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He is an adventurer, and he loves an adventurous imagination." "Imagination" is a word that cropped up when Golson uncorked an eloquent declamation on the title of Horizon Ahead, which he traced to conversations with two fellow jazz immortals: tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins and pianist Hank Jones (1918-2010).
"Sonny basically said, 'There's no end to this music we play.' He's right. We musicians don't say, 'I know everything there is to know; there's nothing else to discover.' We know it's just the opposite. "Hank Jones put it another way. He said, 'The horizon is ahead.' I didn't know what he meant at first. But we're never satisfied. To be satisfied is a caveat that we have to avoid, because then you slow down. You stop stretching out. You stop reaching. It's like falling overboard of a ship. The ship sails over the horizon without you, and you tread water, and you're exist ing for as long as you can, and then it's over. No, we have to stay on the ship. There's always something to learn, so we've always got something to aim for, to hope for. But of course, we need the talent. We need the one thing that's always axiomatic with the jazz musician: Imagination. Extrapolations. New ways to do the old things. That's what we do. If there's no imagination to create things that have no prior existence- and that's what improvising is- then you may as well get a job as a parking attendant or a cook. When we go to sleep at night and wake up the next morning, what do we intuitively say to ourselves? 'What can I do better today than I did yesterday?' Age doesn't usually interfere with that, as opposed to an athlete.
I tell my audiences: 'Can you imagine an 89-year-old quarterback?' I'm being ridiculous when I say it, of course."
"I like to talk," Golson said, and his oracular soliloquies - delivered with an orotund baritone voice in complete sentences and paragraphs, even chapters, using vocabulary bedrocked in King's English - are a beloved staple of Golson's performances.
Many of those stories appear in Golson's 2016 memoir, Whisper Not: The Autobiography Of Benny Golson (Temple University Press), which features a lovingly rendered portrait of the young John Coltrane, his close friend. The book also documents various encounters with Thelonious Monk; eyewitness accounts of trumpet battles between Clifford Brown and Fats Navarro and between Brown and Louis Armstrong; what it was like to play the debut engagement of the Jazztet at the FiveSpot opposite Ornette Coleman, when Coleman first hit New York; and how it felt to be recognized by Duke Ellington, who asked if he wouldn't consider contributing something to the orchestra.
In the book's introduction, Golson compares his journey to that of the hero in Homer's The Odyssey, which itself represents a collective consensus of orally related tales. 'Tm sure the warrior who invented the Trojan horse ... was too restless to keep his head on the pillow when he got back to Ithaca," Golson writes. "I'll bet that Odysseus - who tricked the Cyclops, faked out Circe, avoided the Sirens, and rafted the hellish seas between Scylla and Charybdis had one more adventure in him.