King Curtis: A Good Man Gone

MAYBE THIS should be a collection of unrelated notes. I’m not sure how the things I’m thinking about fit together. King Curtis is dead. That pain, it seems so senseless. After twenty-five years of playing, he said, he had come to the point where he could play without thought. He got there, as he also said, by working on his axe. Up pops Juan Montanez and his blade. King Curtis is dead. Not many months before I had seen him and talked to him for the first time. He moved me greatly. His own self-estimation was correct: he had achieved effortless connection with his own musical soul.