PopplagiWest

"I only came to tell you that this, you and me, can't go anywhere beyond this evening. It just can't."

"Well, then, you should've worn a different dress."













"Truly to sing, that is a different breath."

-- Rainer Maria Rilke





"All I know about music is that not many people really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours.

I had never before thought of how awful the relationship must be between the musician and his instrument. He has to fill it, this instrument, with the breath of life, his own. He has to make it do what he wants it to do. And a piano is just a piano. It's made of so much wood and wires and little hammers and big ones, and ivory. While there's only so much you can do with it, the only way to find this out is to try; to try and make it do everything.





He hit something in me, myself, and the music tightened and deepened, apprehension began to beat the air. [He] began to tell us what the blues were all about. They were not about anything very new. He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.

I seemed to hear with what burning he had made it his, with what burning we had yet to make it ours, how we could cease lamenting. Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did."

-- James Baldwin, Sonny's Blues





"Some day, perhaps, we will find out why Monk withdrew from the world in his last years of life. Was it by choice, or was it imposed by conditions beyond his will? Did the private world he had built for himself, and which for so long seemed to make him almost invulnerable, break down? No matter what the answer might be, no matter how sad it is that the music he could have made (and must have heard) in those years will never be, it is a miracle of sorts that he was here at all, that he accomplished what he did with such integrity."

-- Dan Morgenstern, Thelonious Monk