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.

I heard Sidney Bechet play a Duke Ellington piece and fell in love with the soprano saxophone.

Nobody was playing the soprano saxophone and certainly nobody was trying to do anything with it. So I was all alone. I didn't know that at first.

[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.

I can't imagine playing for any other club,

There is an awful lot of what I call recreational jazz going on, where people go out and learn a particular language or style and become real sharks on somebody else's language.