Contact Geoffrey

New York · May 14, 04:29 PM

In the small hours, last night, Manhattan almost hushed although I could hear a pneumatic drill being worked a few blocks away even then… anyway, shortly before sleep I find this on the television… angular, spiky, visceral clumps of chords and winter branch arpeggios… but what I am most struck by is footage filmed up by Amsterdam and 64th, around the back of Lincoln Center (an architecture that surely deserves a footnote in a page like this).

You can see the sheen of that wall in the background, seemingly that hasn’t changed since ’68, but so much else has. I’ve spent a lot of time there in the last couple of decades; Juilliard, Ailey, and not least La Guardia, which is the old Fame school where, incidentally, Monk did not go. It didn’t exist then, so Monk, being a bright boy, attended — and dropped out of — what is now a ‘rival’ institution, Stuy. These days he would almost certainly have to stay on and get himself a master’s degree at Juilliard in order to forge a serious instrumental ‘performing/composing’ career, unless he became a rapper or maybe, a singer.

It’s a bleak few blocks now at Amsterdam and 64th, except when the schools are let out. The footage of Monk making a return visit is different. Here amongst the corner stores, the brothers and sisters on the corner, the effusive greetings and the like, the great vibration of life is in abundance. Right or wrong, that’s the image of urban America that was distilled to Europe ‘back in the day’, a kind of rough shod swaggering well spring of creative activity. I’m not sure how it’s perceived now. I will ask.

~~~~~~~~~~~