Like most of the participants in our ongoing dialogue with African American music writers, Gregory Thomas, has both feet and hands in several camps.  Greg’s byline has been featured in numerous publications, including Salon.com., Guardian Observer (London), American Legacy, Africana.com, BlackAmericaWeb.com, Daily News (NY, NY), TBWT.com, Callaloo and others.  He was the founding editor-in-chief of Harlem World magazine. 

Additionally Gregory Thomas has taught jazz education at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Thurgood Marshall Academy, and the Frederick Doublass Academy for the Jazz Museum in Harlem’s Harlem Speaks Education Initiative.

As an electronic journalist Greg details his web-television exploits below.  He has hosted radio specials on WBAI (99.5 FM, Pacifica Radio in New York City), where he hosts a regular jazz show the first Monday each month from 9:00-11:00 p.m.

Writer-Producer-Broadcaster

Gregory Thomas

What motivated you to write about this music?

The foundation was the music my parents listened to which included jazz, and my deep study and enjoyment of the giants of jazz I’d been listening to very intently since high school.  Inspired by a high school stage band concert, I began to play the alto sax at 15 years old.  I took lessons with a local Staten Island legend, Caesar DiMauro; studied music theory and saxophone method books; played in various classical and jazz ensembles; tuned in regularly to WRVR and WBGO; and minored in music at Hamilton College, where I also hosted a jazz radio show for three years.  Sharing a melody line with trumpet icon Clark Terry there, on April 17, 1984 in the college chapel, was an epiphany, a mystical experience of musical ecstasy.

    A few years after graduating from Hamilton I met Keith Clinkscales and Leonard Burnett, later of Vibe and Savoy, who launched their first publication, Urban Profile, in the late ’80s.  I was more troubled by how relatively few black folk attend live jazz performances than by the dearth of black writers about jazz.  So Keith and Len published my very first professional piece: "Why Black Folks Should Listen to Jazz."  I became a staff writer for the Brooklyn-based City Sun a few years later, and wrote about jazz and other subjects.  Since then I’ve free-lanced for many publications.

    My initial goals as a jazz journalist were to report accurately, and educate readers gently, while describing a recording or a concert so the reader felt that he or she had experienced it too.  Usually if I don’t like a performance, live or on record, I just don’t write about it.  I’m not into bashing artists to feed my ego or further my career.  My major objective now is to share my knowledge and adoration of the music on as many platforms to as many people as possible — in print, on radio, on stage at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, and on the internet and mobile through the TV series I host, Jazz It Up!

When you started covering the music were you aware of the dearth of African Americans writing about serious music?

Well it wasn’t as bad then as it seems to me now.  I’d read pieces on jazz by Stanley Crouch and Greg Tate in the Village Voice, Gene Seymour in the Nation and New York Newsday, as well as jazz writings by Harlemite Herb Boyd, and a contemporary of mine, Eugene Holley, in various publications.  Playthell Benjamin wrote about jazz (and a whole lot more) for the Voice and other periodicals.  All of these guys were in New York in my early years as a writer, as were the ever-looming presence of the elder grand masters — Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray.

Why do you suppose that’s still such a glaring disparity — where you have a significant number of black musicians playing this music but so few black jazz media commentators?

I suppose that most black commentators who focus on music generally deal with more popular genres.  And in 2009, there are less and less publications that even cover "serious music" anymore.  The glaring disparity has to do with black musicians being acculturated early on to the cultural power and appeal of jazz expression, particularly since their ancestors founded and innovated the blues idom vernacular called jazz, versus black media commentators who privilege popular forms (and the career benefits that could bring) over jazz, a fine art that they may not even like or feel qualified to write about.

      Pop and youth culture hold a powerful sway.  You have to go deep in the woodshed to write about jazz with substance.  Most black commentators, even those in the academy, apparently aren’t ready, willing or able to go that deep in the shed about the musical form at the very pinnacle of their culture, as developed in the United States.  With some notable exceptions, this has been the case through the entire history of the music.

{Editor’s note: on that academy tip, one wonders if we will ever see the likes of such leading black scholar-intellectuals as Henry Louis Gates, Cornell West, or Michael Eric Dyson write extensively on the subject of jazz music, with the same degree of vigor with which at least West and Dyson have taken up the pen to wax rhapsodic on black pop.  Still waitin’…]

    But hey, on the other hand, perhaps writing about the fine arts, about "serious music," considering our difficult history in this land, was aptly viewed as a luxury until more recent times.

Do you think that disparity or dearth of African American writers contributes to how the music is covered?

    Sure, but I think we can only take that point so far.  Most writers covering jazz readily admit the black American roots of the music, so that’s a commonality.  But there are different views on the value of certain styles or sub-genres, and so different emphases arise based on stylistic preferences.  These and other factors such as those I detail later play an important role in how the music is covered as much or more than race.

    As in politics, where race doesn’t necessarily determine whether one is, say, liberal or conservative, African-American writers won’t share the same opinions about the music based solely on their cultural identification.  Anyway, white and other writers who don’t identify as "black" still share in the values and expressive content of black American culture by a sort of cultural osmosis, because that blues idiom is in the very fabric, the fiber, of American society and culture writ large.  If you consider yourself American… you part black too!

Since you’ve been writing and broadcasting about serious music, have you ever found yourself questioning why some musicians may be elevated over others and is it your sense that has anything to do with the lack of cultural diversity among the writers covering this music?

Yes, I have at times questioned why some musicians may be elevated over others.  And though the back story is usually more complicated than a simple "race" analysis, race being an omnipresent cancer in the body politic, does play a role.  It’s important to note that race and cultural diversity are actually two different things — the confusion between race and culture has been deadly — but I think it better to confront race in jazz to best move beyond it.  Race is ultimately trivial and stupid but to transcend it we must face the illusion/delusion of race squarely; this is especially true in the era of Obama.

    Record label and public relations support factor in such elevations, as does a need for some writers to find the "next hot artist."  So many good jazz artists labor in relative obscurity that when they get some attention, I usually don’t have a problem with it.  Cultural diversity among writers will flower more perspectives, but not a consensus on which artists deserve to be elevated over others.

    However, I don’t agree with certain musicians being called "jazz" artists when they themselves will say, for instance, that they play "instrumental R&B."  The way the term "jazz" has been marketed is problematic too, especially by festival promoters and the radio industry (i.e. "smooth jazz").  They endeavor to profit from the veneer and sophisticated brand of jazz while pulling in other genres to make more money than they could with jazz proper.  That’s business.  Kenny G, for instance, is a popular pop/R&B instrumentalists, but when he is elevated by the mainstream press as a "jazz" artist due to record sales and radio play over, say, Kenny Garrett, the most influential jazz alto of his generation, that’s hype, not an accurate evaluation of genre or of artistic weight and authority.

    Furthermore, I think there is an undercurrent of race in why artists such as Diana Krall, Chris Botti, and Norah Jones become popular performing a mellow, soothing, less-experimental style of music.  They fill a niche in the music and radio industries and for certain market segments.  But I don’t criticize those artists for that, it’s not their fault as individuals that the dumb idea of race is so entrenched that they benefit from white privilege as well as their musical style and talent as artists.

What’s your sense of the indifference of so many African American-oriented publications towards this music, despite the fact that so many African American artists continue to creat serious music?

Jazz is a fine art and most black publications focus on popular music.  As Albert Murray says, the quality and range of aesthetic statement can be grouped into folk, pop, and fine art categories, for pedagogical purposes.  Our celebrity and profit-driven society overall doesn’t value fine art based on intrinsic or long-term value.  If it doesn’t have a big audience, then it won’t be considered relevant to most black publications because they compete in a media field where popularity and celebrity trumps all.

    This is especially sad and tragic because elder masters such as Hank Jones, Roy Haynes, Clark Terry, Wayne Shorter, Sonny Rollins, Phil Woods, Barry Harris, Charles McPherson, Jimmy Heath, Reggie Workman, Louis Hayes, Jimmy Cobb, Ben Riley, Benny Golson, Buster Williams, Jon Hendricks, Melba Joyce, Gloria Lynne, Ahmad Jamal, and Grady Tate are still on the scene.  I could easily name 20 more living legends unknown to a wider black audience, or to the general public.  The audiences consuming black publications are aware of Quincy Jones and Herbie Hancock, and even Wynton Marsalis, but they usually aren’t hip to the just-mentioned senior giants.  To re-phrase Carter G. Woodson, this is the mis-education of the black American.  These artists should be revered and honored by black publications and media outlets as a cultural and ancestral imperative.

    American Legacy magazine, for which I’ve written features on Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, is one of the few African American periodicals I can point to that delves into the historical and cultural depths beyond pop culture and contemporary hype.

    Oprah’s fame and world-wide celebrity is larger than just a black audience, so she could reach that demographic and more.  I wrote an open letter to Oprah in All About Jazz inspiring her to have more jazz musicians on her show, not just as performers, but as commentators.  Jazz musicians are some of the most worldly, sophisticated and smart people I know.  Exposing wider audiences to jazz musicians as artists and as thinkers is one way to address the low cultural moment in which we find ourselves.

    The public education system and the music industry are largely at fault for the current state of affairs, where a vicious cycle of mediocrity predominates.

    It’s incumbent upon those of us who love and value this music’s contribution to this nation and the world to be more entrepreneurial.  [The Independent Ear] is an exampole of this.  My online jazz news and entertainment series Jazz It Up! is another.

How would you react to the contention that the way and tone of how serious music is covered has something to do with who is writing about it?

How serious music is covered is a matter of individual taste, depth of historical, aesthetic, literary and musical knowledge. native talent and disciplined application of all the above.  These factors fluctuate, of course, among writers of varying backgrounds.  How the music is covered also has to do with how the writer views his or her social and cultural function.  I recently produced and moderated a panel discussion at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem that brought together jazz critics and scholars (Gary Giddins, Howard Mandel, John Gennari) and jazz musicians (Steve Coleman, Lewis Nash, Jon Gordon and Vijay Iyer) for a dialogue.  I ventured a definition of the role of jazz criticism: to be a bridge between the artists, the art form and the public for the sake of publicity, education, and aesthetic evaluation.  That’s how I see my role, so that orientation grounds the tone and approach I take when I write about the music.

In your experience writing about serious music what have been some of your most rewarding encounters?

Getting to meet, interview and even become friends with musicians who play the music that most moves my soul has been extremely rewarding.  Of course hearing great music live that I otherwise may not have been able to afford is another.  When a reader says to me "I felt like I was there," I say to myself: "mission accomplished"!  There is also a community of academics and scholars with whom I’ve interacted as a member of the Jazz Study Group at Columbia University.  I’m grateful to Robert O’Meally for asking me to join in 1999, as I worked towards a doctorate in American Studies at NYU.  (I decided not to pursue academia as a career.)

    Last, but far from least are friendships and mentor relationships I’ve nurtured over the years that have jazz, and an abiding appreciation of black American culture, at the root.

What obstacles have you run up against — besides difficult editors and indifferent publications — in your efforts at covering jazz?

The main obstacle, other than those you’ve mentioned, is making a living covering jazz.  So, like many others, I’ve had to supplement coverage of jazz with other work to support my family.  Another obstacle has been getting due recognition in the jazz press about Jazz it Up!  Though we had a little coverage in Downbeat and JazzTimes when we launched in 2007, since then the coverage hasn’t been commensurate with what we’ve accomplished.  Jazz it Up! is the only online TV series devoted to this music, and over the course of 18 half hour episodes we’ve garnered close to 3 million viewers online.  That’s jazz news that warrants coverage.

    Ironically, the organization that produces and presents the Emmy Awards has recognized Jazz it Up! in fall 2008, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences nominated Jazz it Up! for a Global Media Award in the Long Form Entertainment category.  Not one jazz publication — online or otherwise — covered this achievement.

If you were pressed to list several musicians who may be somewhat bubbling under the surface or just about to break through as far as wider spread public consciousness, why might they be and why?

Jonathan Batiste, a young pianist from New Orleans, is a charismatic, fresh voice on jazz piano.  I’m also excited about pianist Gerald Clayton, who comes from a great family of musicians; his touch, taste and technique are superb.  Dominick Farinacci and Theo Croker (Doc Cheatham’s grandson) are two young trumpeters who deserve wider recognition for their fidelity to the tradition while attempting to forge new pathways.  Vibraphonist Warren Wolf plays jazz andd other genres of music with deep integrity and verve.  He’s a favorite of Christian McBride, so that speaks for itself.  Edmar Castaneda is an incredible harpist on the verge too; he plays the harp with a percussive virtuosity that is a wonder to hear and see.

