Sublime

Thelonious Monk playing “Honeysuckle Rose”.

The Cry of Jazz—was based in part on an unpublished book by Bland entitled The Fruits of the Death of Jazz.

at The Cry of Jazz and another film called Unheard Melodies, which showed how wind caused statues to

Meeting the man himself, it is hard to believe that such a quiet, calm, and serious individual could be responsible for the frantic ‘sheets of sound’ which emanate from his tenor saxophone, or that such [a] sensitive person could think of his uglier wailings on soprano as beautiful.”

Don Michael, a one-armed pianist who played and recorded with Erskine Hawkins in the mid-1940s.

Paul Humphrey was a session drummer who worked with everyone from Jimmy Smith and Charles Mingus to Frank Zappa and Marvin Gaye. He was also the drummer for Lawrence Welk’s TV show in the late seventies, and his children would sometimes appear with him on the show. Sound familiar?

the everyday world in which he lived and worked: his formation in the segregated South of the 1930s, his early losses—his father’s death at an early age; a sojourn that exchanged an insular southern life for an urban northern one; the ceaseless search for a spiritual life that greatly expanded but was ultimately rooted in the southern black Christi