Charlie Parker Quotes

I knew Noah worshipped Charlie Parker and that his toothbrush was green. That he wouldn't bother to button his shirts correctly but always made his bed. That when he slept he curled into himself and that his eyes were the color of the clouds before it rained, and I knew he had no problem eating meat but would subtly leave the room if animals started to kill one another on the Discovery Channel. I knew one hundred little things about Noah Shaw but when he kissed me I couldn't remember my own name.

Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you that music has boundaries. But, man, there's no boundary line to art.

Don't be afraid, just play the music.

At the edge of madness you howl diamonds and pearls.

Being a nerd, which is to say going too far and caring too much about a subject, is the best way to make friends I know. For me, the spark that turns an acquaintance into a friend has usually been kindled by some shared enthusiasm . . . At fifteen, I couldn't say two words about the weather or how I was doing, but I could come up with a paragraph or two about the album Charlie Parker with Strings. In high school, I made the first real friends I ever had because one of them came up to me at lunch and started talking about the Cure.

The nature of compassion isn't coming to terms with your own suffering and applying it to others: It's knowing that other folks around you suffer and, no matter what happens to you, no matter how lucky or unlucky you are, they keep suffering. And if you can do something about that, then you do it, and you do it without whining or waving your own fuckin' cross for the world to see. You do it because it's the right thing to do.

They were on the side of the angels, even if the angels weren't entirely sure that this was a good thing.

I'd been hurt, and in response I had acted violently, destroying a little of myself each time I did so.

This world is full of broken things: broken hearts, broken promises, broken people,

Charles Simic, when asked what he thought of Slam Poetry events: "They are fun, but they have as much to do with poetry as Elvis Presley had to do with Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk".

If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn.

He was trying to put loss into words, but loss is absence and will always defy expression.

First you learn the instrument, then you learn the music, then you forget all that s**t and just play.

Why did you shoot him?" "You weren't around," I replied, my teeth gritted in pain. "If you'd been here I'd have shot you instead.

Misery loved company, but damnation needed it.

The nature of humanity, its essence, is to feel another's pain as one's own, and to act to take that pain away,. There is a nobility in compassion, a beauty in empathy, a grace in forgiveness.

She was plump, with dyed red hair and a face so caked with cosmetics that the floor of the Amazon jungle probably saw more natural light...

When she was taken from me it was like the death of a world, an infinite number of futures coming to an end.

I would like to be able to gently drift in and out of existence when I wanted to. I don’t want to kill myself. I still want to listen to Charlie Parker and sit in a room alone at four in the morning. There are moments to live for. There are times, hours slammed together, that are definitely worthwhile. It’s all the other hours, minutes and unendurable expanses of time that drag me by my collarbone slowly through the mindlessness of their blank words.

Don't play the saxophone, let the saxophone play you.

I believe in evil because I have touched it, and it has touched me.

Know a man by his metaphors.

Patriots built Auschwitz. You start believing that “my country wrong or right” shit, and it always ends up at the same place: a pit filled with bones.

You must be careful where you step. And you must be ready for what you might find.

For a moment they still lived and I experienced their deaths as a fresh loss with each waking, so that I was unsure whether I was a man waking from a dream of death or a dreamer entering a world of loss, a man dreaming of unhappiness or a man waking to grief.

I am sorry," I whispered. "I am sorry for all of the ways that I failed you. I am sorry that I was not there to save you, or to die alongside you. I am sorry that I have kept you with me for so long, trapped in my heart, bound in sorrow and remorse. I forgive you too. I forgive you for leaving me, and I forgive you for returning. I forgive you your anger, and your grief. Let this be an end to it.

In the end, you have to let things go. The things you regret are the things you hold on to.

Drowning men will drag you down if you let them. Sometimes, to survive, you have to let them sink.

Frank tried to look like he was wrestling with his conscience, although he couldn't have found his conscience without a shovel and an exhumation order.

Sometimes we need our pain. We need it to call our own.

Here is a truth, a truth by which to live: there is hope. There is always hope. If we choose to abandon it, our souls will turn to ash and blow away. But the soul can burn and not be damned.

Some revelations came only with the sound of dirt falling on a coffin:the ones that mattered, the ones that made for regrets.

Families,” said Angel, with some feeling. “Can’t live with them, can’t have them killed without complications.

When I started in homicide, the Dead Sea was just sick.

THERE ARE NO COINCIDENCES, only patterns we do not see.

I slipped from present to past, sliding down the snake heads of memory into what was and what would never be again.

You're breathing, Charlie. You are breathing, and it is beautiful, and I am so grateful for that.

It was an overcast late November morning, the grass splintered by hoarfrost, and winter grinning through the gaps in the clouds like a bad clown peering through the curtains before the show begins.

