man who has wandered far from home and returns to touch the doorframe before walking back in.

McCoy Tyner, who had been Coltrane’s pianist through this entire journey, sounds in the Seattle recording like someone trying to hold a kite string in a high wind. His playing is grounded and harmonically rich — more conventional than Coltrane’s, almost as if he is reminding both himself and the audience where the music came from. Within months of this concert, Tyner would leave the band. The music had gone further than he could follow.

What Changed, and What Didn’t

Between 1960 and 1965, Coltrane moved from craftsman to explorer, from master of a tradition to someone actively dismantling it in search of something deeper. The Body and Soul that Coleman Hawkins played as a declaration of sophistication became, in Coltrane’s hands, something closer to a prayer — or a question.

What is remarkable is not only how much changed, but how much survived. The song never disappeared. It kept reappearing, like the shore glimpsed from further and further out to sea.

Hawkins proved that a saxophone could think. Coltrane proved it could seek.

Listening Guide

Coleman Hawkins, Body and Soul, 1939

John Coltrane, Body and Soul, 1960

John Coltrane, Body and Soul, 1962

The entire Live in Seattle performance, 1965

Coppola went into the Philippine jungle in the mid-1970s carrying enormous ambition, studio money, technical resources, and a cassette tape of Bitches Brew he could not stop playing.

That detail matters more than most film historians have allowed.

Most people understand Apocalypse Now as a Vietnam film. Others read it as psychological descent, Conrad transplanted to Southeast Asia, or cinematic derangement on an industrial scale. All of those readings are true. But underneath the helicopters, napalm, and nervous breakdowns, the film is doing something else entirely.

It is a jazz improvisation on celluloid. Specifically, it is a film structurally shaped by the late electric period of Miles Davis. Once you hear that, the entire architecture shifts.

Released in 1970, Bitches Brew abandoned conventional song forms for something more volatile: sprawling collective improvisation built around mood, repetition, texture, and gradual mutation. The music does not move linearly. Themes emerge, dissolve, reappear, collide, and reassemble. Time stretches. Momentum accumulates hypnotically. Musicians circle ideas instead of resolving them.

Listen to “Pharaoh’s Dance.” The opening riff surfaces, vanishes, resurfaces altered. Rhythm sections overlap without locking. Soloists drift in and out of the center. The piece accumulates psychic pressure through repetition rather than narrative arc, and nearly twelve minutes pass before anything resembling resolution appears, and even then it is provisional, unstable, temporary.

Now watch the river sequences in Apocalypse Now.

The patrol boat’s journey toward Kurtz is not structured as traditional Hollywood plot driven by escalating cause and effect. It functions as extended modal exploration. Each stop becomes its own improvisational movement: the helicopter attack, the Playboy bunnies, the bridge at Do Lung, the tiger in the jungle, the French plantation, the final approach to Kurtz. These sequences do not always advance the plot in any conventional sense. They deepen the vibration. Each one expands the psychic atmosphere while destabilizing normal reality further. The further upriver the boat travels, the less conventional time behaves. Logic dissolves. Military structure collapses into surrealism. Civilization loses coherence measure by measure.

This is jazz logic. Specifically the logic of electric Miles Davis, where repetition and improvisation create altered states through accumulation rather than dramatic escalation.

The production itself already resembled free jazz performed with explosives. Typhoons destroyed sets. Martin Sheen had a heart attack on location. Brando arrived overweight and apparently without having read Conrad. The script rewrote itself daily. The schedule collapsed. The budget detonated. Crew members drifted into psychological exhaustion that began to look not so much like burnout as theater.

“My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam,” Coppola told his wife during production. It sounds insane until you watch Hearts of Darkness and realize he was probably underselling it.

And through all of it, the cassette kept playing.

This was not background mood music. This was structural influence. Coppola was using Bitches Brew the way Miles Davis used controlled chaos in the studio: deliberately assembling volatile elements and then refusing to over-manage the collisions.

Consider what editor Walter Murch actually built. Large portions of the film are constructed through associative sound flow rather than rigid visual continuity. Helicopter blades morph into the ceiling fan above Willard’s bed in Saigon. The Doors bleed into jungle ambience. Gunfire and music and river sounds braid together into a single hallucinatory pulse that refuses to let the ear settle.

Murch’s sound design is itself a jazz performance. He is not illustrating the images. He is improvising alongside them, creating a third thing that neither image nor sound produces alone. The film’s famous opening achieves its disorientation not through editing tricks but through layered acoustic texture, the sound of a mind coming apart at its seams rendered as pure rhythm and atmosphere.

Miles Davis and Teo Macero worked identically on Bitches Brew, splicing and layering tape to construct moods that no single performance captured. The method was the same. The intention was the same.

Then Brando arrives.

His performance barely resembles conventional screen acting. He enters the film the way a rogue improviser enters a session late, after the other musicians have already established a groove, and changes the harmonic center instantly. Everyone else has to reorient. The internal logic of the film shifts on its axis.

Consider what Brando was actually doing on set. He had arrived in the Philippines overweight, apparently without reading Conrad, carrying note cards with passages from T.S. Eliot and James Frazer’s The Golden Bough that he may or may not have intended to use. He moved through Coppola’s jungle compound in darkness, refusing conventional lighting, requesting to be shot in shadow and silhouette. He improvised speeches. He wandered. He muttered. He picked up a cat and held it. He shaved his head and became something that no longer fit inside a screenplay.

Coppola did not try to stop any of this. He filmed it all.

