Nobody told him his hand was a problem. Somebody handed him a piano.

I went looking for what Horace Parlan actually thought about his own hand, interviews, oral histories, anything in his own words about what it felt like to grow up with a right hand polio had partially taken from him.

There isn't much, and nobody seems to have asked him directly, or if they did, it never got written down. He just played.

What is documented is smaller and somehow says more.

Parlan was adopted as a child by a minister and his family, and polio hit early and left his right hand partially paralyzed. His parents put him on piano, and the reason given was therapy, something to do with a hand that didn't fully work. Brilliant move on the parents.

But look at what that choice actually was underneath the label. They didn't sit a five year old down and explain what he couldn't do. They handed him an instrument and let him find out what he could.

I think about that a lot, actually, because I grew up in a small town carrying my own version of being told what I was up against, and I don't say that as a knock on my parents, they did their best with what they knew.

But it makes me wonder how a resilient mind actually gets built, whether it's something you're taught directly, sit down conversations about grit, or something quieter than that, just what nobody in the room ever said out loud.

Nobody told Horace Parlan his hand was a problem to be managed. Somebody handed him a piano instead.

He played on Mingus Ah Um, then led six albums for Blue Note in about fifteen months, this one among them, before spending decades still working, well into his eighties, in Denmark by then, until his sight finally went too.

Sixty years of a career built on top of a hand that never fully recovered, and as far as I can find, there's no record of him ever complaining about it.

I woke up annoyed about something small this morning, the kind of thing that won't matter by tomorrow. Then I read about a five year old handed a piano instead of a diagnosis, and I sat with that for a minute before I put this record on.