What have been the most intriguing new records you’ve heard this year so far?

Benny Golson, New Time, New ‘Tet

Bobby Broom, Boby Broom Plays for Monk

Christian McBride & Inside Straight, Kind of Brown

Cyrus Chestnut, Spirit

Roy Hargrove Big Band, Emergence

Vijay Iyer, Historicity

Take 6, The Standard

You can check out Greg Thomas’ Jazz it Up! internet TV series and catch up with his latest exploits at www.jazzituptv.com.

Robin D.G. Kelley, author of the exhaustively-researched and superb new Thelonious Monk biography Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of An American Original (Free Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster), contributed the following piece to the recent 75th birthday commemoration for Amiri Baraka.  He granted re-print permission to The Independent Ear.  Read Robin’s contribution to our ongoing dialogue between African American music writers Ain’t But a Few of Us by clicking on the month of October.

Author & USC Professor Robin D.G. Kelley

                   What Amiri Baraka Taught Me About Thelonious Monk

                       by Robin D.G. Kelley

"Monk was my main man."

            — Amiri Baraka

    I just spent the past fourteen years of my life researching and writing a biography of pianist/composer Thelonious Monk, and over thirty years attempting to play his music.  My obsession with Monk can be traced back to many things and many people, but paramount among them is Amiri Baraka.  Let me explain.

    My path to "jazz" began like so many others of my generation who came of age in the late 1970s — with the funky commercial fusions of Grover Washington, Jr., Bob James, Patrice Rushen, Earl Klugh, Ronnie Laws, through Stanley Clarke and Chick Corea.  But inexplicably, at the tender age of seventeen or eighteen I took a giant leap directly into the so-called "avant-garde", or the New Thing.  By 1980, the New Thing wasn’t so new (and as Baraka and others have shown us, it wasn’t so new in the 1960s), but the music appealed to my rebellious attitude, my faux sense of sophistication, and to the way I heard the piano.  As a young neophyte piano player and sometimes bassist, my heroes became Cecil Taylor, Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, Archie Shepp, late ‘Trane, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, those cats.  I knew almost nothing about bebop, nor could I name anyone in Ellington’s orchestra except for Duke.  I just thought free jazz was the beginning and end of all "real" music.  My stepfather introduced me to Charlie Parker, Monk, Bud Powell, Dexter Gordon, but I wasn’t yet ready to fully appreciate bebop.  Then in one of my many excursions to "Acres and Acres of Books" in Long Beach, California, I picked up two used paperbacks by one LeRoi Jones: Blues People and Black Music.

    I dove into Black Music first.  Imagine my surprise when I discovered a thoughtful piece on Monk in a book that I understood then to be a collection of essays primarily about the "New Thing."  Don’t get me wrong; I dug Monk from the first listen.  I had heard an LP recorded live at the Five Spot Cafe with Monk and tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin.  I wore it out, especially their rendition of Monk’s "Evidence".  But Monk wasn’t part of the jazz avant-garde.  He was already an old man when Ornette Coleman made his debut, or so I thought.  Baraka’s Black Music corrected me, schooling me on the roots and branches of free jazz.  Between his piece on "Recent Monk," his brilliant treatise, "The Changing Same (R&B and the New Black Music)," and several other pieces on white critics and the jazz avant-garde, I began to hear Monk and "free jazz" quite differently.  It was Baraka who dubbed the jazz avant-garde the "New Black Music," insisting that it emerged directly out of a Black tradition, bebop, as opposed to the Third Stream experiements of Gunther Schuller, Lee Konitz, and Lennie Tristano.  While Black musicians might have milked Western classical traditions for definitions and solutions to the "engineering" problems of contemporary jazz, Europe is not the source.  "[J]azz and blues," he writes, "are Western musics; products of an Afro-American culture."

    Of the few hundred times I listened to Monk, Johnny Griffin, drummer Roy Haynes, and bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik tear the roof off the Five Spot, I probably heard Baraka, shouting his approval and urging them on from his table near the bandstand.  It was August of 1958 and Baraka (when he was still LeRoi Jones) had been an East Village resident for the past year.  He became a Five Spot regular when Coltrane was with Monk in the summer and fall of 1957.  His constant presence gave him unique insights into Monk’s music and the challenges it created for the musicians who played with him.  Indeed, Baraka was one of the few critics to admit that "opening night [Coltrane] was struggling with all the tunes."  Baraka just didn’t come to dig the music, he studied Monk.