This is precisely what Miles Davis did with certain musicians in the electric period. When Keith Jarrett joined the band in 1970, Davis did not hand him charts or direct him toward a predetermined role. He told Jarrett to play electric organ, an instrument Jarrett reportedly despised, and then left him to find his own position inside the collective turbulence. The discomfort was the point. Productive instability was the compositional strategy.

Brando’s discomfort produced the same result.

His dialogue in the Kurtz compound sequences feels exploratory, fragmented, circling back on itself the way a soloist circles a modal center without ever fully resolving. He delivers lines about snails on a razor’s edge. He reads Eliot. He talks about his son. He describes the horror of watching children with inoculated arms hacked off, and the voice never rises, never performs conventional dramatic emotion, stays low and uninflected and all the more devastating for it.

The sequence where Willard sits in the darkness watching Kurtz materialize out of shadow operates entirely on rhythm and texture rather than dramatic exposition. Brando surfaces and submerges. Light catches a cheekbone, an eye, a massive shoulder. The scene has no conventional dramatic arc. It accumulates pressure through repetition and proximity the way “Pharaoh’s Dance” accumulates pressure through overlapping keyboards and percussion that never quite resolve into a single coherent pulse.

You are not watching a villain explained. You are watching a theme stated, submerged, and restated in a different register.

Jazz logic.

Kurtz is not the destination. He is the resolution the piece has been refusing to deliver for three hours, arriving finally in the wrong key, at the wrong tempo, in a form no one could have written down in advance.

The Do Lung bridge sequence demonstrates this most nakedly. No commanding officer. No clear objective. Explosions everywhere. Soldiers operating inside pure chaos illuminated by flares and collective insanity. The scene unfolds the way “Spanish Key” unfolds: rhythm and texture replacing exposition, dread accumulating without traditional release, the listener suspended inside an experience that refuses to resolve.

You are not understanding the war intellectually anymore. You are inside its psychological rhythm.

What Coppola ultimately discovered, intentionally or accidentally, was that Vietnam itself resisted classical narrative order. The war had already shattered America’s belief in coherent moral storytelling. There were no clean arcs. No stable ideological structure. No heroic symmetry left.

Only the river. Only the music. Only the next phrase emerging from the dark, unresolved, inevitable.

Listen to “Spanish Key” from Bitches Brew

Chaos at the Do Lung Bridge

Listen to “Pharoah’s Dance” from Bitches Brew:

Willard and the PBR arrive at Kurtz’s outpost/camp

Brando’s Horror Speech

Sixty years of films have been sitting in the dark like loaded weapons, waiting for me to crawl back through the wreckage and face them again. I used to think movies stayed frozen in time, preserved like insects in amber, but that’s a lie people tell themselves when they’re young and stupid and still under the impression their opinions matter more than their scars.

The films did not change. I did. The years piled up. Bodies disappeared. Illusions burned off like cheap whiskey fumes at sunrise. And now when I return to these old pictures, they hit differently. Scenes I once ignored suddenly feel radioactive. Small gestures crack open like land mines. Entire meanings emerge from corners I never even noticed before.

Great art plays the long game. It waits. Patiently. Like an old hustler at the end of the bar watching you destroy yourself for decades before finally leaning over to tell you what the joke was all along.

You come back older, heavier, carrying your private cemetery of failures and half-finished dreams, and the work finally opens itself to you. Not because the art matured. Because you did. Or because life beat you hard enough to understand what the artists were trying to say before you were qualified to hear it.

Orpheus (1950) earns masterpiece status the hard way. No nostalgia. No academic embalming fluid. No museum-glass reverence. The thing still breathes. Still stalks around the room at three in the morning looking for cigarettes and doomed young poets.

Jean Cocteau took the ancient Orpheus myth and dragged it straight into postwar Paris, into a city full of cracked mirrors, existential smoke, ruined buildings, motorcycle engines, and starving artists trying to outtalk death long enough to survive another night. Radio transmissions arrive like coded messages from the underworld. Poetry moves through black markets like heroin. Death rides a motorcycle entourage with the calm authority of organized crime.

And somehow, against all odds, Cocteau never betrays the myth itself. That is the miracle. Most people who “modernize” mythology end up flattening it into graduate-school sludge. Cocteau understood the story from the inside because he had spent his entire life romancing death like a dangerous lover he knew would eventually bankrupt him.

Every frame looks invented under chemical pressure. Mirrors become liquid portals. Human bodies move backward through time. The land between life and death resembles a bombed-out legal district abandoned after the apocalypse. These are not “special effects” in the Hollywood sense. They are metaphors made flesh. Dream logic photographed directly onto film stock before the accountants arrived to sterilize cinema forever.

The secret weapon is Death herself, played by María Casares with enough erotic gravity to collapse nearby planets. She is not a symbol. Not a lecture. Not some bloodless philosophical device for French intellectuals to scribble essays about between cigarettes. She is ambitious, jealous, wounded, hungry, capable of tenderness, and fatally attracted to the people she destroys. That gives the tragedy real torque. You feel the machinery grinding the characters apart.

Behind the entire picture lurks the ghost of Raymond Radiguet, Cocteau’s lost prodigy, dead young and permanently embalmed in memory. The film aches with grief. You feel Cocteau trying to negotiate with the dead through art itself, trying to bargain his way across the border for one more conversation. That autobiographical wound is what separates the film from formalist trickery. Without the pain, the movie becomes clever. With the pain, it becomes immortal.

The film stands in the middle of Cocteau’s strange holy trinity alongside The Blood of a Poet and Testament of Orpheus. Seeing all three together deepens the experience, but Orpheus survives perfectly well on its own, which is the final proof you are dealing with the genuine article and not some fashionable relic dragged out for film-school autopsies.