There is a dark resource within all of us, a reservoir of hurt and pain and anger upon which we can draw when the need arises. Most of us rarely, if ever, have to delve too deeply into it. That is as it should be, because dipping into it costs and you lose a little of yourself each time, a small part of all that is good and honorable and decent about you. Each time you use it you have to go a little deeper, a little further down into the blackness. Strange creatures move through its depths, illuminated by a burning light from within and fueled only by the desire to survive and to kill. The danger in diving into that pool, in drinking from that dark water, is that one day you may submerge yourself so deeply that you can never find the surface again. Give in to it and you're lost forever.

There was a lot to be said for the discipline of married life. It forced one to learn the art of compromise, and to remedy the flaws in one's nature.

It’s a full-time job being homeless. It’s a full-time job being poor.

The evolutionary curve obviously sloped pretty gently where Six came from.

My grandfather used to say that if God did not allow a man to be reunited with his dogs in the next life He was no God worth worshipping; that if a dog did not have a soul, then nothing had.

The term “hipster,” in fact, drew from the Chinese opium smoker of the 1800s, who’d spent much of his time smoking while reclining on one hip. The hipster counterculture took inspiration from heroin-addicted jazz greats like Charlie Parker and John Coltrane.

I have found in the past that what passes for coincidence is usually life’s way of telling you that you’re not paying enough attention.

Prepare for the worst and you won’t be disappointed.

It was the kind of bar where everybody knew your name, as long as your name was ‘Motherfucker’.

He has all the weaknesses that come with a conscience, but none of the strengths.

..her lips were as red as a stop light..

You still carrying an arsenal in the trunk of your car?” “Why, you need something?” “No, but if your car is hit by lightning I’ll know where my lawn went.

The Detective was different. Not that he wasn't a good man; Willie had heard enough about him to understand that he was the kind who didn't like to turn away from another's pain, the kind who couldn't put a pillow over his ears to drown out the cries of strangers. Those scars he had were badges of courage, and Willie knew that there were others hidden beneath his clothes, and still more deep inside, right beneath the skin and down to the soul. No, it was just that whatever goodness was there coexisted with rage and grief and loss.

We all know that books burn—yet we have the greater knowledge that books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. . . . In this war, we know, books are weapons. —Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882–1945)

Everyone in the world is a Charlie. The trick is to figure out which Charlie you’re going to be. Charlie Manson. Charlie Starkweather. Or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” “Charlie Chaplin.” “Charlie Parker.” “Charly… from Flowers for Algernon.” “Charlie Brown.

His grandfather used to say that there were angels whom devils would greet on the street. If that were true, thought Parker, then let the devils raise their hats to him. It would just make them easier to identify and destroy.

But the measure of a man was the degree to which he was prepared to inconvenience himself for what was right;

Here is a truth, a truth by which to live: there is hope. There is always hope. If we choose to abandon it, our souls will turn to ash and blow away.

Every individual spends a lifetime trying to disprove Copernicus by placing him- or herself at the heart of existence, but a small core of diehards manages to turn it into an art.

That is what we do for the ones we love: we lie to protect them. Not all truths are welcome.

I realized by using the high notes of the chords as a melodic line, and by the right harmonic progression, I could play what I heard inside me. That's when I was born.

Come on,” I said a third time, to the approaching darkness, to the figures that beckoned from within it, to the peace that comes at last to every dead thing.

As legendary musician Charlie Parker said, “If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn.

We haunt ourselves, I sometimes think; or, rather, we choose to be haunted. If there is a hole in our lives, then something will fill it. We invite it inside, and it accepts willingly.

There should be a Stage IV of black identity—Unmitigated Blackness. I’m not sure what Unmitigated Blackness is, but whatever it is, it doesn’t sell. On the surface Unmitigated Blackness is a seeming unwillingness to succeed. It’s Donald Goines, Chester Himes, Abbey Lincoln, Marcus Garvey, Alfre Woodard, and the serious black actor. It’s Tiparillos, chitterlings, and a night in jail. It’s the crossover dribble and wearing house shoes outside. It’s “whereas” and “things of that nature.” It’s our beautiful hands and our fucked-up feet. Unmitigated Blackness is simply not giving a fuck. Clarence Cooper, Charlie Parker, Richard Pryor, Maya Deren, Sun Ra, Mizoguchi, Frida Kahlo, black-and-white Godard, Céline, Gong Li, David Hammons, Björk, and the Wu-Tang Clan in any of their hooded permutations. Unmitigated Blackness is essays passing for fiction. It’s the realization that there are no absolutes, except when there are. It’s the acceptance of contradiction not being a sin and a crime but a human frailty like split ends and libertarianism. Unmitigated Blackness is coming to the realization that as fucked up and meaningless as it all is, sometimes it’s the nihilism that makes life worth living. Sitting

You want to know what’s on the other side?’ Walsh eyed the detective carefully, as if gauging the seriousness of the question. ‘Is it seventy-two virgins, like the Muslims believe?’ ‘That’s the good news. The bad news is that they’re all guys. It’s like being at a boarding school.’ ‘I knew there had to be a catch.

