Books by Reggie Revis

If you want to know about a culture, pay close attention to its music. Melody, be it complex or simple, and lyrics provides a deep well of information that could be missed through more apparent sources. I would love to be able to write books the way Thelonious Monk or Willie “The Lion” Smith played piano... The 1950s—that halcyon period between the war years and the unsettled sixties—have long intrigued me. If you were born anytime during those years, you have membership in a unique club. You would know about a time when the niceties of civilized life were practiced, where few of us were in a hurry and where secrets were kept close to the vest only to be unleashed right when we felt most comfortable... Protestations to the contrary, I believe that people are reading more, not less. The internet allows instant access to a wealth of information to millions of people who might not otherwise have had it—with a few key strokes you can cull information in minutes that might have taken hours to access in the neighborhood library... I don’t have a clue how someone is able to read a novel, then create a screenplay and maintain faithfulness to the author’s original vision. In my mind, writing a screenplay is to writing a novel the way playing the piano is to playing the tambourine... Erroll Garner was the first jazz musician I heard in concert. I was about ten years old and I remember to this day—some forty years later--the power that came from him and his two side men who were in complete mastery of their instruments, who were so completely immersed in the making of pleasant sounds (that’s how I described it as a ten year old, not much different from the way I would describe it now). The music had a way of sifting right through you...