View “Orpehus” and for english, click on closed captions and set to English.

Touch of Evil (1957) kicks the door open with one of the great acts of cinematic arrogance. Three-plus minutes of unbroken movement. A crane shot gliding above a filthy border town while a car packed with explosives crawls through the night like a doomed animal. The bomb ticks away somewhere under the audience’s nervous system. Welles is not showing off. He is declaring war. The message arrives immediately: in this world, corruption is not hidden in alleyways or back rooms. It hangs in the air like industrial smoke. Everybody breathes it.

From there, Orson Welles and cinematographer Russell Metty shove noir straight into fever-dream territory. The camera tilts sideways like a drunk trying to stand upright during the end of civilization. Faces crowd the frame so tightly you feel trapped inside other people’s bad decisions. Shadows swallow entire rooms whole. Every visual choice argues the same ugly truth: the environment itself is diseased. The camera is not observing corruption. The camera is infected by it.

At the center waddles Hank Quinlan, one of the great bloated ghosts in American movies, played by Welles like a police chief who ate his own soul twenty years earlier and has been digesting it ever since. Quinlan solved too many crimes through lies, intimidation, planted evidence, and rotten instinct until the line between justice and personal mythology dissolved completely. The terrifying part is that he is often right. He sniffs out guilt with animal accuracy. But he arrives there through methods so poisoned that morality itself collapses around him. Hollywood almost never permits this level of ambiguity inside genre filmmaking. Most crime films hand you heroes and villains with bright labels attached. Quinlan arrives as a human catastrophe.

Then there is Marlene Dietrich, drifting through the wreckage as Tanya, exhausted, amused, and somehow wiser than everyone else in the picture combined. She delivers Quinlan’s final epitaph with the efficiency of a guillotine blade. One sentence. Entire lifetimes buried inside it. The whole movie operates this way. Nothing wasted. Maximum despair compressed into tiny spaces.

The production history feels almost too perfect, like Hollywood accidentally produced its own autopsy report. Welles took the assignment as hired labor. The studio panicked. Executives hacked the film apart in the editing room with the confidence of men who mistake accounting for intelligence. Welles fired back with his legendary memo, page after page begging them to restore the picture’s rhythm and logic. They ignored him, because studios traditionally fear artists the way livestock fears wolves.

For decades the mutilated version staggered around theaters while the real film existed like contraband folklore among obsessives and insomniacs. Then in 1998 the reconstruction finally surfaced, and suddenly the full nightmare snapped into focus. The masterpiece had been there all along under layers of studio vandalism.

That is what makes Touch of Evil feel immortal. Welles took compromised conditions, hostile executives, cheap genre material, and industrial sabotage, then somehow bent the entire rotten apparatus into art dense enough to survive the century.

View the nearly four minute continuous opening shot from Touch of Evil:

Dr. Strangelove (1964) begins with one savage realization from Stanley Kubrick: the nuclear age was too insane for solemn speeches and respectable drama. You could not explain mutually assured destruction with dignity because the entire premise already sounded like a psychotic break in a Pentagon conference room. The only honest response was comedy so black it leaves fingerprints on your throat.

Everything in the film grows out of that ugly little truth.

Kubrick structures the movie like a precision-engineered panic attack. Three storylines running simultaneously. The airbase spiraling into fascist paranoia. The bomber crew lumbering toward apocalypse with cheerful professionalism. The War Room packed with bureaucrats and military dinosaurs calmly discussing planetary annihilation like accountants arguing over parking validation. The editing moves with machine-like exactness. Every cut tightens both the suspense and the absurdity until they become the same sensation.

And looming over all of it sits Ken Adam’s War Room, one of the greatest sets ever built for a motion picture, a cathedral erected for the worship of extinction. The giant circular table. The overhead lighting turning generals into undertakers. The cavernous blackness surrounding the men supposedly managing civilization. Every inch of the room tells you humanity handed ultimate power to people emotionally unqualified to supervise a grocery store.

Then there is Peter Sellers performing three separate nervous breakdowns disguised as characters. Not a gimmick. A diagnosis.

Group Captain Mandrake represents baffled human decency trapped inside systems built by lunatics. President Muffley is liberal rationalism rendered completely impotent, a man politely negotiating the end of the species over the telephone like a middle manager apologizing for a shipping delay. And then comes Dr. Strangelove himself, grinning in from the edge of the abyss like some escaped Nazi ghoul feeding on thermonuclear theory and amphetamines.

The hand. God almighty, the hand.

That involuntary Nazi salute remains one of the great comic inventions in cinema because it exposes something hideous and true. Ideologies outlive the people carrying them. They twitch. They mutate. They seize control of the body when the conscious mind pretends civilization has moved on. Strangelove wrestling with his own arm looks funny until you realize Kubrick is talking about the twentieth century itself.

The film never pauses to explain its deeper argument because Kubrick trusted audiences back when filmmakers still believed viewers possessed functioning nervous systems. The message hums underneath everything: the systems humans invent to prevent catastrophe eventually manufacture catastrophe as a side effect. Deterrence logic, followed to its final destination, produces Dr. Strangelove sitting in a wheelchair screaming about mine shafts and survival ratios while the planet burns.

And then Kubrick delivers the ending.

Slim Pickens riding the nuclear bomb downward like a rodeo cowboy drunk on patriotism and destiny, hollering into the apocalypse while Vera Lynn sings “We’ll Meet Again” over blooming mushroom clouds swallowing the Earth whole.

