#19 "epistrophy" for roy brooks there is no such world as that which exists in books, or such con tractions & expansions as we may devise for ourselves, out of the endless chaos of real life, nothing is so ordered as we would make it, mere trophies of epistemology brought back from the battle to make sense out of something which makes no sense whatsoever except what registration of feeling & experience we can make in song & keep singing it like monk all life long —new orleans march 4, 1984/ detroit may 24, 1984

#20 "i mean you" for penny it's not just a case of wanting to be in love as if it didn't matter just who you are or the particularities, like the way you make my blood race, the certain taste of your skin, or just how soulful you are in every way, & how deeply & completely you understand me in all the nutty complexity of my being—it's your intelligence, your exquisite taste in music, & the warmth of you i want, baby, the warmth of you i want like i've never wanted anyone else —detroit september 18, 1984

#11 "in walked bud" for les reid & john petrie first there was monk before the war & then from further uptown, in harlem, from the neighborhood of coleman hawkins, sonny rollins, & jackie mclean, there was bud powell or earl alfred "bud" powell on piano, strict interpreter of dizzy & bird for the keyboard, fleet of single line & fast to abandon the heaviness in the left hand , to make room for the bass & drums & the harmonic implications of the melody, the farther reaches of the chords, the dizzy atmosphere which resulted from the compression of experience & the deep urban intelligence of african-americans born in manhattan or brought to harlem as children, coming up on the streets, standing outside of bars & after-hours joints with the whores & the dope peddlers, straining to listen or to hear from the bandstand or to see the musicians inside with such aspirations, to get up there themselves, with they little horns, behind the drums, or at the piano, hands on the keyboard & a room full of people looking up from the depths of their lives to flood the bandstand with huge waves of love & warmth, then back out to the streets, & the ugly stares, the cold bitter hatred of the white people, the nightstick across the head in philadelphia, the loss of consistent memory, the shock treatments inside the several nut houses, a phony dope beef in new york city & no more cabaret card, loss of license to work in the nightclubs of manhattan or even brooklyn, iced out of everything but the will to make music out of the guts of a piano, the amazing bud powell, the blazing bud powell, now faltering & lost, now lucid, now gone again, in toronto with bird & dizzy & mingus & max roach, fresh out of creedmore & more shocks to the head, may, 1953, on the same night rocky marciano knocked out jersey joe wolcott, drunk & crazy bud powell back in manhattan, a night at birdland with bird in the first week of march, 1955, gone all the way out of his motherfucking mind, bud powell, bud powell, bud powell, bird's voice ringing in his ears, mingus pointing his finger from the bandstand, "these are sick men," he said, "ladies & gentlemen, please don't associate me with this madness," & in walked monk that night to catch some music, with his head set straight on his shoulders & his feet firmly on the ground, in control of his faculties like few men of any time, 1955, just a week before bird would leave us here & bud would stagger on, the scene changes, time waits, exile in paris from 1959 to the end of his life, but on this night at birdland there they are, bird at the microphone intoning his name & bud staring off into space, & monk taking it all in, crazy too, like a fox to say to bird & bud, "i told you guys to act crazy, but i didn't tell you to fall in love with the act. you're really crazy now...." —louisville , ky october 12 , 1985/ detroit december 7-14 , 1985

#107 “monk’s dream” for tyree & karen guyton & sam mackey in the middle of the night on the east side of detroit off behind mack & gratiot, on heidelberg street where a lot of old houses be burnt out or just falling apart & big weeds be growing up where there used to be houses, on heidelberg street in the middle of the night when the moon is high in the sky & people be asleep in they beds dreaming of new refrigerators full of groceries for they babies & maybe a new car outside, or a number they can hit tomorrow, put it in a box, drag a bunch of boxes out in the vacant lot across the street & pile them up on top one another, paint ’em all different colors, hang a pink bicycle up in a tree painted polka dot, nail some old plastic doll bodies & maybe some road signs up on the front porch next door where the people been gone so long & stick in a telephone booth, put a television on the porch roof & plug it in, change the channel once or twice, a toy airplane in a bird cage on the top of the house, some plastic legs sticking out the front window, all different colors of paint & objects of every description stuck or nailed on somehow all over the abandoned house, “sometimes a thing just needs some stripes” says grandpop, 91, who can see the things that maybe we can’t in the middle of the night, like the doll in the attic window, “she's reaching out for help,” & the line of doors in the field on the other side of the street, they came from houses that used to be here, they came from old refrigerators & wrecked taxicabs, they standing there cocked every which way & down on the corner of ellery they got 3 big old vacant lots, one got a raggedy boat in it filled with junked tires, one got a pile of oil drums painted up in bright colors, the other one got more doors all lined up in a row like tyree say, “there are so many openings in life, you just have to pick the right ones”— the music comes up in the background out of the little speaker on the radio by the porch, it’s thelonious with charlie rouse, “monk’s dream” & the peoples indoors sleeping turn over in they beds, a smile on they faces, they know in their dreams it’s just tyree & karen & grandpop out there on heidelberg street in the middle of the night turning their neighborhood inside out —harmonie park detroit may 26, 1988

#12 "monk's mood" ("why do you evade the facts?") for melba boyd & sadiq muhammad what would piss you off if you were monk but the superficial gesture, the appropriation of the formal weirdness without the content or any intent to keep the code of manly conduct, that what one says & what one does must be one & the same or either bullshit reigns & walks & talks like a man, but no man is there to be found in the action, like hats & beards & funny names, or dreadlocks & canes, the constant iteration of the sainted litany of the great masters as a form of intimidation—the pointed finger, the crooked tongue, the phony shit that monk despised & not the word made act, no pose but for real, no crooked intention or weird overlay, like this cat is a chump, let's set him up, we can get the money out the bank without him knowing about it & not pay the other musicians for the concert & blame it on him, that they never got paid & put some crow jim shit in the game too, like it's about color or anything else but sincerity of expression, depth of soul, intelligence, it's not about race it's about culture, motherfucker, like what you learn from constant exposure to what people be doing, it is learned or acquired, from birth on or from when you be born into it, like the way the music can be studied, & the life & the code of behavior can get in to the sound, like monk & james p. johnson, willie "the lion" smith, the cats in his neighborhood & in harlem where monk was well known the piano players hung out together, they bought each other drinks & meals, or a place to stay, but they took care of e ach other with no hand in the other cat's pocket, no knife in the back, no phony shuck & jive, twisted, super hip sneer on they jibs, straight-ahead cats with the ethics that made them for real men of music we worship & study long after they have passed from this sphere —detroit august 1 /september 15 /december 18 -23 , 1985/ july 7 , 1989 edit for steve gebhardt wvxu-fm, cincinnati may 14, 1991