In 1997 John Edgar Wideman wrote an essay for Esquire magazine called “The Silence of Thelonious Monk,” about love and poetry and words (all that jazz), the sublime way in which the quiet between a maestro’s key strokes elicits the glory of all of the above, and about Paris, too. Wideman penned the work, or at least framed its reflections, around his own sojourn in that hub of western culture and democracy and romance and empire and revolution, Gaul—safe haven for so many black American performers, artists, thinkers, and radicals over the postmodern years.
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In that piece or perhaps another, Wideman compared the quiet of Monk’s melodic pauses with the basketball artistry of the Chicago Bulls’s Scottie Pippen, number 33, who mastered accompaniment of the GOAT (“Greatest of All Time,” for those who aren’t familiar with the bop-bop-bop and be of ball), Michael Jordan. The quiet in how Pip handled the leather opened opportunities for contemplation, improvisation, and movement—or the possibility thereof as long as the player followed coach’s word and staved off ball watching. (Watch his midsection instead. Then you’ll anticipate where he’s going with the rock. He can’t get there without his torso.)
But Wideman didn’t say any of that. He just suggested a link between Monk’s long, luscious fingers, with their halting bop from A to E and back again, and the game of the all-star forward. Then he moved on. Wideman has written about love, race, loss, home, and his own wayward brother—imprisoned as an accomplice to murder—in the most stealth, eloquent, and evocative prose. But no subject has culled from him the same silent joy and bop-and-scat melody of language as the sublime game.
