(on) the man i love
"lyrical in its own right"...
Around the 5:15 mark of Miles Davis and the Jazz Giants’ rendition of Gershwin’s “The Man I Love”, Thelonious Monk begins to fade. His solo, an obtuse and prolonged restatement of the song’s melody, gets slower and slower, the already-wide space in between the notes widening.
Monk was a known alcoholic in the jazz community, consuming “whatever was around.” If there was any community in which either the mental or physical process of fading or slowing down was accepted, however, it was the jazz community of the 1950s. The ecstasy of Minton’s, the Open Door, the Village Vanguard simultaneously running your life rampant while encouraging a lethargic decrease.
By 5:30, the sound of the keys has faded entirely. The pace – once an up-tempo, vibrant reinterpretation of a traditionally somber standard – is dragging. And Thelonious Monk is asleep at the piano. Thelonious Monk is gone.
Anyone familiar with 20th century jazz standards know that they come from a time of incredible optimism. A time in which a piece could be written, distributed, and learned by the community in a matter of moments. A time in which one couldn’t own music, one could only embrace it. No matter what neighborhood you lived in, there was always one or two or five homes you could walk into and string off a tune. There was always one or two or five people who could come to listen, to dance.
There is something uniquely American about valuing the individual while lacking the collective. We are lighthouses in the dark, each beam distinctly its own yet contributing to the mission of rescue. We speak of pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps yet refuse to acknowledge that it is not our hands that pull but those of someone who will fade into memory just as quickly as they entered it. It, in part, is why jazz is so uniquely American: it's a soloist’s art embedded in a collective embrace.
Take Gershwin’s lyrics:
Maybe I shall meet him Sunday
Maybe Monday, maybe not;
Still I’m sure to meet him one day
Maybe Tuesday will be my good news day
He’ll build a little home
Just meant for two
From which I’ll never roam,
Who would - would you?
The song, amongst other standards, is a study of collective waiting – for recovery, for resurrection, for salvation. In jazz clubs, in synagogues, in offices we wait. We are desperate for the return, and I am not immune. We are desperate for the moment in which we can breathe, can let go, can rejoin the collective in the form of peace we have dictated. We are desperate because we have convinced ourselves that being such is a form of love, even when love means watching someone disappear night after night. We are
~~
nothing more than tired. Charlie Parker was 34 when his body gave out, and we are tired. The doctors estimated his physical age at closer to sixty.
Perennial jazzheads will know that Bird is perhaps the most respected musician in its history, yet attempt to find such and you’ll be met with threads that say differently: “Isn’t it kind of crazy that Charlie Parker wasn’t really a great guy?” If there’s one thing that persists about the Internet, it's that strangers love to weigh geniuses against their habits, innovation against absences. As if speed and hunger has not proven to be detrimental to one’s body and spirit. Time, all in all, moves differently when you’re expected to be both brilliant and palatable.
The critics who celebrate Bird and Monk’s velocity write theses about the speed of his decline. The strangers who praise genius simultaneously want it doled out in digestible doses. There’s no manual for revolution, for change, no guarantee the revolutionary survives their own change. Time simply bends around legends until they snap.
The pace of justice is always dictated by those with the luxury of patience. Progress, but our tempo. Freedom, but in our key. Rest, but only when permitted.
Yet a man walks onto a stage carrying a dead man’s name and makes it sing a song a dead man never could have imagined. He makes it move when it wants to move. He makes it rest when it wants to rest.
He makes it die when it wants to die.
~~
At 5:41, after a wake-up riff from Miles, Monk comes back to the piano. It’s thrilling in that you would never know he drifted away, the silence working almost too perfectly with the group’s historic camaraderie. Monk’s traditional tricks ease us back into the rhythm, the ecstasy of the environment.
No one would be surprised to learn that this is not the last time Monk would fall asleep or step off the bench or throw something at his bandmasters. Yet we are content that he comes back. We are not sad in knowing that he will go again.
We are blindly listening to the music.
We are embracing the rhythm.
We are asleep at the piano.
We are gone.