By Matt Stieb via Vulture.com
Back in February, Reggie Workman went to visit his friend Henry Grimes, a noted free-jazz bassist with whom he’d come up in Philadelphia, gigging competitively around town as teenagers almost 70 years ago now, at the Northern Manhattan Rehabilitation and Nursing Center on 125th Street. In the crowded hallway by the elevator where Grimes sat in a wheelchair, Workman at first could not believe it was his friend with the long gray beard, as he didn’t respond to his greeting. He had to ask a nurse if that was Grimes. But, Workman recalls on the phone from his Harlem apartment, where he’s been self-quarantined for more than two months now — seeing no one but his daughter Ayana and his wife and creative partner, Maya Milenovic Workman (she and Workman separated fifteen years back and never got divorced), both of whom are determined to keep him safe — the two had a wonderful talk. “It did not feel like a good-bye,” he says.
Workman, a jazz bassist who has taught at the New School since 1987 and still gigs occasionally, turns 83 in June. Many of his friends are not in as fortunate shape as he. Grimes, who’d lived with bipolar disorder and had taken a decades-long hiatus from playing, during which he’d worked as a janitor and at times been homeless, staged a comeback in 2002. But that was cut short by Parkinson’s. The halcyon era of driving Blue Note hard bop and the birth of the avant-garde “New Thing” is more than 60 years in the past now, and to be a fan of jazz in this moment is to understand that if you skipped an icon’s latest date at the Vanguard, there may not be another one. Many of Workmen’s friends were in decline. And this was true even before the pandemic.
Read the full article at: https://www.vulture.com/article/reggie-workman-profile.html
