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The Jazz Lesson by Antoine Herve Thelonious Monk, the Be-Bop griot
What was the inventor of bebop like,
this guy with his gruff, deadpan humor
always trying to make jokes
which were not necessarily understood by his entourage.
He was rather candid, deep, a dreamer, mysterious.
He saw everything but said little, kept things to himself.
Regarding sounds on the streets of Manhattan,
you can imagine that there were lots of klaxons, a lot of honking.
Monk loved to use honking sounds in his music
and was often called Melodious Tonk.
He picked this up from the urban environment,
these dissonant sounds like klaxons,
very often based on the flatted, diminished fifth.
He puts down his cigarette,
he plays a chord, he wipes his forehead,
The difficulty was not to smoke his handkerchief
and wipe his forehead with a cigarette.
For Baudelaire, dandyism was an act of heroism.
He was a real, black American jazzman,
an inventor of a major trend called bebop,
and he did not intend to lower his guard
even at a time of rather rampant apartheid in the United States.