a blind flaneur

The café opens a day early to celebrate the birthday of my friend Lou Bourgeois. He is 91 today. We share a fondness for Duke Ellington’s incomparable altoist, Johnny Hodges, so this week’s Mouffe is devoted to Johnny and dedicated to Lou. Several years ago I gave him a CD featuring duets by Hodges […]

Set 1: Senor Blues
Set 2: Cool Eyes

When I was grooving on Oscar Peterson back in September, I found an excellent vintage clip of Horace Silver performing Senor Blues in the Netherlands in 1959. It sent me searching for Song for My Father. Although I didn’t find a performance by Horace himself, I stumbled on this quiet gem by fiveofsix. […]

Set 1: My Heart Belongs to Daddy
Sophie Milman has a smoldering torch-singer voice that could singe the heart of the world-weariest lounge lizard. Born in Russia, raised in Israel, Milman calls Toronto home now. I heard her first on NPR, part of a media blitz promoting her second album, Make Someone Happy. The promotion […]

[Photo by wallyg]
I heard these guys almost every afternoon as I crossed Place de la Contrascarppe, the heart of our Paris neighborhood. One time they were playing “On Green Dolphin Street” and I imagined one street  in New York while walking down another in Paris.

Set 1: Moan for Man is an excerpt from the famous Steve Allen Show appearance where Jack Kerouac discussed and read passages from On the Road. Allen accompanyies him on piano.
Set 2: Charlie Parker looked like Buddha is a photo montage with Kerouac reading an homage to Bird as the sound track.
Set 3: […]

After writing about Thelonious Monk on the 90th anniversary of his birth, I had to devote this week’s Mouffe to Monk. The weather here has changed finally from blasting summer heat to somber autumn chill, a time that always puts me in the mood to hear the rhythmically incisive, bare-boned compositions of […]

Lorraine Gordon, 84-year-old doyen of the Village Vanguard, published her memoirs earlier this year. Alive at the Village Vanguard tells the following story about the first time Lorraine heard Thelonious Monk in a cramped uptown apartment in the 1940s. She was married then to Alfred Lion, founder of Blue Note Records and an early promoter […]

Monk was born 90 years ago today in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, a Piedmont town where Jack Kerouac lived intermittently in the 1950s. NPR observes the occasion with an exploration of Monk’s Southern roots, making much of train sounds in his tunes and claiming that you don’t hear that on W. 63rd Street in Manhattan. […]

After a taste of Coleman Hawkins last week, I hankered for some Lester Young. I found a feast. Both clips embedded here feature Hawk and Prez along with a pantheon of 50s all-stars. Contrary to prevailing myth, the decade’s verve wasn’t buttoned down by Eisenhower, Ozzie, and Harriet. Jazz giants strode the earth, and impresarios […]

The Day Lady Died
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me
I walk up the muggy street beginning […]

When I was in Toronto a few weeks ago, ms. Modigliani and I had dinner with our dear friend Lou Bourgeois. On the drive to Il Paridiso in Oakville, the CD playing on the car stereo was The Genus of Coleman Hawkins, one of my Top 10, Stranded on a Desert Island jazz records. […]

For me, Friday afternoon means jazz. When I get home from work on Fridays, what I want most is to walk down the street with Ms. Modigliani to a funky little jazz club with a piano trio, bistro cooking, a coterie of variegated lounge lizards, and some amiable conversation. A place like the Village Vanguard […]