When one encounters enough strangeness, then what is strange ultimately becomes familiar. The mind can accommodate itself to almost anything, given time: pain, grief, loss, even the possibility that the dead talk to the living.

He understood the half-life of hope: it is not despair that destroys us, but its opposite. Hope is the winding, despair the unwinding. Despair brings with it the possibility of an ending. Taken to the extreme, its logical conclusion is death. But hope sustains. It can be exploited. Ormsby

When Louis relaxed, it was an indication that a threat was at hand and he was preparing to act, as when an archer releases a breath simultaneously with the flight of an arrow, channeling all of the tension into the flighted missile itself.

Came from nothing- less than nothing, because the poor always enter this life with their account in deficit, and generally leave it in much the same condition...

The trick was not to stifle the emotions, but to control them. Love, anger, grief – all were weapons in their way, but they needed to be kept in check.

Law and justice are not the same.

[I]gnorance was never an obstacle to a good sound bite.

In any given situation, the most difficult step is to reach a decision. Once a decision is made, control can be asserted.

It didn’t matter whether a thing existed or not. What mattered was the trouble caused by those who believed in its existence.

because a man who is everybody’s friend really has no friends at all.

Regret, he now knew, was a useless emotion, the poor cousin of guilt.

I learned something that day: there may be worse things than arriving somewhere with your dog and leaving without him, but there aren’t many.

No man has seen God. No man has seen Lucifer. No man that I've ever talked to! It's just a useful way of looking at the world. And seeing into it.

He was just thinking aloud, ruling out possibilities by releasing them into the air, like canaries in the coal mine of his mind.

We lose ourselves by degrees: our youth, our souls.

Dogs were generally incompatible with melancholy.

what human beings did: they tried and failed and failed again, and they kept failing until either they got it right at last or time ran out and they had to settle for what they had.

Perhaps it's true that all men love their fathers, no matter how terrible the things they do to their sons: there is a part of us that remains forever in debt to those responsible for our existence.

But some gifts are worse than curses, and the dark side of the gift is that they know. The lost, the stragglers, those who should not have been taken but were, the innocents, the struggling, tormented shades, the gathering ranks of the dead, they know. And they come.

Good will attract good to itself, and those involved will unite toward a common goal. Evil, in turn, draws evil men, but they will never truly act as one. They will always be distrustful, always jealous. Ultimately, they seek power for themselves alone, and for that reason they will always fall apart at the end.

Early mornings were given over to Bartok and Schoenberg. Midmorning I treated myself to the vocals of Billy Eckstine, Billie Holiday, Nat Cole, Louis Jordan and Bull Moose Jackson. A piroshki from the Russian delicatessen next door was lunch and then the giants of bebop flipped through the air. Charlie Parker and Max Roach, Dizzy Gillespie, Sarah Vaughan and Al Haig and Howard McGhee. Blues belonged to late afternoons and the singers’ lyrics of lost love spoke to my solitude.

Not every wound needs to be poked and opened, and not every wrong needs to be reexamined, or dragged kicking and screaming into the light. Better just to let the wound heal, even if it doesn’t heal quite right, or to leave the wrongs in the dark, and remind yourself not to go stepping into the shadows if you can avoid it.

The thing in jazz that will get Bix Beiderbecke out of his bed at two o’clock in the morning, pick that cornet up and practice into the pillow for another two or three hours, or that would make Louis Armstrong travel around the world for fifty plus years non stop, just get up out of his sick bed, crawl up on the bandstand and play, the thing that would make Duke Ellington, the thing that would make Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Mary Lou Williams, the thing that would make all of these people give their lives for this, and they did give their lives, is that it gives us a glimpse into what America is going to be when it becomes itself. And this music tells you that it will become itself. And when you get a taste of that, there’s just nothing else you’re going to taste that’s as sweet.

He died at forty-two. I was there to collect his talent. I was there at the hospital deathbed of my beloved Billie Holiday, just forty-four, her liver destroyed by drinking; I was there inside the hotel room of Charlie Parker, my singular jazz saxophonist, who died in his midthirties, but whose body was so ravaged by drugs the coroners thought he was sixty. Tommy Dorsey, the bandleader, choked in his sleep when he was fifty-one, too deep in pills to awaken. Johnny Allen Hendrix (you called him Jimi) swallowed a handful of barbiturates and expired. He was twenty-seven. It is not new, this idea that a purer art awaits you in a substance. But it is naive. I existed before the first grapes were fermented. Before the first whiskey was distilled. Be it opium or absinthe, marijuana or heroin, cocaine or ecstasy or whatever will follow, you may alter your state, but you will not alter this truth: I am Music. I am here inside you. Why would I hide behind a powder or a vapor? Do you think me so petty?

It really was a whole generation who were listening to Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Ella Fitzgerald, Sonny Rollins, James Moody, Fats Navarro and, a little bit later on, Mongo Santamaría and Chuck Berry, and these dozen or so guys gave them a voice. They led the way. They wrote what a whole generation wanted to read. The time was right and they seized the day by writing about their lives. They travelled, they got into scrapes, they got arrested, they got wasted … and they wrote about it. Isn’t that something?

The beam caught the bowed head of Angel. He glanced up into Bobby Sciorra’s eyes and smiled. Sciorra looked puzzled for a moment and then his mouth opened in slow-dawning realization. He was already turning to try to locate Louis when the darkness seemed to come alive around him and his eyes widened as he realized, too late, that death had come for him too.

Cresil leaned forward, his pupils shrinking to pinpoints of hate.

Parker felt, not for the first time, as though he had wandered into a ghost story.

A man is a very small thing, and the night is very large and full of wonders. —

Although it was cold out, he opened the window slightly because the room smelled of sleep. The action dislodged something red and black from the frame,

In the end, we’ll all face oblivion.

I don’t think you can dial 911 for a literary emergency.

It never paid to underestimate children.

So you’re British?’ said Billy. ‘I think of myself as English first, British second. It’s a way of keeping the Scots and Welsh at a distance, never mind the Irish.

What's seldom is wonderful.

Okay," I said hoarsely as the blood left my head and headed south for the winter.

Contentment is a very underrated feeling, but you only learn that as you get older, and with it comes regret that it took you so long to realize what you’d been missing.

There’s always someplace to go, even if it’s only someplace else.

The four ages of man, as far as Williamson was concerned, were confusion, anger, complacency, and grumpiness, but it was important to embrace them in the right order. The

[H]e looked like a real bruiser as he stepped from his car, his big sunglasses giving the impression that a large bug had evolved to the point that it could wear a suit.

They were called “rooms,” but it was still a cell. A room you could leave when you chose to do so; a cell you could not.

If he has a weakness, it’s that he’s a moral being. Where possible, he’ll do the right thing, the just thing, and if he does wrong he’ll bear the guilt of it.

In the old house, the past hung in the air like motes of dust waiting to be illuminated by the sharp rays of memory

You cannot perform acts of evil in the name of a greater good, because the good suffers. It is corrupted by what has been done in its name.

A discarded newspaper skimmed the sidewalk with a sound like the whisperings of a dead lover.

The past never truly dies. It is there, waiting, just below the surface of the now.

A faint mist hung over the streets, creating penumbrae around the streetlights like the halos of saints, and making a dreamscape of the skyline.

If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.

Charlie kissed Kellan, and he wrote an entire book about it. Named it after her taste. Immortalized her inside the same coffin he’d locked his soul. And above all, he’d given them a happy ending.

You into Charlie Parker?” he asked. “No,” I had to say again. “Well, Bird was a dishwasher just like me and you,” he said. “Worked at Jimmy’s Chicken Shack in New York. You can hear it in his sax.

The law doesn't require truth, only the appearance of it. Most cases simply rest on a version of it that's acceptable to both sides. You want to know the only truth is? Everybody lies.--Elwin Stark

Dizzy Gillespie recorded it with Charlie Parker in an influential 1945 track (incorporating a much imitated intro—perhaps initially intended as a parody of Rachmaninoff ’s Prelude in C-Sharp Minor

But there was a saying in Hebrew, “We survived Pharoah, we’ll survive this too.” In the words of the old joke, it was the theme of every Jewish holiday: they tried to kill us, they failed, so let’s eat!

the more of us there are, the more distant from each other we become. We’re practically livin’ on top of each other but we’re further away from each other in every other way than we’ve ever been before.

There are people whose eyes you must avoid, whose attention you must not draw to yourself. They are strange, parasitic creatures, lost souls seeking to stretch across the abyss and make fatal contact with the warm, constant flow of humanity. They live in pain and exist only to visit that pain on others.

They listened to the Beatles for most of the journey, and Hynes explained to Gackowska why Abbey Road was the band’s best record, and how Sgt. Pepper’s wasn’t really a concept album, no matter what anyone claimed to the contrary. Then he had to explain to Gackowska what a concept album was, and a B side, until pretty soon he felt about a hundred years old and was tempted to check himself into a nursing home.

We’re the world’s leading producer of serial killers. It’s a sign of sickness, is what it is. We’re sick and weak and these killers are like a cancer inside us: the faster we grow, the quicker they multiply.

After all, what is hell but the eternal absence of God? To exist in a hellish state is to be denied forever the promise of hope, of redemption, of love. To those who have been forsaken, hell has no geography.

There are some truths so terrible that they should not be spoken aloud, so appalling that even to acknowledge them is to risk sacrificing a crucial part of one's humanity, to exist in a colder, crueler world than before.

Then again, maybe nostalgia was an understandable response to a world that appeared to be going all to hell, as long as everyone remembered that the past was a nice place to visit but nobody should want to settle in it. One

As for dying, he didn't believe that he was frightened of it: the manner of it, perhaps, but not the fact of it. After all, he had reached an age where dying had started to become an objective reality instead of an abstract concept.

