Malachi Thompson (1949–2006)

I don't know some of the giants' works as well as I should.

And then, like Malachi Thompson, they're gone.

I'd largely been oblivious to Chicago Jazz until relatively recently.

Ernest Dawkins' New Horizons Ensemble changed that for me, this past April, when they played UMASS Amherst. If New York City is the acknowledged world headquarters for jazz, in all its conventional and experimental forms, Chicago is "the music's" heart and soul. Sorely needed, since its crèche was abandoned, last August. Only in Chicago do avant-garde bands stay together for 20+ years; only there is there as much cooperation as competition.

Prior to this, I had a vague sense of the AACM and what they were about. Had I only known more, sooner.

Two passions I've harbored are for 'the music' and for the sense of community. Community arts programs, such as The Buttonwood Tree in Middletown offer what scant evidence exists that we, as a species, have some intrinsic worth; that not all our institutions are morally bankrupt.

Meanwhile, not 1000 miles due west of Storrs, the AACM's been engaging the culture and the community for over 40 years, now.

It's tempting to place blame for my ignorance elsewhere, but the key irony, in this age of hyper-connectivity and information overload, is that, like salmon swimming upstream against media bombardment, we must seek that which enriches us. We cannot permit our private bandwidth to be squandered by another's choices of which commercials and infotainment we should see and hear.

And so Kevin Johnson, of Delmark Records bears the bad news, via email, that Malachi Thompson has lost his battle with leukemia; and so I seek... and I find an article he wrote for All About Jazz.

And so an inadequate tribute to this lost treasure, tonight.

"Fanfare for Trane" is playing right now...