Good morning. It's Wednesday, June 10, and we're deep into Juneuary, and nothing goes better with damp streets than Debussy.
"First I want to take a second for George Floyd," the musician Kyle O'Quin says.
"I also want to wish Breonna Taylor a happy birthdayâshe would have been 27 last week. And all of us know there's a lot of people besides George Floyd and Breonna Taylor whose names we don't know that have been murdered, and I want to dedicate the piece I'm going to play to all of them."
He also gives a shoutout to his former neighbor Charles Mudede, and shares a memory of Lynn Shelton.
Never formally trained, Kyle buried himself in music at a young age. He taught himself how to play and studied the greats: Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, Mozart, and the Beatles. (His list.)
He was the first-ever piano player for the Silent Reading Partyâ"like way back when my hair was still brown," he cracks in the video. (Before that, the party had literally been silent.) He talks about being very nervous the time Lynn Shelton came to the party, and says, "I want to dedicate this piece to her as well."
If, by the endâthere's a revealâyou just want to, like, smoke weed with Kyle and listen to him talk about music while he plays around on the piano? It's your lucky day.
Thank you for all of this, Kyle. Thank you so much.
See you tonight.
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Previously in this series: