At last...

Clarity
Clarity comes
      when the clouds dissipate
Clouds dissipate when the rain fall
The rain falls

at last

Prayer for whom?

Prayer for whom? and for whom for what?
Before I have been helped so much... and so much was given
Now learning to give... not even to give back
You bloody beggar... good at taking
Every day - today - every day learning how good it is
how good it is to ...
give back

Nothing much... just do your job
learning to give back
not that you are doing some great things

others bless you
from their accepting
the little things, little little things
you have to
humbly
put to them and offer to their benevolent appreciation, likings and usage

every day... feel it feel it and feel it
give give give

what is it to be given?
nothing much
nothing much more than who you are
be me
be
be
enjoy being
sleep be
eat be
love be
be be
smile, joy appreciate every second
of pain and of joy
burn them all
i will be always be

now may that be possible should i still need and depend on so much of this help I got to start with?
may i? may i not?
can i still be like the kid with the parents asking for help?
how thankful will i be?
will i forget?
will i act upon it?

act - act - act
upon what?
act upon what ask the blur one - the one willing not to see that
in asking there is less giving
in taking there is less offering
in depending there is what? there is love
in reliance there is what? there is nonchalance... there is less risk and no
responsibility

Taking responsibility
TAKING RESPONSIBILITY
what does that mean?
facing which risk?
Not knowing - not seeing
facing the pain... and loving it as the teacher, the blind man guiding our steps from boulder to boulder, the cane hurting the contours... until the contours fade away, revealing the space there is
space
position
stand and standing
contentment
satisfaction and balance

The adequat response to the touch of the cane
to the footprint of the steps
to the whip and caresses of things... Oh cruel things
you teach us and
we thank you for it
though we damn you before and will damn you again
forgive our pangs, we forget our pain
forgive us things
your are the One
we will follow you and may be  -
may be - one day -
One day will become
part of you
part of you things
and may be - may be - one day - somethintg
something will follow
in our suit
 will follow
something

Taking the time to to take stock to tackle what really matters

Stopping there....breathing
Creating the call to which nothing can resist
The call, the calling and calling, calling, calling... and knocking, knocking, knocking
and... again... and again... and
breathing... and breathing
and...and,... and crying... and crying and breating... and crying
and calling, and knocking and... then
and then what..? feel, feel, feel
feeling

Before we thing, we feel
Knock, knock, knock
Know.... what? Know that to know that what you need to know... to knock, knock gently knock and listen
Pay attention to the that... the beat, the pace, the rhythm...
Your heart.... the beat, .... your heart.... the heart beat
Don't beat yourself... it beats, yes, it beats...
Feel it... do you? Feel it beating, gently ... gently beating... beating down the ... what?
Beating down the lane, down the vein, down the drain
Rain or shin, cry or laugh, full or famished

Now here it is
Feel it...
Every single sign that you feel your heart and enjoy the very single beat that repeats itself and again and again
Every single little clue... this is worth a life a full and dancing one a life of joy and expression and of so many things... giving, and opening and sharing and moving on strong steady and smiling

 Stopping the rest
Pursuing the quest... for ...
The quest for this authentic synchronisation
this authentic resonnance between my heart and my being
the two in tune, the two ... singing and dancing

Stopping the rest
there is heart pain and heart pain
crying is good and cleanse
there is heart pain and back pain
in fact this sounds more accurate
the later pull us.. back
the former burns us to the core... so that nothing remains
nothing else than a burning heart
this is pure, this is

Stopping the rest
and how is life? This is life
And earning a living? this is living
And the rest? The rest will take care of itself... will it?
it will... Doubt is poison
the rest is wonder

When will I stop to drink this nectar?
When will I stop to repeat the verses i believe in?
And why should I? and why should I? If this is what in which I believe?
If this is what...
My finger on the keyboard jump on to... dance and listen.. turn and turn....
round and round....
ecstatic song, ecstatic dance... the fingers on the keyboards
aned what if it is what I believe in
for you, listen, listen and maybe .. you could dance and listen
to the beat... the beat of ... the beat of your
Heart
Your heart
If there is one, somewhere near
You
If there is one
Where?

Ce qui va se passer

Passer du temps a approfondir ce qui compte
Mettre les choses a plat... clarifier
Exposer... mettre au soleil, a jour, au jour
Respirer

Tout ca cela veux dire... pratiquement... ecrire
TO WRITE
le matin tot
si la pensee est sauvage et vagabonde, je vais lui offrir - avec l'aide mon guide, de mon ami, de mes soutiens - je vais lui offrir une vaste, verte et grasse pature... un champs ouvert et vert, en un lieu magnifique ou l'air est pur...

Qu'elle saute, coure et joue tant qu'elle veut
La pensee s'apaisera, la pensee s'epuisera et s'afermira en meme temps
Ecrire... prendre le temps pour que les choses se reposent en ce reposoir de la pensee
Puis fermer le cahier
Tourner la page et... vivre

A prayer and its resonnance, The goal of human life

In my spiritual practice I encounter this simple prayer, which becomes like a daily companion.
And as a daily companion I realise that my relationship to it can oscillate between: ignoring each other, being bored at each other, or on the other side: marveling, wondering and rediscovering each other every time...

Of course, I do not need telling you which is more frequent, and which is most exiting.... I guess it is up to me to create the routine I like... and make the ordinary extra-ordinary

Oh Master (Oh Divine Master, the Master within me)
You are the real goal of human life. There are many goals in life some of which are more real.... wealth will stop being useful the day I die... Fame too.... In fact almost everything has used only from a material point of view... Is there anything in life that serves for after life? Is there anything after life?
The soul... what is the soul made of?
Who is the guardian of our soul?
Oh Master, yes I do start to feel some infinite wisdom in the prayer...
Some questions with "infinite" answers...
A sense of wonder in life... That goes with life...
Where life goes, so goes wonder
So be it

NETS, Gross and and Balance Sheet

We have what we deserve
What is it to be said?
A training slash teambuilding
Slash.... slash
as the horses start advancing, the whips criss
slash, slash
fear, stress, anger, uncomfort,
dealing with that, dealing with what is
a different form of magic
seizing the reins and
reigning in
let s start, slowly first, let s start
ho poor beast ho can you hear me
do you do you?
do you feel....on your rough skin, the skin of my hand rubbing you
rubbing you... left and right...
as you get used to it... we start moving together
and you lead me and I lead you

Thelonious Sphere Monk, the one name that came when asked my favorite music

Thelonious Sphere Monk. Time for me to explore and discover more about this amazing musician.
(October 10, 1917-February 17, 1982)

"You know, anybody can play a composition and use far-out chords and make it sound wrong. It’s making it sound right that’s not easy." Thelonious Monk, 1961

With the arrival Thelonious Sphere Monk, modern music—let alone modern culture--simply hasn’t been the same. Recognized as one of the most inventive pianists of any musical genre, Monk achieved a startlingly original sound that even his most devoted followers have been unable to successfully imitate. His musical vision was both ahead of its time and deeply rooted in tradition, spanning the entire history of the music from the “stride” masters of James P. Johnson and Willie “the Lion” Smith to the tonal freedom and kinetics of the “avant garde.” And he shares with Edward “Duke” Ellington the distinction of being one of the century’s greatest American composers. At the same time, his commitment to originality in all aspects of life—in fashion, in his creative use of language and economy of words, in his biting humor, even in the way he danced away from the piano—has led fans and detractors alike to call him “eccentric,” “mad” or even “taciturn.” Consequently, Monk has become perhaps the most talked about and least understood artist in the history of jazz.

Born on October 10, 1917, in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, Thelonious was only four when his mother and his two siblings, Marion and Thomas, moved to New York City. Unlike other Southern migrants who headed straight to Harlem, the Monks settled on West 63rd Street in the “San Juan Hill” neighborhood of Manhattan, near the Hudson River. His father, Thelonious, Sr., joined the family three years later, but health considerations forced him to return to North Carolina. During his stay, however, he often played the harmonica, ‘Jew’s harp,” and piano—all of which probably influenced his son’s unyielding musical interests. Young Monk turned out to be a musical prodigy in addition to a good student and a fine athlete. He studied the trumpet briefly but began exploring the piano at age nine. He was about nine when Marion’s piano teacher took Thelonious on as a student. By his early teens, he was playing rent parties, sitting in on organ and piano at a local Baptist church, and was reputed to have won several “amateur hour” competitions at the Apollo Theater.

Admitted to Peter Stuyvesant, one of the city’s best high schools, Monk dropped out at the end of his sophomore year to pursue music and around 1935 took a job as a pianist for a traveling evangelist and faith healer. Returning after two years, he formed his own quartet and played local bars and small clubs until the spring of 1941, when drummer Kenny Clarke hired him as the house pianist at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem.

Minton’s, legend has it, was where the “bebop revolution” began. The after-hours jam sessions at Minton’s, along with similar musical gatherings at Monroe’s Uptown House, Dan Wall’s Chili Shack, among others, attracted a new generation of musicians brimming with fresh ideas about harmony and rhythm—notably Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Mary Lou Williams, Kenny Clarke, Oscar Pettiford, Max Roach, Tadd Dameron, and Monk’s close friend and fellow pianist, Bud Powell. Monk’s harmonic innovations proved fundamental to the development of modern jazz in this period. Anointed by some critics as the “High Priest of Bebop,” several of his compositions (“52nd Street Theme,” “Round Midnight,” “Epistrophy” [co-written with Kenny Clarke and originally titled “Fly Right” and then “Iambic Pentameter”], “I Mean You”) were favorites among his contemporaries.

