35 things Cecil Fontaine from New Orleans, LA actually loves
- Miles Davis, Kind of Blue, the whole thing, but especially So What
- A second line on a Saturday afternoon in Treme
- My Selmer Mark VI tenor, serial number 125xxx, 1965
- Red beans and rice on a Monday, the way God intended
- The Spotted Cat Music Club at midnight
- Thelonious Monk's hands
- Playing for a room that's listening, really listening
- Frenchmen Street before the tourists found it
- My father's record collection, still on his shelves, still in order
- A po'boy from Parkway, the roast beef, dressed
- Wayne Shorter's Speak No Evil
- The Mississippi at sunset from the Algiers Point ferry
- Benny Golson, who told me to play less and say more
- Gumbo, my aunt Odette's, with okra, never with file
- The space in a Miles Davis solo where he doesn't play
- Bird's solo on Just Friends, which I've transcribed four times and still don't fully understand
- Jazz Fest at 4pm, when the sun starts to soften
- August Wilson's plays
- The belief that swing is a moral position
- A cold Abita Amber after a four-hour gig
- New Orleans after a rainstorm, when the streets steam
- Sonny Rollins on the Williamsburg Bridge, the legend of it
- Magazine Street on a Tuesday, no crowd, just the neighborhood
- A well-voiced chord on a piano you've never played before
- Dexter Gordon in 'Round Midnight, the acting, not the playing
- Crawfish boil in someone's backyard, April
- The way my mother hums while she cooks, always Ellington
- Chet Baker's voice, which had no business being that beautiful
- John Coltrane's sheets of sound, 1957-1958
- The Maple Leaf Bar on a Monday, rebirth brass band
- Beignets from Cafe Du Monde, powdered sugar on a dark suit
- Herbie Hancock's Head Hunters
- The idea that tradition is a living thing, not a museum
- Teaching a kid their first blues scale and watching it click
- This city, which has broken my heart and put it back together more times than I can count