=== Passage A by Molly Loomis ===
It’s a bird! Tim shouts through the fog. But the petrel, it will stay. I drop my shovel into the cache I am digging and look up, frantically scanning the sky—afraid that, like a shooting star, the bird might vanish before I see it. This is Antarctica. Deep Antarctica—a windswept glacier in the icy interior called the Branscomb. Here, no penguins waddle through rookeries, no seals slip between waves, no albatross glide over icebergs. It has been 43 days since I last saw a living creature other than a human. The white body of a snow petrel blends into the barely dense fog—the outline of its outstretched wings, oversize sails for its delicate body, is barely visible. The bird hovers like a ghost, bobbing on a wave of wind. Its beady coal eyes and obsidian feet are the only signs of color. It circles, etching a carving into my memory. With the subtle shift of a wing, the snow petrel charts a new course—evaporating into the milky soup that surrounds us. It is gone. That night, with my hat pulled hard over my eyes to block out the ever-present daylight, I listen to the rat-tat-tat drumbeat of soft hail against my tent. The image of the petrel keeps resurfacing. Our encounter was brief—less than two minutes—but the lone bird swoops back and forth across the canvas of my closed eyes. Despite their delicate physique and thin veil of feathers, snow petrels live in Antarctica year-round. They spend much of the year at sea, then at breeding time fly up to 200 miles inland to reunite with their mates and scratch out nests high on rocky outcroppings. Back and forth the birds fly from the land to the ocean, where they snatch krill, mollusks, and fish from the icy waters. The food sustains them and their chick until the fledgling is ready to fly.
=== Passage B by Tim Dee ===
Another day in September, I was crossing the Bay of Biscay on a ferry and had seen storm petrels. We were straining our eyes looking for spouting whales miles out across the silvery water toward the horizon. The wind was chasing us hard south and attending to the sea’s surface with diligence. It picked at acres of water, and as it rose in strength it seemed to go back over the sea to work on smaller and smaller patches until every square inch had its drama. And through this, come flying migrant land birds. Two miles of water were below me, a distance that is less known and less knowable than its equivalent in any other direction. By comparison, the thin air of birds’ lives seems solid and well mapped. Up from the sea’s depths, as from a dream, came fin whales; we slid past one another, and their jaws and undersides lit the sea with an otherworldly blue. Though the ferry was bigger, the vastness of the whale was stupendous. Its back broke the surface and it blew, and the sun caught its breath. Through these fleeting rainbow clouds tiny things appeared in my binoculars and grew to gannets as the ship reached them or they passed it. Then there was a tiny thing that didn’t grow and suddenly was upon us, whizzing overhead, and somehow drawn down toward the ferry and to me. I put down my binoculars and turned my head and two inches away from my face, perched on my left shoulder, was a willow warbler. The warbler weighs less than an ounce and has come from who-knows-where to the north; perhaps it was the bird that sang along the railway cutting at the back of my house this spring and lifted my journeys to the work; perhaps it was a Norwegian bird, the descendant of the three or four in a gully that I had helped flush into a funnel trap on Fair Isle nearly thirty years before.
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concerts tend to be, he's fascinated with process as part of the art. This fascination is what’s on display here—a sort of audio-video collage that explores the roots of Monk’s concert, of Monk himself, and of the ties that bind his music to Moran’s own path to jazz. Certainly, there’s a place for jazz repertory—recitals of the classics—but, with some of those classics, the projects are fraught with doom from the get-go. For instance, Charlie Parker not only invented a new way of playing jazz; he also perfected it. A generation of alto saxophonists latched on to his style, but the best of them knew better than to play his tunes very often, for fear of inviting comparison, inevitably to their detriment. In most hands, this would be a formula for twee disaster. But Moran, at 34 (meaning he was born 16 years after Monk’s 1959 concert), is one of the most versatile and imaginative jazz pianists of our time. Moran can play everything and play it brilliantly, preserving the integrity of the source while making it his own. And he does it again in this unlikely postmodern adventure with Monk. Musicians who dare devote an entire album or concert to Thelonious Monk are toying with still more dangerous fire. Monk was a completely distinctive pianist. His jabbing dynamics, his jarring cadences, his oddball intervals that seem at once slapdash and preternaturally precise—he was to the keyboard what Picasso was to the canvas, and nobody can play or paint the same way, to the point where it’s a bit crazy to try. Most of those who make the attempt either round off the edges or sharpen them to the point of parody. The Monk tributes at Town Hall faced a further challenge. Both were commemorating the 50th anniversary of a single concert—Monk’s first stab at leading a big band through his music, performed at the same Town Hall in February 1959. The concert was recorded live and released as an album that came to be hailed as a modern masterpiece. How do you duplicate—or otherwise capture “the spirit”—of that? Try to sound too much like Monk and you risk coming off as a pale imitation; try for something too different and you risk being dismissed as insufficiently Monkish. The first of the two tribute concerts took the former course to an extreme degree. Charles Tolliver, an accomplished trumpeter and arranger who attended the 1959 concert as a teenager, was commissioned to transcribe all the parts (listening over and over to the album, since the original sheet music was lost long ago), put together a 10-piece band, and lead them through a straight re-creation of the event. The musicians were allowed to improvise their solos—this is jazz, after all—but the pianist, Stanley Cowell, was instructed to match Monk’s solos as closely as possible. Miraculously, Tolliver pulled it off. The concert, which could have been an “academic” exercise, was anything but. The musicians had no doubt listened to the album countless times, but they owned these arrangements, playing them as if for the first time—not just a re-creation.