It is hysterically funny. It is genuinely horrifying. The miracle is that Kubrick forces both reactions to exist simultaneously without weakening either one. Most directors spend careers trying to balance two tones in a single scene. Kubrick balanced annihilation and slapstick at the exact same moment and somehow made the collision feel like documentary footage from the human condition itself.

View the ending of Dr. Strangelove:

The Met Gala returned Monday night like a jeweled funeral procession for the American century, and there waddling up the marble staircase came Jeff Bezos, swollen with protein powder, compound interest, and the unmistakable glow of a man who has not heard the word “no” since the Bush administration. He looked less like a human being than a refrigerated pharmaceutical executive carved from warm candle wax. The tuxedo strained against him heroically. The neck had expanded another three inches since last season. Somewhere in America, a warehouse employee got written up for taking an eleven-minute bathroom break so this neck could continue evolving toward its final form.

The cameras erupted.

Photographers screamed his name with the desperate energy of medieval peasants witnessing a king distribute bread during a famine. Flashbulbs detonated across the staircase while Bezos grinned the grin of a man who knows every camera pointed at him was manufactured, shipped, warehoused, marketed, monetized, and algorithmically delivered inside a system he owns pieces of.

Lauren Sanchez floated beside him wrapped in enough fabric, diamonds, and strategic engineering to finance a regional hospital. Together they resembled a luxury escape pod launched from the dying atmosphere of late capitalism. They did not walk the carpet so much as audit it.

And the beautiful thing, the truly deranged thing, is that everybody played along.

Actors. Influencers. Fashion reporters. Men in tuxedos shaped like chess pieces. Women balanced on heels engineered by sadists. All orbiting the staircase while Manhattan flooded itself in champagne and moral surrender. The Met Gala has stopped pretending to be a charity event. It is Versailles with Wi-Fi. A yearly census of people who believe collapse is something that happens to other countries.

But Bezos is only one horseman.

The others haunt the perimeter like radioactive weather systems.

Elon Musk skipped the event, possibly because even he understands there are limits to how much psychic damage one republic can absorb in a single news cycle. Still, his presence lingered over the evening like the smell of burning circuitry. Musk exists now as a permanent hallucination projected directly into the bloodstream of the culture. Every hour brings another transmission from the command bunker. One minute he is reposting conspiracy theories from accounts named things like UltraPatriotWolf69. The next he is threatening governments, insulting advertisers, launching rockets, firing engineers, fathering children, or announcing plans to colonize Mars while his car company slowly transforms into a case study for what happens when the CEO becomes more volatile than the stock.

This is no longer business.

This is performance art funded by federal contracts.

Musk has transcended billionaire status and entered the realm of unregulated mythological creature. The man sleeps three hours a night, communicates primarily through memes, and governs public discourse from a social media platform that now resembles a bus terminal bathroom during a regional blackout. But never mistake the chaos for stupidity. Chaos is leverage. If the public spends every waking hour reacting to Elon Musk, then Elon Musk controls the rhythm of public attention, and attention is the only currency left with any real exchange value.

Then there is Mark Zuckerberg, who remains perhaps the most terrifying because he learned long ago that charisma is inefficient. Zuckerberg has spent twenty years transforming himself into the physical embodiment of a terms-of-service agreement. Blank expression. Dead calm. No readable emotional signature. Somewhere deep behind those eyes sits a machine counting human impulses like poker chips.

Three billion people volunteer their private lives into his system daily. Divorces. Birthdays. Political radicalization. Nervous breakdowns. Adulteries. Birthday cakes. Race riots. Cat photos. Revolutionary movements. Everything goes in. Nothing leaves without being converted into behavioral data.

The old robber barons stole oil, railroads, steel.

Zuckerberg figured out how to mine loneliness.

And while the public argues about social media addiction like nervous parents discovering cigarettes, Zuckerberg quietly purchases Hawaiian land and constructs a compound large enough to survive societal decomposition. He is not planning for the future. He is planning for the aftermath.

Which brings us to Peter Thiel, the vampire intellectual lurking behind the curtain with a glass of red wine and a constitutional crisis folded neatly into his jacket pocket.

At least Thiel has the decency to say what he believes out loud.

He looked at democracy and concluded it was inefficient. Most billionaires believe this privately. Thiel published essays about it. He funds candidates, surveillance companies, legal networks, and ideological infrastructure with the detached calm of a man assembling furniture. Palantir alone sounds less like a corporation than the central computer system from a fascist science-fiction film banned in Scandinavia.

Thiel does not want to dominate the existing system. He wants a replacement system. A cleaner one. Smaller. More obedient. A world managed by technical elites and protected enclaves while the public fights culture wars in the digital ruins.

And these men, despite the tabloid narratives, are not enemies.

They are different departments of the same empire.

Bezos controls logistics. Musk controls spectacle. Zuckerberg controls attention. Thiel controls ideology. Put them together and you have the full operating system for a civilization entering its late imperial hallucination phase.

The terrifying part is not secrecy.

The terrifying part is disclosure.

They keep telling everyone exactly what they are doing. They give interviews. They write essays. They fund projects openly. They buy newspapers, satellites, platforms, politicians, data streams, and survival bunkers in broad daylight while the public responds by asking whether the tuxedo looked flattering under the lights.

