Editor Notes
In 1996 my music teacher introduced me to Gilly Coggins hoping that he would consider giving me lessons. Musically I was a novice and teaching had never been Gilly’s vocation, but I knew that he was a rare and authentic master of the music I loved and if I could study with him it would be incomparable. We arranged to meet one summer afternoon. Gilly lived at 59 1st avenue between 3rd and 4th Street and I was instructed to call him from the corner pay phone when I arrived because his buzzer didn’t work. He picked up my call within a ring and told me to walk over to number 59 where he would throw down his keys from his apartment on the top floor. His key ring which could have been that of a janitor’s, fell to the sidewalk in a loud thud the moment I hung up the phone and just nearly missed the people walking by. I let myself in and went up to his apartment to be vetted for the first of many visits that would take place over the next 8 years.
I was thrilled by Gilly’s mystique and was beside myself to be in the presence of a man who had played and recorded with Lester Young and Miles Davis. I was taken aback by how shy, soft spoken and humble he was. I came to him with the utmost respect and a reverence akin to the kind one feels when meeting a beloved untouchable icon. He warmly welcomed me into his world with no questions asked.
A year after we met, Gilly started to work a gig at the now defunct C-Note Bar on Avenue C and 12th street. Every Sunday for no cover he played 2 sets to an often empty bar. Accidentally the Alphabet City derelicts and beggars would often stumble in. I can still see their confused faces standing at the entrance transfixed and not knowing if they should or should not enter. It was obvious that they didn’t come for the Jazz, but as they entered they were instantaneously hypnotized and transported. They knew not what celestial room they had just entered but immediately recognized via déjà vu dreams, romances, and desires before they had been confiscated by hard times and bad choices. Not only through music was Gilly able to conjure the past that he wanted to relive aloud, but through extremely careful preparations he would share and take you back with him, back to the moment that inspired a particular expression and through it move you to the extent that he himself had originally been moved. Gilly mesmerized and haunted everyone who attended with ballad upon ballad upon ballad and often choruses of rubato. His rubato cut and divided the air in the room into little visible circling cells where deliberately accented choices gave one the illusion that what they were hearing was more precise then the most accurate measurement of time. These circles echoed love, loss, joy, creation and pain, and were evoked as a painting of the most touching sonorous colors. Maybe what composed the essence of Gilly’s profound rubato was what also enabled us to relate to each other. It’s plausible that his masterful and poetic control of going in and out of time actually made time pause and that our age gap no longer mattered. He could stop time just long enough for me to take my time and absorb what he was expressing. In granting me this necessary time he allowed for a true friendship and deep understanding to evolve. This was the atmosphere of those Sunday afternoons and there may not have been anything more moving or consequential in all of New York City. This unique and poignant expression of sensibility was Gillie’s utterly sincere heartbeat.
He started to let me tag along with him and I would follow him wherever he went. We would go out to hear musicians play and I would spend hours with him in his apartment talking and listening to music. He would take time to point out things when we were in the clubs or listening to recordings but never gave me formal lessons. When he wanted to convey something to me he might say:
I like what Sonny played there. Did you hear what he just did? Sonny and Miles are painters. They paint beautiful pictures when they play. I love painters. You know what I mean?
When I met him he was already 70 and had already experienced everything a black man growing up in America when he did could have. He told me horrifying stories in which he just escaped being beaten to death and other stories of grotesque racism. He could have ended up an angry and shattered man. After developing a true bond in which I knew he trusted me completely, he never made me feel like an outsider or a white kid. He told people that I was his grandson and would become livid if anyone questioned how that was possible. I’m not sure how he came to peace or if he came to peace with what he experienced before I met him, but I believe that his soul orbited in a distant sphere that remained unmoved by the habitual everyday ignorances that he had long suffered through. When he spoke of such incidents I sensed that instead of speaking from their center stage, he was recalling his observations from above it.
He meant the world to me and still does today. Knowing Gilly was to know a man and artist where there was no division between the two. He and his expression were one of wisdom and un-frilled beauty. It is a true shame that the world he lived in didn’t roll out the carpet for his every step and make sure that his art was heard. It would have moved the masses if they had heard him in the same way I hope the masses will be moved when they hear him now.
Sam Kulok, New York City, February 2021