Some music is just imagined

As the great Pablo Picasso (who also happened to be my next-door neighbor for three years while I lived in the south of France with the Barclays; he resided in Villa La Californie with his wife Jacqueline, two goats, and three ducks!) established, “You’ve got to know the rules in order to break them.” Music is a science that needs to be carefully s

His time with Monk provided an apprenticeship with one of the greatest musical minds of the twentieth century. While with Monk, Coltrane’s conceptual approaches broadened significantly, including melodic invention, rhythmic variations, and mastery of vertical approaches to improvisation and sophisticated harmonic variations. His confidence grew str

In this sense, Coltrane’s sound of freedom, his infamous quest for perfection and ceaseless search for the “right sound” is, I think, neither mysterious nor otherworldly—but rather it is, I believe, the actual work of making freedom, grounded in the routine and everyday practice of doing and living.

Nina Simone: “Jazz is not just music, it’s a way of life, it’s a way of being, a way of thinking. I think that the Negro in America is jazz. Everything he does—the slang he uses, the way he talks, his jargon, the new inventive phrases we make up to describe things—all that to me is jazz just as much as the music we play. Jazz is not just music. It’