    In fact, he was arguably the first American critic, along with Martin Williams, to really understand what Monk was doing and why a new generation of self-described avant-garde musicians was drawn to Monk’s music and his ideas.  By the time Baraka entered the fray, most critics had either dismissed Monk for having no technique or formal training as a pianist, or they praised him for his eccentricity and inventiveness precisely for his lack of technique or formal training.  For Baraka, the whole issue of Monk’s technique was nonsense:  "I want to explain technical so as not to be confused with people who think that Thelonious Monk is ‘a fine pianist, but limited technically.’  But by technical, I mean more specifically being able to use what important ideas are contained in the residue of history or in the now-swell of living.  For instance, to be able to double time Liszt piano pieces might help one become a musician, but it will not make a man aware of the fact that Monk was a greater composer than Liszt.  And it is the consciousness, on whatever level, of facts, ideas, etc., like this that are the most important parts of technique."

    While Baraka’s fellow Beat generation writers embraced Monk because they heard spontaneous, instinctual feeling and emotion as opposed to intellect, Baraka saw no such opposition; he was careful not to divorce consciousness and intellect from emotion.  He writes, "The roots, blues and bop, are emotion.  The technique, the ideas, the way of handling the emotion.  And this does not leave out the consideration that certainly there is pure intellect that can come out of the emotional experience and the rawest emotions that can proceed from the ideal apprehension of any hypothesis."  Like his insights about Monk’s technique, the point underscored Baraka’s general claim that bebop was roots music, no matter how deep the imperative for experimentation, because it carries deep emotions, historical and personal.  The music of the Blues People.

    And if Thelonious Monk was anything, he was Blues People.  Born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, the grandson of enslaved Africans, delivered by a midwife who was thirteen when Emancipation Day came, Monk was raised by parents who grew up picking cotton and survived on odd jobs and cleaning white folks’ homes.  His mother brought Thelonious and his two siblings to New York in search of a better life, and while they enjoyed more opportunities the Monks settled in the poor, predominantly black neighborhood of San Juan Hill (West 63rd Street, Manhattan).  Thelonious grew up listening to the blues, jazz, the rhythms of calypso and merengue, hymns and gospel music (he spent two years traveling through the Midwest with an evangelist).  His mother Barbara, scrubbed floors to pay for his classical piano lessons, and Monk continued his studies under the tutelage of the great Harlem stride pianists of the day.  Monk told pianist Billy Taylor "that Willie "The Lion’ and those guys that had shown him respect had… ’empowered’ him… to do his own thing.  That he could do it and that his thing is worth doing.  It doesn’t sound like Tatum.  It doesn’t sound like Willie ‘The Lion’.  It doesn’t sound like anybody but Monk and this is what he wanted to do.  He had the confidence.  The way that he does those things is the way he wanted to do them."

    Willie ‘The Lion’ never mentions Thelonious in his memoirs, but he described the all-night cutting sessions which sharpened Monk’s piano skills:  "Sometimes we got carving battles going that would last for four or five hours.  Here’s how these bashes worked: the Lion would pound the keys for a mess of choruses and then shout to the next in line, ‘Well, all right, take it from there,’ and each tickler would take his turn, trying to improve on a melody…  We would embroider the melodies with our own original ideas and try to develop patterns that had more originality than those played before us.  Sometimes it was just a question as to who could think up the most patterns within a given tune.  It was pure improvisation."  A later generation of bebop pianists would often be accused of one-handedness; their right hands flew along with melodies and improvisations, while their "weak" left hands just plunked chords.  A weak left hand was one of Smith’s pet peeves among the younger bebop piano players.  "Today the big problem is no one wants to work their left hand — modern jazz is full of single-handed piano players.  It takes long hours of practice and concentration to perfect a good bass moving with the left hand and it seems as though the younger cats have figured they can reach their destination without paying their dues."

