In the gossipy world of jazz, Monk is also less discussed than many others. Occasionally he will say some splendid thing and the story will make the rounds, but there are personalities more actively bizarre than Monk's around. Rollins is a Rosicrucian who contemplates the East River, letting his telephone ring in his ear for hours while he studies birds from his window. Mingus is so obsessed with goblins from the white world that person to person he is as perverse as a roulette wheel; his analyst wrote the notes for his last record jacket. Coltrane is a health addict - doing push-ups, scrubbing his teeth, grinding up cabbages.

And Miles Davis, Miles broods in his beautiful town house, teaching his son to box so that he won't fear white men, raging at every corner of a world that made him wealthy, a world that is now, in Guinea and the Congo as well as in Alabama and New York, filled with proud little boys who call themselves Miles Davis. He is a man who needs to shout, but his anger is trapped in a hoarse whisper caused by an injury to his vocal chords. The frustration shows. Onstage, he storms inwardly, glaring at his audience, wincing at his trumpet, stabbing and and tugging at his ear. Often his solos degenerate into a curse blown again and again through his horn in four soft beats. But Miles can break hearts. Without attempting the strident showmanship of most trumpeters, he still creates a mood of terror supressed - a lurking and highly exciting impression that he may someday blow his brains out playing. No one, Dizzy Gillespie included, does it so well.

Racial woes are at the heart of much bad behaviour in jazz, and the racial question is largely a confusion between life and art. Negroes say whites cannot play, when they mean that whites have always taken more money out of jazz than their music warranted. Whites complain of "Crow Jim" when what they mean is that work is scarcer than ever - even for them. The fact is that most of the best jazz musicians are Negroes and there is very little work to go around on either side.

At bars and back tables in the 20 or so good jazz clubs in the country, talented, frustrated musicians - many of them historic figures in jazz - hang around in the hope of hearing their names called, like longshoremen at a midnight shape-up. Junkies who were good players a year ago swoop through the clubs in search of a touch, faces faintly dusty, feet itching, nodding, scratching. The simple jazz fans in the audience sit shivering in the cold fog of hostility the players blow down from the stand. A dig-we-must panic inhibits them from displaying any enthusiasm - which only further convinces the players that their music is lost on the wind.

© TIME magazine - 1964