Time & Perspective Quote by Benny Green

The voice is casual and corrective, the kind of mid-conversation pivot that happens when two people try to nail down the origin story of their connection. Memory plays detective here. The speaker pushes back against a tidy narrative and locates the moment in a specific place: Fat Tuesday's, the intimate, much-loved New York club that served as a crossroads for generations of jazz musicians. That name alone evokes a scene of low light, tables close to the bandstand, and a nightly parade of players dropping by to listen, sit in, and be seen.

Saying Benny was playing centers the encounter on a working bandstand, not a rehearsal room or office. In the jazz world, relationships often begin in the heat of a set, when the music is the introduction and the conversation follows at the bar or the sidewalk outside. The uncertainty about the year — I think in 1989? — underscores the porousness of time in a life built on tours, residencies, and late nights. Yet the specificity of the venue and the leader gives the memory weight. It is how musicians map their lives: by rooms, bandstands, and who was on the gig.

Placed in the late 1980s, the moment sits at a hinge between eras, when young players were stepping into the lineage and veterans still held court. Fat Tuesday's was precisely the sort of place where that baton passed, night after night. The correction at the start signals a desire to get the oral history right, not out of pedantry but out of respect for the way scenes form and community stories are kept. What matters is not a date on a calendar so much as the ecology of a club where people meet, listen, and learn. The music creates the encounter; the memory preserves the network that sustains it.