Yet, as much as Monk helped usher in the bebop revolution, he also charted a new course for modern music few were willing to follow. Whereas most pianists of the bebop era played sparse chords in the left hand and emphasized fast, even eighth and sixteenth notes in the right hand, Monk combined an active right hand with an equally active left hand, fusing stride and angular rhythms that utilized the entire keyboard. And in an era when fast, dense, virtuosic solos were the order of the day, Monk was famous for his use of space and silence. In addition to his unique phrasing and economy of notes, Monk would “lay out” pretty regularly, enabling his sidemen to experiment free of the piano’s fixed pitches. As a composer, Monk was less interested in writing new melodic lines over popular chord progressions than in creating a whole new architecture for his music, one in which harmony and rhythm melded seamlessly with the melody. “Everything I play is different,” Monk once explained, “different melody, different harmony, different structure. Each piece is different from the other. . . . [W]hen the song tells a story, when it gets a certain sound, then it’s through . . . completed.”


Despite his contribution to the early development of modern jazz, Monk remained fairly marginal during the 1940s and early 1950s. Besides occasional gigs with bands led by Kenny Clarke, Lucky Millinder, Kermit Scott, and Skippy Williams, in 1944 tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins was the first to hire Monk for a lengthy engagement and the first to record with him. Most critics and many musicians were initially hostile to Monk’s sound. Blue Note, then a small record label, was the first to sign him to a contract. Thus, by the time he went into the studio to lead his first recording session in 1947, he was already thirty years old and a veteran of the jazz scene for nearly half of his life. But he knew the scene and during the initial two years with Blue Note had hired musicians whom he believed could deliver. Most were not big names at the time but they proved to be outstanding musicians, including trumpeters Idrees Sulieman and George Taitt; twenty-two year-old Sahib Shihab and seventeen-year-old Danny Quebec West on alto saxophones; Billy Smith on tenor; and bassists Gene Ramey and John Simmons. On some recordings Monk employed veteran Count Basie drummer Rossiere “Shadow” Wilson; on others, the drum seat was held by well-known bopper Art Blakey. His last Blue Note session as a leader in 1952 finds Monk surrounded by an all-star band, including Kenny Dorham (trumpet), Lou Donaldson (alto), “Lucky” Thompson (tenor), Nelson Boyd (bass), and Max Roach (drums). In the end, although all of Monk’s Blue Note sides are hailed today as some of his greatest recordings, at the time of their release in the late 1940s and early 1950s, they proved to be a commercial failure.

Harsh, ill-informed criticism limited Monk’s opportunities to work—opportunities he desperately needed especially after his marriage to Nellie Smith in 1947, and the birth of his son, Thelonious, Jr., in 1949. Monk found work where he could, but he never compromised his musical vision. His already precarious financial situation took a turn for the worse in August of 1951, when he was falsely arrested for narcotics possession, essentially taking the rap for his friend Bud Powell. Deprived of his cabaret card—a police-issued “license” without which jazz musicians could not perform in New York clubs—Monk was denied gigs in his home town for the next six years. Nevertheless, he played neighborhood clubs in Brooklyn—most notably, Tony’s Club Grandean, sporadic concerts, took out-of-town gigs, composed new music, and made several trio and ensemble records under the Prestige Label (1952-1954), which included memorable performances with Sonny Rollins, Miles Davis, and Milt Jackson. In the fall of1953, he celebrated the birth of his daughter Barbara, and the following summer he crossed the Atlantic for the first time to play the Paris Jazz Festival. During his stay, he recorded his first solo album for Vogue. These recordings would begin to establish Monk as one of the century’s most imaginative solo pianists.

In 1955, Monk signed with a new label, Riverside, and recorded several outstanding LP’s which garnered critical attention, notably Thelonious Monk Plays Duke Ellington, The Unique Thelonious Monk, Brilliant Corners, Monk’s Music and his second solo album, Thelonious Monk Alone. In 1957, with the help of his friend and sometime patron, the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, he had finally gotten his cabaret card restored and enjoyed a very long and successful engagement at the Five Spot Café with John Coltrane on tenor saxophone, Wilbur Ware and then Ahmed Abdul-Malik on bass, and Shadow Wilson on drums. From that point on, his career began to soar; his collaborations with Johnny Griffin, Sonny Rollins, Art Blakey, Clark Terry, Gerry Mulligan, and arranger Hall Overton, among others, were lauded by critics and studied by conservatory students. Monk even led a successful big band at Town Hall in 1959. It was as if jazz audiences had finally caught up to Monk’s music.