    Teddy Wilson, though only five years older than Monk but considered a master tickler of the swing generation, had nothing but praise for Thelonious’s piano playing.  "Thelonious Monk knew my playing very well, as well as that of Tatum, [Earl] Hines, and [Fats] Waller.  He was exceedingly well-grounded in the piano players who preceded him, adding his own originality to a very sound foundation."  Indeed, it was this very foundation that exposed him to techniques and aesthetic principles that would become essential qualities of his own music.  He heard players "bend" nots on the piano, or turn the beat around (the bass note on the one and three might be reversed to two and four, either accidentally or deliberately), or create dissonant harmonies with "splattered notes" and chord clusters.  He heard things in those parlor rooms and basement joints that, to modern ears, sounded avant-garde.  They loved to disorient listeners, to displace the rhythm by playing in front or behind the beat, to produce surprising sounds that can throw listeners momentarily off track.  Monk embraced these elements in his own playing and exaggerated them.

    Finally, Baraka was one of the first critics to predict that Monk’s long awaited success in the early 1960s might negatively impact his music.  Indeed, this was the point of his essay, "Recent Monk."  Thelonious’s fan base had expanded considerably after he signed with Columbia Records, made a couple of international tours, and appeared on the cover of Time Magazine in 1964.  But Baraka noted that Monk’s quartet, like so many successful groups, began to fall into a routine that sometimes dulled the band’s sense of adventure.  Baraka warned, "once [an artist] had made it safely to the ‘top,’ [he] either stopped putting out or began to imitate himself so dreadfully that early records began to have more value than new records or in-person appearances…  So Monk, someone might think taking a quick glance, has really been set up for something bad to happen to his playing."  To some degree, Baraka thought this was already happening and he placed much of the blame on his sidemen.  Of course, Monk hired great musicians during this period — Charlie Rouse (tenor sax), bassists Butch Warren and Larry Gales, and drummers Frankie Dunlap and Ben Riley.  But the repertoire remained pretty much the same, and the fire slowly dissipated.  Monk himself continued to play remarkably, but there was an element of predictability that overrode all the amazing things he was doing.  "{S}ometimes," Baraka lamented, "one wishes Monk’s group wasn’t so polished and impeccable, and that he had some musicians with him who would be willing to extend themselves a little further, dig a little deeper into the music and get out there somewhere near where Monk is, and where his compositions always point to."

    Baraka never gave up on Monk, and while I can’t prove it I suspect Monk’s music continues to have a strong philosophical and aesthetic influence on both his literary and political work.  But more than anything, I will always be grateful to Baraka for helping me discover Monk, for revealing that Monk’s rootedness in this history, in family, in tradition explains why his music, as modern as it is, can sound like it’s a century old.  It explains why he always remained a stride pianist; why his repertoire was peppered with sacred classics like "Blessed Assurance" and "We’ll Understand it Better, By and By"; and why the careful listeners can hear in Monk’s whole-tone runs, forearm clusters, unusual tempos and spaces, shouts, field hollers, the rhythm of a slow moving train, rent parties, mourners, children playing stickball and marbles, and the Good Humor or Mr. Softee truck on a summer evening.

    Like most scholars and other voyeurs, we are always listening for, and looking at, art for personal tragedy rather than collective memory, collective histories.  Amiri Baraka understood the fallacy of this approach.   Perhaps this is why he writes in the poem "Funk Lore" (one of several associated with Monk):

                    That’s why we are the blues

                                Ourselves

                                That’s why we

                                 Are the

                                 Actual

                                 song

It should be noted that the source of the various passages from Baraka’s writings on Monk, as well as the interview segments and book passages Mr. Kelley quotes in this appreciation of Amiri Baraka are meticulously footnoted — as they are in Kelley’s exhaustively-researched book.  For the sake of webzine brevity we elected not to include Robin’s footnotes and source materials… and also to urge you to run out and purchase your copy of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of An American Original… and do that with a quickness!

Referencing this special book, here’s a passage on Ellington’s sense of Thelonious (chapter 10, p. 138) during a time when Monk and his music were widely misunderstood, or dismissed as some sort of hopeless eccentric by musicians, critics, and the listening public:

"During the summer of 1948, while Duke Ellington’s band was traveling by train in the southern coast of England, trumpter Ray Nance decided to pass the time away by listening to records on a little portable phonography he had picked up.  "I put on one of my Thelonious Monk records.  Duke was passing by in the corridor, and he stopped and asked ‘Who’s that playing?’  I told him.  ‘Sounds like he’s stealing some of my stuff,’ he said.  So he sat down and listened to my records, and he was very interested.  He understood what Monk was doing."