Liminal Jazz Café: Mulligan Meets Monk

The café is half-empty, which is to say it is half-full of ghosts. A place that exists just outside of time, between two beats, the space where the note almost happens but never does. The sign flickers, the neon buzzing like a dying wasp. Inside, the smell of burnt coffee and old lacquer, of rain-soaked overcoats and newsprint dissolving into memory.

Onstage, Gerry Mulligan and Thelonious Monk are playing something that never was. A baritone sax, warm as candlelight, curls through the air, seeking something just beyond reach. The piano answers in jagged steps, unpredictable and inevitable, each chord a question without an answer. The two of them speak in a language without words, a conversation that only exists in the moment it's heard.

Life is like that, I think, sitting in the corner with a coffee gone cold. It doesn’t make sense, not in any way that matters. Patterns emerge and dissolve, meaning flickers like the sign outside. Monk stabs at the keys, Mulligan exhales a long, mournful phrase, and for a moment—just a moment—it all feels clear. The absurdity of it, the melancholy, the sheer weight of nothingness, and the fact that nothingness can swing.

A man at the counter stirs his drink without drinking it. The waitress wipes the same spot over and over again, lost in the rhythm of it. Outside, the rain continues its indifferent applause.

Mulligan plays another note. Monk answers.

We keep going.