At one point actress Sarah Paulson described her outfit as “the one percent,” which may have been the most honest sentence spoken all evening. She wore a blindfold with the ensemble, a gesture balancing somewhere between satire and confession. The crowd applauded. Cameras flashed. Champagne flowed. Then the limousines carried everyone back into Manhattan while outside the velvet perimeter ordinary people continued performing economic acrobatics to afford groceries and rent in cities increasingly owned by investment firms and men with orbital ambitions.

History notices these things eventually.

Empires always believe they invented permanence right before discovering gravity still works.

And somewhere in Hawaii, Zuckerberg is reportedly building walls thick enough to survive whatever comes next, because unlike the others, he appears to understand that history is not a ladder. It is a trapdoor.

The billionaires keep climbing the staircase anyway.

Maybe they believe money changes the ending.

Maybe nobody around them has the courage to explain otherwise.

Or maybe the Met Gala is exactly what empires look like in the final act. Diamonds flashing under chandeliers while the foundation quietly catches fire beneath the floorboards.

There is a moment in many Eric Dolphy recordings when the music seems to leave the room entirely — when a phrase curls upward beyond any conventional scale, when a bass clarinet growl descends into something almost feral, or when a flute line scatters like startled birds. And then, impossibly, it all coheres. The music comes home. That is the Dolphy experience: the sensation of the ground dropping away, and then solid earth beneath your feet again.

In a career tragically cut short at thirty-six, Eric Dolphy produced one of the most singular bodies of work in jazz history. He was a composer, an improviser, and a triple instrumentalist of extraordinary range. He expanded what each of his instruments could say, collaborated with the greatest minds of his era, and left behind a sound so distinctive that even today — sixty years after his death — no one has quite replicated it. What he sought was nothing less than a new language, one that had room for every bird call, every ache, every human voice that had ever tried to say something that words couldn’t hold.

Eric Allan Dolphy was born in Los Angeles on June 20, 1928, into a family that encouraged music from the start. While other young players learned to make their horns sing in accepted ways, Dolphy was drawn to the extreme registers, to the timbres that sounded strange or unsettled, to the pitches that fell between the cracks of the piano keyboard.

He studied music formally in Los Angeles and later served in the Army, playing in military bands where his technical gifts were obvious even if his aesthetic restlessness was out of place. After his discharge, he worked the club scene in L.A. before heading to New York in the late 1950s, where the avant-garde was fermenting and the city was hungry for players willing to push.

What set Dolphy apart from the beginning was his absolute command of three distinct instruments:

Alto Saxophone — His most expressively raw voice, jagged and searching, capable of extraordinary speed and searing emotional intensity. His phrasing was angular and unpredictable: he would leap across intervals that other players wouldn’t dream of, land on tones that seemed wrong and then feel inevitable.

Bass Clarinet — Almost single-handedly brought this instrument into jazz as a solo voice, plumbing depths that felt ancient and new at once. The instrument had been a novelty at best; Dolphy made it into a protagonist, using its woody darkness to evoke something pre-rational — myth, or grief, or the sound of deep water.

Flute — Introduced microtones and breath effects rarely heard in jazz, creating a floating, atmospheric quality unlike any contemporary. Musicians who heard him for the first time often described the sensation of hearing something genuinely new, as though a previously unknown species had announced itself.

His harmonic concept drew on a wide range of influences. He absorbed bebop thoroughly, studied 20th-century European classical music, was fascinated by birdsong as a compositional source, and listened deeply to non-Western music. The result was a style sometimes described as belonging to the “New Thing,” or free jazz, but which was really something more personal and more disciplined than that label suggests. Dolphy was never randomly free. Every deviation from the expected had a purpose.

The Meeting with Coltrane

In the world of early-1960s jazz, there was no more consequential partnership than the one between Eric Dolphy and John Coltrane. The two men were different in temperament — Coltrane was slow-burning, meditative, monumental; Dolphy was more mercurial, darkly playful, prone to sudden flights — but they recognized something essential in each other almost immediately.

The relationship that mattered crystallized in 1961, when Coltrane invited Dolphy to join his working group. This was not a casual addition. Coltrane was pushing away from his hard bop mastery toward something more expansive and spiritually charged. He needed a musical interlocutor of the highest order — someone who could follow him anywhere, and who had enough of their own to push back. Dolphy was that person.

The collaboration produced an immediate and highly publicized controversy. A Down Beat magazine review called their live performances at Shelly’s Manne Hole in LA as “anti-jazz.” Coltrane and Dolphy responded publicly and calmly, explaining their intentions and methods. It was a remarkable moment: two musicians at the frontier of the art form, taking the time to articulate exactly what they were doing and why.

What the recordings from this period reveal is an extraordinary musical dialogue. On the Live at the Village Vanguard sessions of 1961, their interplay has the quality of a conversation between two people finishing each other’s sentences and then taking those sentences somewhere neither had anticipated. Dolphy extended the vocabulary of the group in ways that made the music bigger without making it louder.

The friendship was genuine. Coltrane spoke of Dolphy with consistent reverence, describing him as one of the most complete musicians he had ever known. For his part, Dolphy credited the collaboration with pushing him to think more deeply about how freedom could be achieved not by abandoning form but by bending it past its previous limits. They were each other’s most demanding audience.

Respected Across Every Boundary

What is striking, looking back at the testimonies of musicians who knew or played with Dolphy, is how consistently the same qualities are mentioned: his total lack of ego about music, his generosity as a collaborator, his insatiable curiosity, and his humanity. He was not a difficult man. He was warm, gentle, and deeply serious about music in a way that made others feel that their own seriousness was validated.

Charles Mingus — not famous for his patience with mediocrity — kept Dolphy in his group for an extended period and wrote music that seemed designed to showcase him. He recognized in Dolphy something that transcended technical skill: a willingness to be fully present in the music, to mean every sound, to never coast.

