Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘Q: How would you describe the jazz mind?

BE: I don’t know, lemme think a minute. There’s a particular attitude, I think, sort of an instantaneous response or something like that. It’s just sort of a direct thing, and this immediately imposes, I think, a closed area within which you have to work, an area in which you develop the facility, you know. It’s just like if you pick up a ball and you know how to throw, you don’t have to think about throwing it. In jazz it would all have a certain similarity because it has to be within a certain area of facility and knowledge, and that’s the difference because your feeling sends out sort of a motivation and that has to be answered without so much figuring and tearing apart. There has to be a real facility to answer that motivation.’ (from Jazz Photo Archives on Instagram)

Perhaps, in the way that Sunday quickly became poetry day on this blog, Mondays might become ‘zen-adjacent thinking’ day. We’ll see. Anyway, I was a huge Bill Evans fan years before I was a Buddhist!