IT WAS FIFTY YEARS AGO TODAY

I was in the service when this came out, busted from a court martial and supplementing my meager pay with nightclub gigs playing jazz piano...Monk was my main music maker model, and when the mag came out I tore off the cover and hung it on my wall...

...several months later I married, and my wife framed it for me, it still hangs on my wall, over my piano...difficult to measure the impact this cover had but it clearly was big and worldwide...not just because he was an African-American on the cover of the world's most important news magazine (at a time when many African-Americans were still often legally discriminated against and most de facto), and a jazz musician, but a jazz composer and music maker unlike any other and certainly way unlike (i.e. way too avant grade or "progressive") what was considered palatable to not just the general audience but even many jazz fans at the time...

...a truly seminal moment when many indicators of a different kind of future for the USA and the world intersected in this one image...powerful and iconic...I still miss Monk...