[This week Marcel listened to the just-rediscovered tapes of a 1957 session of the Thelonious Monk quartet with John Coltrane, at Carnegie Hall.] Hugely exciting. Two geniuses at their peak. ... Absorbing and imaginative - they never met in real life.

It was proving difficult to find MONK programmers.

When I heard Monk in person in 1955, he was playing with a quartet in a small club. The place was full of musicians, but there was no public at all.

It's time we rediscovered the thrill of space,

But … the other thing besides that which is true is that we have … been rediscovered or discovered by a new audience.

Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have perished which I imagined would last for ever, and new ones have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are hard to understand.