By 1961, Monk had established a more or less permanent quartet consisting of Charlie Rouse on tenor saxophone, John Ore (later Butch Warren and then Larry Gales) on bass, and Frankie Dunlop (later Ben Riley) on drums. He performed with his own big band at Lincoln Center (1963), and at the Monterey Jazz Festival, and the quartet toured Europe in 1961 and Japan in 1963. In 1962, Monk had also signed with Columbia records, one of the biggest labels in the world, and in February of 1964 he became the third jazz musician in history to grace the cover of Time Magazine.

However, with fame came the media’s growing fascination with Monk’s alleged eccentricities. Stories of his behavior on and off the bandstand often overshadowed serious commentary about his music. The media helped invent the mythical Monk—the reclusive, naïve, idiot savant whose musical ideas were supposed to be entirely intuitive rather than the product of intensive study, knowledge and practice. Indeed, his reputation as a recluse (Time called him the "loneliest Monk") reveals just how much Monk had been misunderstood. As his former sideman, tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin, explained, Monk was somewhat of a homebody: "If Monk isn't working he isn't on the scene. Monk stays home. He goes away and rests." Unlike the popular stereotypes of the jazz musician, Monk was devoted to his family. He appeared at family events, played birthday parties, and wrote playfully complex songs for his children: "Little Rootie Tootie" for his son, "Boo Boo's Birthday" and “Green Chimneys” for his daughter, and a Christmas song titled “A Merrier Christmas.” The fact is, the Monk family held together despite long stretches without work, severe money shortages, sustained attacks by critics, grueling road trips, bouts with illness, and the loss of close friends.

During the 1960s, Monk scored notable successes with albums such as Criss Cross, Monk’s Dream, It’s Monk Time, Straight No Chaser, and Underground. But as Columbia/CBS records pursued a younger, rock-oriented audience, Monk and other jazz musicians ceased to be a priority for the label. Monk’s final recording with Columbia was a big band session with Oliver Nelson’s Orchestra in November of 1968, which turned out to be both an artistic and commercial failure. Columbia’s disinterest and Monk’s deteriorating health kept the pianist out of the studio. In January of 1970, Charlie Rouse left the band, and two years later Columbia quietly dropped Monk from its roster. For the next few years, Monk accepted fewer engagements and recorded even less. His quartet featured saxophonists Pat Patrick and Paul Jeffrey, and his son Thelonious, Jr., took over on drums in 1971. That same year through 1972, Monk toured widely with the "Giants of Jazz," a kind of bop revival group consisting of Dizzy Gillespie, Kai Winding, Sonny Stitt, Al McKibbon and Art Blakey, and made his final public appearance in July of 1976. Physical illness, fatigue, and perhaps sheer creative exhaustion convinced Monk to give up playing altogether. On February 5, 1982, he suffered a stroke and never regained consciousness; twelve days later, on February 17th, he died.

Today Thelonious Monk is widely accepted as a genuine master of American music. His compositions constitute the core of jazz repertory and are performed by artists from many different genres. He is the subject of award winning documentaries, biographies and scholarly studies, prime time television tributes, and he even has an Institute created in his name. The Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz was created to promote jazz education and to train and encourage new generations of musicians. It is a fitting tribute to an artist who was always willing to share his musical knowledge with others but expected originality in return.

Robin D. G. Kelley Ph.D.

Robin D. G. Kelley, a Professor of Anthropology, African American Studies and Jazz Studies at Columbia University, has published several books on African American culture and politics. His most recent book is Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (2002). His articles on music have appeared in the New York Times, Black Music Research Journal, The Nation, Lenox Avenue, Rolling Stone, American Visions, among others. He is currently completing two books: Thelonious: A Life (The Free Press, forthcoming 2009), and Speaking in Tongues: Jazz and Modern Africa (Harvard University Press, forthcoming 2006)

Ca continue

27 Octobre 2009 - ma fille va bientot avoir 2 ans. Je continue et valide la formule du blog. Un journal d'expression libre et ouverte... Un lectorat - inconnu et mysterieux - probablement inexistant, mais potentiellement infini - la multitude. Une voix, et - imaginant la solitude, et pourquoi pas la solitude dans les montagnes - une voix et son echo... un echo...

Des strates, des couches d'ecriture... un relief a travers le temps et l'espace.... un espace et un temps de dialogue et de decouverte... jete a la posterite...

Je continue, donc. Je valide et consolide... quoi? l'echo qui passe, s'oublie,... et reviens... a travers cela... les signes, les modeles de la vie... vibrations, energies..., les "patterns of life"... un dessin, un dessein...

Oh voila, et/ou peut etre rien... cela revient souvent au meme
Bonsoir, welcome back

NB: dessein: comprendre/saisir le sens (essayer - je parle pour moi): http://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/dessein#.C3.89tymologie