Monk sat down and left the hole where the note should've been. That's the thing drummers had to learn around him — the silence wasn't an accident, it was written. You come up in a band where you fill every gap, and then this man from Rocky Mount, born 1917, puts his elbow somewhere strange and waits, and the whole band has to wait with him.

Up at Minton's in the forties they'd let him play late, after the paying crowd thinned out, and he'd hit two notes a half-step apart and just let them sit there ringing against each other until they decided what they were. Most piano players would smooth that over. He'd lean on it. And the bass player — bless every bass player who ever had to walk under that — would keep the floor steady while the ceiling did whatever it liked.

Listen for the stop in "Blue Monk," the little lurch where you think somebody's dropped a bar. Nobody dropped anything. There's a photograph of him over the open lid of a grand, sunglasses, beret sitting on his shoulder, and down below the strings and the iron frame with 650 stamped on it, like the piano had a serial number and an opinion.