It was human nature. You didn't give everything away; if you did, you would have nothing left. There were those who took the view that there was a liberation in the act of confession, but mostly they tended to be the ones who were listening, and not the ones confessing. The only full confessions occur on deathbeds; all others are partial, modified.

You can’t die of jazz,” said Dr. Walid. “Can you?” I thought of Fats Navarro, Billie Holiday, and Charlie Parker who, when he died, was mistaken by a coroner for a man twice his real age. “You know,” I said, “I think you’ll find you can.” Jazz

He was in his mid-thirties, tall and pale and thin, with long, sandy hair and rimless glasses, dressed in brown polyester pants, cheap brown shoes, and a light tan shirt. He looked like someone had put a wig on a giraffe and run it through the local Target.

People suffered all the time, and died badly. Many called on God to save them at the end, but if God heard their pleas, He chose not to answer. Maybe the pastor was wrong. Maybe God was imperfect, and men, by acting in their own interests, were reflecting only the reality of His nature.

But no one on either side ever forgot that the law was white. Justice might be blind, but the law wasn’t. Justice was aspirational, but the law was actual. The law was real. It had uniforms, and weapons. It smelt of sweat and tobacco. It drove a big car with a star on the door. White people had justice. Black folks had the law.

When you lived alone, you got used to the sound of your own voice: at least it was a conversation with someone who understood you.

I’m Charlie’s sun, and I’m Parker’s moon. I can be both. I’m an eclipse.

You didn’t have to look very hard to be disappointed by human beings. We were not all bad, just enough of us, although the rest had to work very hard to make up for that minority.

He had loved her as much as a man can love his wife, and so nothing more need be said.

It bore an expression he’d seen before: love poisoned by disappointment.

He thought of the old commonplace about how giving up vices didn’t make you live longer, but just made it feel as though you were living longer.

Perhaps other souls than human are sometimes born into the world, and clothed in human flesh. —Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Uncle Silas (1864)

There was a lot to be said for a man’s capacity to be comfortable while alone.

He has his father’s distinctive good looks, like a badly made crash test dummy. He also smells like a funeral parlor, but that may be incidental.

Perhaps, he considered, her hypocrisy had become so ingrained that she was no longer even capable of perceiving it as such.

The law wasn’t a great business to be in if one valued truth, or even justice.

Lester Bargus was what people liked to call 'two pounds of shit in a one-pound bag.

If you don't live it, it won't come out your horn.

Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.

Slow animals always become prey in the end.

But he was wounded, and tired, and winter was still upon him.

If cats could count, they’d start getting nervous around the time they put paid to their fifth life.

First the girl, then the detective, now the wolf. The town was starting to unravel.

Warraner would rather have been the king of nothing than the prince of something.

You pay by the hour, even if the job only takes five minutes. I don’t do fractions.

The biggest life change any man would ever experience was the ending of it.

you had to be reasonably wealthy and privileged to choose not to own stuff. He

grave emotional injury might somehow have triggered a physical response, so that

Being shot at for years by men of a particular nationality will tend to impact negatively upon one’s view of them.

aside. “How long will it take?” He was scared, and he wasn’t pretending. “Not long,” I said. “Not long at all.” You

cynics were once romantics. Most of them still are.

Deborah Mercier couldn’t have looked more like a WASP if her coat had been striped with yellow and her eyes had been on the sides of her head. She

all presented one face to the world, and kept another hidden. Nobody could survive in it otherwise.

After all, no relationship could function or survive under the burden of total honesty.

After all, evil was a kind of poison, an infection of the soul.

Most of the bad situations I've encountered began with the best of intentions.

Real life was curious enough without the embellishments of fiction.

I've started to believe that most people do what they think is right. The problems arise when what they do is right for themselves, but not what's right for others.

It’s good that you have someone that cares for you. It doesn’t make it easier, but it sure doesn’t make it harder.

Instead, I felt only a heaviness, like a dark, wet blanket over my consciousness.

Most criminals are kind of dumb, which is why they’re criminals. If they weren’t criminals, they’d be doing something else to screw up people’s lives, like running elections in Florida

And Frank was right: they were both fathers who had lost children, and somehow they had come through that loss—not without ongoing pain, and not without fractures, but they had endured,

daddy and it contained within it the prospect of living and the hope of dying, of endings and beginnings, of love and loss and peace and rage, all wrapped up in two whispered syllables.

Warraner looked pleasantly surprised at the question, like a Mormon who had suddenly found himself invited into a house for coffee, cake, and a discussion of the wit and wisdom of Joseph Smith.

So what you gonna do?” “Push a stick into the beehive and rustle up some bees. The Larousses are hosting a party today. I think we should avail ourselves of their hospitality.” “We got an invite?” “Has not having one ever stopped us before?” “No, but sometimes I just like to be invited to shit, you know what I’m sayin’, instead of havin’ to bust in, get threatened, irritate the nice white folks, put the fear of the black man on them.” He paused, seemed to think for a while about what he had just said, then brightened. “Sounds good, doesn’t it?” I said. “Real good,” he agreed.