Ornette Coleman, whose own harmolodic system was in many ways the theoretical cousin of what Dolphy pursued, admired him deeply. Both men insisted that emotion and personal expression were more fundamental than harmonic convention, and both paid the price in critical incomprehension before the world caught up. They recognized in each other a shared commitment to sincerity — the sense that the music must always be telling the truth, even if the truth is uncomfortable or strange.

Younger musicians revered him for different reasons. He was unfailingly kind to players learning their craft, willing to talk about music for hours. Bobby Hutcherson — the vibraphonist who appears on Out to Lunch! and was in his early twenties at the time — described the recording sessions as feeling like a master class as much as a record date. Dolphy created an environment in which every musician felt both challenged and completely free.

Out to Lunch!, recorded in February 1964, stands as Dolphy’s definitive statement as a composer and bandleader — and quietly, one of the most influential albums in jazz history. Its asymmetric rhythms, wide-interval melodic writing, use of silence and space, and refusal of conventional resolution all became part of the DNA of creative music in the decades that followed. Musicians who have never heard of Dolphy are playing ideas he first articulated here.

He died in Berlin on June 29, 1964, of complications arising from diabetes that had gone undiagnosed. He had been playing concerts in Europe, was scheduled to stay and work with European musicians, and was by all accounts in excellent spirits. He was thirty-six years old.

The musician who perhaps felt the loss most acutely was Coltrane, who had been planning further collaborations and who would go on, before his own death in 1967, to push in directions that Dolphy’s presence might have shaped differently. Whether Coltrane’s increasingly ecstatic and formally open music would have been modulated by Dolphy’s more linear intelligence is one of jazz history’s great unanswerable questions.

What is answerable — what the recordings make irrefutably clear — is that Dolphy was one of those artists who genuinely extended what was possible. Not by discarding the tradition but by listening to it so deeply that he found the doors within it that no one had noticed. The intervals between the familiar notes. The sounds that language almost has words for. The music, as he said himself, that disappears into the air.

It disappears, but it has never really gone. Every musician who plays with total honesty, who follows a musical idea past the point where it feels safe, who insists that expression is more important than approval — every one of them is playing in a tradition that Eric Dolphy helped to make. The voice between the notes is still speaking.

November 24, 1961, Baden-Baden, West Germany for German television, with John Coltrane, here’s Eric Dolphy’s solo on “Impressions.

I don’t watch television series. I watch films on my big screen and clips on my computers, and every video platform has accumulated content on every imaginable subject. As a devoted fan of film noir, I’m naturally drawn to clips featuring fascinating criminals, which is how I’ve spent considerable time with the Godfather, the Sopranos, Goodfellas and most recently, Raymond “Red” Reddington from The Blacklist, the NBC crime drama that ran for ten seasons with James Spader in the lead role.

The show’s afterlife in short-form video is staggering. Somewhere between 25,000 and 100,000 individual Reddington clips have accumulated across platforms over the last decade, generating hundreds of millions of views between them — a testament to how completely Spader’s performance transcended the original broadcast and took on a second life of its own. The clip legacy Reddington has accumulated is, as far as I can tell, without precedent in television history.

Raymond Reddington did not arrive on television so much as stroll into the room, pour himself a drink, compliment the drapes, and order three men executed before dessert.

That is the trick of him. Charm fused to menace so cleanly you stop trying to separate the parts. Most shows hand you villains with a tragic backstory or heroes with a dirty streak. Child’s play. Red is something nastier and more honest. A man who enjoys beauty, music, tailored suits, ripe fruit, and selective homicide with equal sincerity. No split personality. No hidden compartment. The darkness moved in years ago and now pays half the rent.

He smiles like a diplomat and kills like an accountant.

What made the beast sing was language. When cornered, he did not bark threats or pound tables like some steroid deputy from network hell. He told stories. Long, winding, absurd tales involving Armenian smugglers, Belgian pastry chefs, widows in Odessa, counterfeit orchids, mangoes in Cartagena, and one-legged jewel thieves with gout. You’d think the man was rambling. Then suddenly the anecdote lands like a brick through stained glass and everyone realizes too late they’ve been mugged philosophically.

That was Red’s finest weapon. Not the gun. Not the money. Not the Rolodex of monsters. Narrative control.

He could turn a hostage scene into a dinner party and a death sentence into a parable.

Then there was the strategy. Ordinary criminals react. Red arranged weather patterns. Other people believed they had leverage because he wanted them to feel tall for thirty seconds. He walked into traps with the confidence of a man who designed the trap, hired the guards, and chose the wallpaper. He used vulnerability the way cobras use stillness.

Even fear worked for him on commission. Often he did not need to threaten anyone. His reputation entered the room first and sat down in the best chair. Violence, in lesser hands, is expensive. Red understood economy. A whisper saved bullets.

But pure cruelty gets old. Every thug with a pulse can snarl. What elevated him was code. Twisted, private, inconsistent, but real. He had lines. He had loyalties. He loved with the same intensity he destroyed. His bond with Liz Keen gave the machine a pulse. The show never fully solved the contradiction, which was wise, because mystery breathes where explanation suffocates.

And then there was James Spader.

Without Spader, you do not have Red. You have a pitch meeting.

Spader was born in Boston in 1960, raised by teachers, dropped out of Phillips Academy at seventeen, then wandered New York doing the sort of jobs that make actors interesting later. He bussed tables, shoveled manure, taught yoga, drove a meat truck. Good preparation for Hollywood.

