Dear Ted, Thank you so much for the braided layers of emotion, aesthetics and intellect you bring to the first-person narrative genre of Musical Memoirs as carefully crafted after heated bouts of spontaneity by rootsy innovator-human navigator-poet turned performer turned professor collaboratively transformed with neighboring East Bay co…
Dear Ted, Thank you so much for the braided layers of emotion, aesthetics and intellect you bring to the first-person narrative genre of Musical Memoirs as carefully crafted after heated bouts of spontaneity by rootsy innovator-human navigator-poet turned performer turned professor collaboratively transformed with neighboring East Bay colleague Ishmael Reed into indie co-publisher championing those without heed of Market Forces and later ripened into novelist while earning his nut professing comparative lit at U.C.-Berkeley, Al Young.
I also very much appreciate your restraint from letting any judgment issue forth projected onto clearly terminally under-valued muse and artist Dupree Bolton, who I'd surely never been aware of until your first Substack essay brought him to my attention. Were you rolling audio (or video) tape of your interviews and meetings with Dupree Bolton and are the transcripts available anywhere for longer-form musical and other memoirs?
Mitch, you rock bro. The God in you speaks to me and I don't know if you've got to your last stop which is Jesus yet but bro, there is raw truth in you. I'm here for it.
This is the first experience I've had of the man whose name I first thought was AI (Artificial Intelligence) Young until I noticed that what I saw as an upper case i was actually an l (as in Al). I'm truly amazed by this man's writing about Coleman Hawkins - like, he's riffing with the Bean. And finally, tonight I saw this on Monk in, 'Drowning in the Sea of Love' - and I'm going to sleep happy.
"Thelonious Monk was as much a part of me then as he is now. All kids who listen to Monk's music seem to love it at once. It's a child-like music; compelling and attractive in a fundamental way. There's no way, really, to put this all in language (spoken luggage), but when has being at a loss for words ever stopped a writer? On one of those nights, one crazier than usual, I spent a rapt three sets at the Gallery with my guitar buddy Perry Lederman and with Gordon Hope, a drinker with writing ambitions. We had put away a gang of ale and cheese, crackers and onions over at McSorley's Irish Saloon, and now we were checking out Monk, who had Coltrane with him just then. It was also a night when Steve Lacy was sitting in with the group on soprano saxophone. Charlie Rouse was the other hornman. Actually, Monk and Trane were being featured separately as a double bill, but Trane's energy level was such at the time that he managed to ease in on Monk's sets with no apparent strain."
Dear Ted, Thank you so much for the braided layers of emotion, aesthetics and intellect you bring to the first-person narrative genre of Musical Memoirs as carefully crafted after heated bouts of spontaneity by rootsy innovator-human navigator-poet turned performer turned professor collaboratively transformed with neighboring East Bay colleague Ishmael Reed into indie co-publisher championing those without heed of Market Forces and later ripened into novelist while earning his nut professing comparative lit at U.C.-Berkeley, Al Young.
https://neglectedbooks.com/?p=205
1 thought on “Al Young’s Musical Memoirs”
I also very much appreciate your restraint from letting any judgment issue forth projected onto clearly terminally under-valued muse and artist Dupree Bolton, who I'd surely never been aware of until your first Substack essay brought him to my attention. Were you rolling audio (or video) tape of your interviews and meetings with Dupree Bolton and are the transcripts available anywhere for longer-form musical and other memoirs?
Keep on doing.
Health and balance.
Appreciatively and respectfully yours,
Mitch Ritter\Paradigm Sifters, Code Shifters, PsalmSong Chasers
Lay-Low Studios, Ore-Wa (Refuge of Atonement Seekers)
Media Discussion List\LookseeInnerEarsHearHere
Mitch, you rock bro. The God in you speaks to me and I don't know if you've got to your last stop which is Jesus yet but bro, there is raw truth in you. I'm here for it.
This is the first experience I've had of the man whose name I first thought was AI (Artificial Intelligence) Young until I noticed that what I saw as an upper case i was actually an l (as in Al). I'm truly amazed by this man's writing about Coleman Hawkins - like, he's riffing with the Bean. And finally, tonight I saw this on Monk in, 'Drowning in the Sea of Love' - and I'm going to sleep happy.
"Thelonious Monk was as much a part of me then as he is now. All kids who listen to Monk's music seem to love it at once. It's a child-like music; compelling and attractive in a fundamental way. There's no way, really, to put this all in language (spoken luggage), but when has being at a loss for words ever stopped a writer? On one of those nights, one crazier than usual, I spent a rapt three sets at the Gallery with my guitar buddy Perry Lederman and with Gordon Hope, a drinker with writing ambitions. We had put away a gang of ale and cheese, crackers and onions over at McSorley's Irish Saloon, and now we were checking out Monk, who had Coltrane with him just then. It was also a night when Steve Lacy was sitting in with the group on soprano saxophone. Charlie Rouse was the other hornman. Actually, Monk and Trane were being featured separately as a double bill, but Trane's energy level was such at the time that he managed to ease in on Monk's sets with no apparent strain."