She had not given me the cross to keep the bad men away, as a child might have been expected to do. No, in her mind the bad men could not be kept away. They were coming, and they would have to be faced.

Most criminals were dumb, and he took the view that the whole science of criminology was essentially flawed, since much of its theory was based on the study of criminals who had been caught, and were therefore either stupid or unlucky, as opposed to the study of those who had not been caught, and were therefore smart and had a little luck on their side, but just a little. Luck ran out, but smart was for life.

my God was like a parent always trying to watch out for His children, but you couldn’t always be there for your children, no matter how hard you tried. I had not been there for Jennifer when she most needed

Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art.

No hubo advertencia, ni invitación a volverse con las manos en alto, ni opción a rendirse. Esos gestos eran para los buenos en las películas del Oeste, los que llevaban sombreros blancos y al final se quedaban con la chica.

wanted to talk to them. I wanted to tell them that I was sorry. I wanted to say what every child wishes to say to his parents when they’re gone and it’s too late to say anything at all: that I loved them, and had always loved them.

And I knew, too, that to live a life like Walter Cole’s—a life almost mundane in the pleasure it derived from small happinesses and the beauty of the familiar, but uncommon in the value it attached to them—was something to be envied.

be close to another human being at that instant was enough to convince one, however briefly, that something beyond understanding passed from the body with that final sigh, that some essence began its journey from this world to another.

although his physician had advised him not to be overly concerned about forgetting facts and names, and he should begin to worry only if he stopped noticing that he couldn’t remember them—if, in essence, he forgot that he was forgetting.

Maybe Jane was right. Maybe he was wrong to have filled her head with tales of Bessie Smith and Josephine Baker, let alone take her to see Jackie Wilson, Etta James, Tina Turner and the Ikettes. Maybe it wasn’t right to wake up to Chico Hamilton, Lee Morgan, Charlie Parker, and Art Blakey in the morning. Watch the sunset with Miles Davis, Cecil Taylor, and Little Willie John. But Greer didn’t know what else to offer that was beautiful and colored and alive, all at the same time.

Because to ignore what had happened in the recent and distant pasts, to turn away and look elsewhere because it was easier to do so, was to be an accomplice to the crimes that were committed. To refuse to delve deeper would be to collude with the offenders.

I disliked the attitude of those who came up from the cities to hunt—their braggadocio, their faux machismo, the unpleasant transformative effect of guns and camouflage on otherwise unremarkable men, for in my experience it was generally men who hunted in this way.

Look at you,” he said. “A fractured man, a broken thing. I asked for money to kill you, but none would give it. Now I understand why. There is no value to you. You’re nothing, and therefore nothing is what your life is worth. But I will kill you anyway, out of pity.

Belson came into the apartment with some crime-scene people and two homicide detectives. “This guy,” Charlie said, and looked at his notebook, “Spenser. He was impersonating a police officer.” Belson glanced at him. “We all thought that,” Belson said, “when he was a cop.

Badness lingered, and if blood penetrated deep enough into wood, the stain became near permanent. The past gave substance to the present, and all old places were storehouses of memory: the more ancient the site, the greater the accumulation, and bygone atrocities called to new.

He had a vague longing for the student radicalism of the sixties and seventies, mainly because he had been too young to experience it himself. It seemed to him that the youth of that era had been looking for reasons to be angry, which was perfectly understandable because the young were supposed to be angry. Now the young were just looking for reasons to feel offended, and that wasn’t the same thing at all. The four ages of man, as far as Williamson was concerned, were confusion, anger, complacency, and grumpiness, but it was important to embrace them in the right order.

He knew there were some who said that those who kept dogs had to resign themselves to their eventual loss because of the animals’ relatively short lives. The trick—if “trick” was the right word—was to learn to love the spirit of the animal, and to recognize that it transferred itself from dog to

An interesting thing happened today,” she said, giving me just enough time to get the word “hi” out of my mouth. “I opened the front door and there was a man on my doorstep. A big man. A very big, very black man.” “Rachel —” “You said it would be discreet. His T–shirt had the words ‘Klan Killer’ written on the front.” “I —” “And do you know what he said?” I waited. “He handed me a note from Louis and told me he was lactose intolerant. That was it. Note. Lactose intolerant. Nothing else. He’s coming to the reading with me. It was all I could do to get him to change his T–shirt. The new one reads ‘Black Death.’ I’m going to tell people it’s a rap band. Do you think it’s a rap band?” I figured it was probably his occupation, but I didn’t say that. Instead, I said the only thing I could think of to say. “Maybe you’d better buy some soy milk.” She hung up without saying good–bye.