He built an early career playing seductive abnormalities, men who looked polished but carried weather systems inside them. Then came Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape in 1989, where Spader weaponized stillness and won Best Actor at Cannes. He specialized in intelligence with rot underneath. Few did it better.

And Reddington nearly went elsewhere. Other names circled first. Respectable names. Predictable names. Then Spader got the call three days before filming. Three days. Enough time to buy socks and ruin ten years of competition.

He understood immediately what others missed. Red was not a gangster. Not a spy. Not a villain. He was rhythm.

Spader played him musically. The pauses mattered as much as the words. He knew when to purr, when to whisper, when to let a sentence drop like a body from a tenth-floor window. He could make the word “Elizabeth” sound like affection, warning, grief, and strategy in the same breath.

He obsessed over scripts too. Read everything. Questioned everything. Produced from inside the performance. Every line stress-tested. Every scene tuned. That level of scrutiny shows. Red’s dialogue felt spoken by a man thinking three moves ahead because the actor was doing exactly that.

Even Robert California on The Office now looks like a rehearsal dinner for Reddington. Same calm dread. Same weird authority. Same sensation that everyone in the room should check for exits.

Spader once said contradiction was the key. Ruthless yet vulnerable. Brutal yet attentive to beauty. That is the pulse of Red. Not hero versus villain. Not good versus evil. Something harder. A whole person made of incompatible truths.

Those are rare on television. Most characters are slogans in expensive shoes.

Reddington was alive.

That is why people watched for ten seasons. Not for the cases. Not for the conspiracies stacked like cheap furniture. They watched to see what this elegant monster would say next, who he would save, who he would bury, and whether a man built from paradox might reveal one final secret before the lights went out.

Best Monologue Ever — Raymond Reddington (S1E9) — widely considered the clip that launched the phenomenon. An early, defining demonstration of how Red uses storytelling as a weapon.

Raymond Reddington’s Most Badass Moments — NBC’s official compilation, including the courtroom scene where he represents himself and the “Do You Know Who I Am” sequence back to back.

Congratulations, America. We finally built the future and it hates the sound of our voices.

Some pale laboratory monks with clipboards and government grants have emerged from the data caves to announce that the average American used to speak 16,632 words a day in 2005, but by 2019 had whittled the number down to 11,900. A 28 percent collapse in verbal output. Nearly one-third of the national mouth economy vaporized.

This is what victory looks like.

For centuries we were burdened by conversation. Neighbors. Clerks. Relatives. Bartenders with opinions. Children asking why the moon follows the car. Then Silicon Valley arrived in fleece vests and dead eyes, promising liberation. Tap here. Swipe there. Press a heart icon instead of forming a sentence. Now we glide through public life like heavily medicated ghosts.

Need food? Summon it silently.
Need groceries? Scan your own beans like a prison trustee.
Need romance? Exchange six messages, two gifs, and disappear forever.

The spoken word has been reduced to customer service emergencies and podcasts no one finishes.

Walk through any city. Observe the species in its natural habitat. Heads bent at forty-five degrees. Thumbs flickering like lizards in heat. Earbuds jammed deep into the skull to prevent accidental human contact. Entire train cars full of people avoiding one another with the grim discipline of Cold War spies.

And still they call this connectivity.

The scholars say mothers using phones speak fewer words to babies. Of course they do. Why waste time teaching language to an infant when the infant has not yet learned to like and subscribe? Soon toddlers will skip nouns entirely and communicate through brand partnerships.

Experts suggest parents narrate daily tasks to children.

“I am placing the avocado in the cart.”
“I am comparing oat milks.”
“I am dying inside.”

This is where we are.

Conversation, they tell us, is cognitively demanding. You must listen, think, respond, regulate facial expressions, and avoid screaming, all in fractions of a second. A brutal athletic event for the modern nervous system. No wonder people prefer sending a flame emoji and going dark for three weeks.

Some professor urges calm and says more research is needed before mourning the death of language. Fine. Let the academics measure the corpse while the rest of us step over it.

Then comes the proposed cure, delivered with the optimism of a man who has never ridden public transit: if each of us spoke to one more person every day, we could reverse the trend.

One more person.

A single additional human interaction every 24 hours. This is the mountain before us.

Somewhere in the distance, civilization coughs.

If you enjoyed this post, tap the little thumbs-up symbol. If you hated it, send a crying face. If you feel moved to discuss it aloud, seek immediate help.

George Young, a virtuoso saxophonist, passed away from cancer on April 23, 2026. He was eighty-eight. When I first started writing for DownBeat in 1977, George was my first assignment. Although he was better known to musicians in New York because of his extensive studio work, anyone who heard him play realized they were in the presence of a master.

As a teenage jazz fan in 1963, I used to spend a fair amount of time in record stores (remember those?) browsing new releases. One day I came across a record with a rather startling cover: “The Greatest Saxophone in the World, Presenting the Unbelievable George Young, A New Star on Columbia Records.”

I read the liner notes and checked out the personnel. George Young on tenor, alto, and flute. Clark Terry and Doc Severinsen on trumpets. Jimmy Cleveland on trombone. Hank Jones on piano. Milt Hinton on bass. Osie Johnson on drums. Manny Albam arranging and conducting. Hard to go wrong with those cats. I was already familiar with Manny Albam too, an influential jazz arranger, composer, saxophonist, and bandleader, known less as a front-line star and more as one of the finest architects behind the scenes in modern jazz.

So I bought it.

