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Thelonious Monk: A Thriving Legacy
by Doug Hall
If legendary jazz musicians were collected together in one giant jigsaw puzzle and each musician was one piece—Thelonious Monk's individual piece would be impossible to cut out. As a singular artist, his shape or place in jazz is too uniquely non-conforming. From a musical and historical standpoint, he is recognized as one of the first creators of modern jazz and a major influence on the later development of the bebop movement. He influenced all its key players, along ...
Continue ReadingTributes to Monk, Part 1
by Russell Perry
Although he has been gone for nearly 40 years, and it has been much longer since he stopped writing, no composer of modern jazz has garnered more attention from his fellow musicians than Thelonious Monk, whose work is the subject of a continuous stream of tribute recordings. Groups as diverse as the Bobby Broom Trio, the Microscopic Septet and John Beasley & MONK'estra have assembled releases from their favorite compositions, but Miles Okazaki, in a solo set, and the Frank ...
Continue ReadingSylvie's Love
by Mark Sullivan
Sylvie's Love Iam21 Entertainment/Seven Letter Word Films; distributed by Amazon Studios Director: Eugene Ashe Run Time: 114 minutes 2020 Sylvie's Love represents the new paradigm of film production. Produced by traditional film producers, and originally presented at the Sundance Film Festival, the film's main distribution has been online via Amazon's online video streaming service. It tells the story of star-crossed lovers Sylvie Parker (played by Tessa Thompson) and Robert Halloway (played by Nnamdi ...
Continue ReadingTen Tiptop Albums Which Include Thelonious Monk & Denzil Best’s Totally Rocking “Bemsha Swing”
by Chris May
That was the opinion expressed in Inside Jazz by its author, Leonard Feather, who, on the front cover of the book's first edition in 1949 was described as “America's No.1 Authority On Be-Bop." Well, at least Feather was half right about the attractive tunes. In fact, Monk is known to have written at least eighty of them, and had already unveiled ten during his first recording sessions, for Blue Note, in 1947. Some, including “Bemsha Swing," have become jazz standards. ...
Continue ReadingThelonious Monk: An Alternative Top Ten Albums Of Deep And Staggering Genius
by Chris May
Thelonious Monk's position in cultural history grows in stature with each passing year and every new generation. Lionised by jazz fans and a continuing influence on musicians, Monk in 2020 is also held to be a hero by the hip hop movement. While his music no longer has the power to shock that it once possessed, it still comes across as unique, profound and thrilling. During his lifetime, however, the course of Monk's career was as craggy ...
Continue ReadingThelonious Monk: Palo Alto
by Mike Jurkovic
Earth-shattering? The best live Thelonious Monk recording ever? Who knows? Probably not. But it is Monk, so Palo Alto, comes to us with all the scholarly fandom brouhaha we accord these wonderful little things that gratefully drop in our laps from troubled time to troubled time. For anyone not paying attention to the jazz chatter of late, the backstory to Palo Alto thumbnails broadly like this: It is 1968 which, as it just so happens, is another troubled ...
Continue ReadingDanny Scher: Back To School With Thelonious Monk
by Lawrence Peryer
A high-stakes election season. Streets filled with rage and protest. Cries for racial justice and equity. The latest news from summer 2020? Of course, but that also describes the American Scene in the summer of 1968, when a high school student in Palo Alto, California, first got the idea to book Thelonious Monk to play his school's auditorium. That student was Danny Scher. His recording of this concert, called Palo Alto, was scheduled to be released publicly for the first ...
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