Winston Churchill once said that you can judge a society by how it treats its prisoners. You know, there was all this stuff about Abu Ghraib and what we're doing to Muslims in Iraq and Guantanamo and in Afghanistan and wherever else we've decided to lock up those whom we perceive to be a threat. People seem surprised by it, but all they had to do was look around them. We do it to our own people. We try children as adults. We lock up, even execute, the mentally ill. And we tie people naked to chairs in ice-cold rooms because their medication isn't working. If we can do that here, then how the hell can anybody be surprised when we don't treat our enemies any better? ~Aimee Price

Every individual spends a lifetime trying to disprove Copernicus by placing him- or herself at the heart of existence, but a small core of diehards manages to turn it into an art. Harpur Griffin was just such a man, spurred on by a suspicion, although he could never have expressed it in so many words, that he was just an emptiness with a name.

It has always seemed to me that there are two types of people in this world: those rendered impotent by the sheer weight of evil it contains, and who refuse to act because they see no point, and those who choose their battles and fight them to the end, as they understand that to do nothing is definitely worse than to do something and fail. --The Collector

Harlan was not a particularly religious man, and had always poured scorn on those whom he termed “God-botherers”—Christian, Jew, or Muslim, he had no time for any of them—but he was, in his way, a deeply spiritual being, worshipping a god whose name was whispered by leaves and praised in birdsong. He had been a warden with the Maine Forest Service for forty years,

There’s a kind of evil that isn’t even in opposition to good, because good is an irrelevance to it. It’s a foulness that’s right at the heart of existence, born with the stuff of the universe. It’s in the decay to which all things tend. It is, and it always will be, but in dying we leave it behind.” “And while we’re alive?” “We set our souls against it, and our saints and angels, too.

I knew that his God—for each man has his own God—let him wander there sometimes, perhaps with the ghost of one of the many dogs that had kept him company through his life yapping at his heels, flushing the birds from the rushes and chasing them for the joy of it. My grandfather used to say that if God did not allow a man to be reunited with his dogs in the next life He was no God worth worshipping; that if a dog did not have a soul, then nothing had.

FLETCHER: The truth is I don’t think people understand what it is I did at Shaffer. I wasn’t there to conduct. Any idiot can move his hands and keep people in tempo. No, it’s about pushing people beyond what’s expected of them. And I believe that is a necessity. Because without it you’re depriving the world of its next Armstrong. Its next Parker. Why did Charlie Parker become Charlie Parker, Andrew? ANDREW: Because Jo Jones threw a cymbal at him. FLETCHER: Exactly. Young kid, pretty good on the sax, goes up to play his solo in a cutting session, fucks up -- and Jones comes this close to slicing his head off for it. He’s laughed off-stage. Cries himself to sleep that night. But the next morning, what does he do? He practices. And practices and practices. With one goal in mind: that he never ever be laughed off-stage again. A year later he goes back to the Reno, and he plays the best motherfucking solo the world had ever heard. Now imagine if Jones had just patted young Charlie on the head and said “Good job.” Charlie would’ve said to himself, “Well, shit, I did do a good job,” and that’d be that. No Bird. Tragedy, right? Except that’s just what people today want. The Shaffer Conservatories of the world, they want sugar. You don’t even say “cutting session” anymore, do you? No, you say “jam session”. What the fuck kind of word is that? Jam session? It’s a cutting session, Andrew, this isn’t fucking Smucker’s. It’s about weeding out the best from the worst so that the worst become better than the best. I mean look around you. $25 drinks, mood lighting, a little shrimp cocktail to go with your Coltrane. And people wonder why jazz is dying. Take it from me, and every Starbucks jazz album only proves my point. There are no two words more harmful in the entire English language than “good job”.

Even in the coldest weather, the harbor, the fields, the woods, all are alive. Blue jays fly, and brown winter wrens; finches feed on birch seed. Tiny, unseen things crawl, hunt, live, die. Lacewings hibernate under the loose bark on the trees. Caddis-fly larvae carry houses made from plant debris on their backs, and aphids huddle on the alders. Wood frogs sleep frozen beneath piles of leaf mold, and beetles and back swimmers, newts and spotted salamanders, their tails thick with stored fat, all flicker in the icy waters above. There are carpenter ants, and snow fleas, and spiders, and black mourning cloak butterflies that flit across the snow like burned paper. White-footed mice and woodland voles and pygmy shrews scurry through the slash, ever-wary of the foxes and weasels and the vicious, porcupine-hunting fishers that share the habitat. The snowshoe hare changes its coat to white in response to the diminishing daylight hours, the better to hide itself from its predators. Because the predators never go away.