From the first track, it was obvious that George could play. Even then, though, I knew that hoisting him onto the pedestal of greatness was a record company ploy. There never was, and will never be, the greatest saxophonist in the world.

After that I lost track of him, though by all accounts he stayed busy as a studio player. Like all the great ones, he could read and execute complicated charts at a moment’s notice, which kept him perpetually in demand.

Eventually I moved to New York to attend NYU Film School. When I wasn’t driving a cab at night, I spent my time at jazz clubs, finally hearing in person the incredible music I had only known from records.

In 1976, the pianist Walter Bishop, Jr. played a gig at a party I attended. I knew about Bish from his work with Charlie Parker, and the two of us became fast friends. The following June, he invited me to his first recording session in some time, for Muse Records. The date featured Bish with some of the best studio players in New York. That’s where I first met Randy Brecker who I knew from Blood, Sweat and Tears. And right there, on soprano and alto sax, was George Young.

I was a bit awestruck to be in the studio that afternoon, my first time present at an actual recording. I didn’t speak to Randy or George that day, but I was deeply impressed by how they worked, no rehearsal, just reading the charts and nailing the music in one or two takes. And the icing on the cake, Bish asked me to do the liner notes, the first of many such assignments I would have.

An interview I did with Bish became my first appearance in print in DownBeat. The editors liked my writing and started giving me assignments. As fate would have it, the first was George Young. I got his number out of the Musicians Union book, and he invited me up to his studio for the interview after he had finished playing on four sessions in a single day.

When George passed, Randy wrote on Facebook that like Randy, George was “from Philly and one of the greatest saxophonists ever; we met when I was a teenager playing local gigs. We both moved to NYC around the same time, and were on a million sessions, gigs and jingles together.”

There was an old building next to Carnegie Hall where a number of studio musicians kept rooms to practice and relax between dates. This was at the apex of the studio scene in New York, before synthesizers gutted that part of the music business. Some hipster had dubbed the building Father Flotsky’s Home for Wayward Beboppers, a reference to a Lenny Bruce routine.

Before I continue, a few words about the studio scene in Manhattan half a century ago.

The New York studio scene across those three decades was one of the most concentrated hubs of recorded music anywhere in the world, and the players who worked there shaped an enormous portion of what people heard on radio, in films, and on Broadway. In the 1950s, Manhattan was packed with active studios. The session musicians of that era were largely jazz players moonlighting on pop dates. Names you would see on countless contracts included Clark and Doc, Saxophonists Phil Woods, Al Cohn and Jerome Richardson, trombonists Urbie Green, Bob Brookmeyer and Jimmy Cleveland, guitarists Mundell Lowe, Jim Hall and Bucky Pizzarelli, bassists Milt Hinton and George Duvivier, drummers Osie Johnson, Grady Tate and Bernard Purdie and Panama Francis, and pianists Hank Jones, Dick Hyman and Tommy Flanagan. Milt Hinton in particular played on thousands of dates and kept a camera with him, leaving behind one of the great photographic records of the scene.

By the late 60s and into the 70s, the session pool expanded with players such as Steve Gadd, Richard Tee, Cornell Dupree, Eric Gale, Will Lee, Anthony Jackson, the Brecker brothers, David Sanborn, and the loose collective that became Stuff. Jingle work was a huge income stream, keeping dozens of horn and rhythm players booked solid during the day.

The combination of dense studio infrastructure, a deep bench of versatile players, and the proximity of advertising, Broadway, jazz clubs, and the major labels made New York a place where a working musician could conceivably do a jingle in the morning, a pop date in the afternoon, a Broadway show at night, and a jazz gig after midnight, all within twenty blocks.

I was a mere lad back then and new to writing, but that didn’t stop me. George and I did the interview, and he had many stories that were both enlightening and very funny. Afterwards, he suggested we get some sushi. Sushi? This was long before sushi became so popular in America that it is now sold in supermarkets. He took me to my first sushi bar, Sushiko on West 55th Street, where the sushi master Ya-Chan performed his magic behind the counter. The fish was incredible, and sushi remains my favorite food to this day.

My next encounter with George was at a short-run jazz club on Second Avenue in the late 70s. I forget the rhythm section, but George was joined by Joe Farrell, another monster sax player. It wasn’t a cutting contest. It was a master class. The two were friends, and that night they inspired each other to even greater creative heights.

In the early 90s, I moved to Upper Westchester and discovered that a superb trumpeter and former studio cat, Marvin Stamm, lived in the area. Marvin and I became friends, and one frigid winter night we drove down to Manhattan where he was playing at Fat Tuesday’s with Louis Bellson. And George Young on sax. Another musical master class. I wish they had recorded the music I heard that night.

I lost track of George again, but around twenty years later, after I had become the Jazz Video Guy, I was shooting some video with the saxophonist Michael Pedicin at a club in LA. George had since moved to Pacific Palisades, still playing and still burning. It turned out Michael and George were close friends and George was in the house. I walked over and asked, “Remember me?” He looked at me, thought for a moment, and apologized — I looked familiar but he couldn’t place me. “Your first DownBeat article,” I said. He stood up and gave me a big hug. We talked for a while, and I left feeling exactly the way his playing had always made me feel: that the world is warmer than you think.

There’s a line from A Streetcar Named Desire that comes to mind: Blanche DuBois saying “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” George Young was exactly that kind of stranger, arriving early in my writing life with a warmth that made me feel my new creative endeavors were worth something. I will always remember that night, the introduction to sushi, and the sheer artistry of his playing. He opened a door to a world that became my life.

Here’s George Young from a 2008 gig in Hawaii.