I appreciate the space afforded my thoughts, my heart, at 4AM. With nobody around, the stresses of the day fall away and goodness bubbles up. Even if it upsets my sleep schedule and makes me a little tired during the day, I appreciate these vacations. Tonight's riff: Jazz.

I had the joy, and now what I know to be the honor of spending more than ten years of Wednesdays listening to some of jazz history's bebop swingers, in Seattle at the New Orleans cafe.
That band was the Floyd Standifer quartet, featuring the father of the Jackson Street jazz era in Seattle, Floyd Standifer himself on trumpet, flugelhorn and tenor sax, various piano or guitarists (a sad era), and the incomparable Clarence Acox on drums. When we were lucky, and Floyd was two glasses of wine into the evening by the third set, he'd sing. The perpetual question, how do you keep the music playing?

There was never a cover charge, and the education I received there, at their hands, one week at a time, could never have been planned in any curriculum. During the time I spent there I would encounter some of the greatest the world had to offer, popping by to sit in on a set for the love of the music, steal a few minutes away from a harried tour. One of my favorite memories was when we hosted (I did work for them for about a year) players big and small at a crawfish feed in the rec room of an Old Seattle house owned by one of 'the family'. You'd never know from the outside.

I cut my jazz teeth on Monk, Coltrane, leGrand. When a beau played me Naima, a song named for Coltrane's first wife, and I innocently asked the band to play it (at age 22) they were impressed by my knowledge. Sent the piano player home to brush up on it at the end of the night. (that piano player was the legendary Billy Wallace, who has backed up the likes of the Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, among others) It's a burly tune, and henceforth the ensuing decade, whenever I walked into the joint, even if mid-song, the band burst into a little Naima (an anagram of my own name) in recognition of my arrival. The beau is lost to history, but my love of difficult jazz remains.

Blue Monk is one of the tunes that is etched into my soul. It makes me feel viscerally better, kind of home, to hear it. It's not easy, it doesn't particularly arrive, but it's got an intention about it, its journey is the arrival. Maybe that's what draws me to jazz, always has. I can relate to its persistence of character and recognition that we don't necessarily know where we're going until we get there-its meandering path toward the end of an undefined period of time. It's often beautiful, discordant and sloppy. Like life.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmhP1RgbrrY&feature=player_embedded