On Contemporary Jazz—‘Bebop’” (from a handwritten journal dated February 24–May 5, 1947) focuses more intently on the effects of speed and virtuosity on stylistic changes in the jazz idiom, as embodied in the playing of figures such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk—all of whom Kerouac had seen perform in New York’s Fifty-second Street jazz clubs by the mid-1940s. Flexing his talents as a music writer, Kerouac presents an informed, condensed jazz history of the 1930s and 1940s. He not only recognizes the significance of bebop’s modern, avant-garde revision of jazz’s compositional vocabulary, but views those compositional developments in rhythm and harmony as the virtuosic equivalent of the European classical tradition. If “A Couple of Facts Concerning Laws of Decadence” displays Kerouac’s tendency at times to sentimentalize the premodern, this early essay on bebop valorizes propulsive, forward-looking art, the avant-garde abandon that came to characterize American expressive culture in the decades following World War II.

A fost odată Louis Armstrong, cântând la frumoasa lui trompetă în noroaiele din New Orleans. Înaintea lui fuseseră muzicienii trăsniţi care mărşăluiau la paradele oficiale şi transformau marşurile în ragtime. Pe urmă a apărut swingul şi Roy Elridge, viguros, viril, scoţând din trompetă valuri de forţă şi logică şi subtilitate - se apleca asupra ei cu ochi sclipitori şi cu un zâmbet minunat şi trimitea sunetele prin radio să legene lumea jazzului. Sosise apoi Charlie Parker, care copilărise doar cu maică-sa într-o căsuţă de lemn din Kansas City, unde cântase la saxofon alto printre buşteni, repetând în zile ploioase, mergând în oraş să-i vadă pe bătrânii interpreţi de swing Basie şi Benny Moten cu a lor Hot Lips Page şi celelalte, Charlie Parker plecând de acasă şi sosind în Harlem, întâlnindu-se cu nebunul de Thelonius Monk şi cu celălalt smintit, Gillespie, Charlie Parker la începuturile carierei sale, când cânta învârtindu-se în cerc. Puţin mai tânăr decât Lester Young, tot din K. C., un scrântit de geniu, sumbru, a cărui muzică acoperea toată istoria jazzului. Când îşi ţinea saxofonul în sus, în poziţie orizontală, scotea cel mai formidabil sunet. Pe urmă părul îi crescu şi deveni mai leneş şi saxul îi coborî mai jos, ajunse în sfârşit să-l ţină vertical, şi acum, când purta pantofi cu talpa groasă ca să nu mai simtă cărările tari ale vieţii, instrumentul îi zăcea rezemat de piept, iar el sufla lejer şi scotea fraze tot mai simple. Aceştia erau copiii bopului din noaptea americană.

He’d been toting it, and checking it, and packing and unpacking, all the way since fate was on the river - that’s how long - the Big River” - Fate Marable and his riverboat caliope (Cleo seemed to recall), who hadastonished the landings between New Orleans and St. Louis with the wild, harsh, skirling Gypsy music, and left there, echoing in the young and restless even as it dies off round the bed; to linger with them thereafter, in the pelting roar of November midnights and the clickety-clack of lonesome valley freights, until they up one night and go after it in a battered bus, following the telephone wires that make a zigzag music staff against the evening sky - some variation of that basic beginning could be told for everyone who jazz has touched and altered.

Jazz was the opposite of everything Harry Anslinger believed in. It is improvised, and relaxed, and free-form. It follows its own rhythm. Worst of all, it is a mongrel music made up of European, Caribbean, and African echoes, all mating on American shores. To Anslinger, this was musical anarchy, and evidence of a recurrence of the primitive impulses that lurk in black people, waiting to emerge. “It sounded,” his internal memos said, “like the jungles in the dead of night.”94 Another memo warned that “unbelievably ancient indecent rites of the East Indies are resurrected”95 in this black man’s music. The lives of the jazzmen, he said, “reek of filth.”96 His agents reported back to him97 that “many among the jazzmen think they are playing magnificently when under the influence of marihuana but they are actually becoming hopelessly confused and playing horribly.” The Bureau believed that marijuana slowed down your perception of time98 dramatically, and this was why jazz music sounded so freakish—the musicians were literally living at a different, inhuman rhythm. “Music hath charms,”99 their memos say, “but not this music.” Indeed, Harry took jazz as yet more proof that marijuana drives people insane. For example, the song “That Funny Reefer Man”100 contains the line “Any time he gets a notion, he can walk across the ocean.” Harry’s agents warned: “He does think that.” Anslinger looked out over a scene filled with men like Charlie Parker,101 Louis Armstrong,102 and Thelonious Monk,103 and—as the journalist Larry Sloman recorded—he longed to see them all behind bars.104 He wrote to all the agents he had sent to follow them, and instructed: “Please prepare all cases in your jurisdiction105 involving musicians in violation of the marijuana laws. We will have a great national round-up arrest of all such persons on a single day. I will let you know what day.” His advice on drug raids to his men was always “Shoot first.”106 He reassured congressmen that his crackdown would affect not “the good musicians, but the jazz type.”107 But when Harry came for them, the jazz world would have one weapon that saved them: its absolute solidarity. Anslinger’s men could find almost no one among them who was willing to snitch,108 and whenever one of them was busted,109 they all chipped in to bail him out.