Articles

Daily articles carefully curated by the All About Jazz staff. Read our popular and future articles.

INTERVIEW July 30, 2020

Danny Scher: Back To School With Thelonious Monk

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 ...

FILM REVIEW November 21, 2019

Blue Note Records Beyond The Notes

By Chris May

Blue Note Records Beyond The Notes Director: Sophie Huber Run Time: 111 minutes Eagle Rock Entertainment 2019 Blue Note fans will love this film. It is an unblemished, 360-degree, feel-good feast for the eyes and the ears. Intended by director Sophie Huber to make sense to newcomers to jazz, Blue Note Records Beyond The Notes does not offer any arcane new perspectives on the label. It is instead a ...

RADIO November 11, 2019

Get It Straight - Thelonious Monk Is Still Cooking at 102

By Mary Foster Conklin

Big birthday shout outs to Thelonious Monk and Roy Kral (pictured with Jackie Cain), along with singers Nancy Kelly, Emma Larsson, Amy Cervini, Lee Wiley, Nona Hendryx, drummer Eve Sicular, trumpeter Pam Fleming, pianists Linda Presgrave and Johnny O'Neal among others; with a bounty harvest of new releases from trumpeter Bria Skonberg, pianists Leslie Pintchik and Champian Fulton with Cory Weeds, vocalists Ronny Whyte and Kurt Elling with James Morrison plus a posthumous release from vocalist Nora York.

RADIO May 12, 2019

The Genius of Modern Music, Thelonious Monk on Blue Note (1947 - 1950)

By Russell Perry

(If the Mixcloud player for this program is unavailable in your country, please scroll down and listen via Soundcloud.) In 1940, Minton's Playhouse on West 118th Street hired drummer Kenny Clarke as a bandleader. For the house band, Clarke hired trumpeter Joe Guy, bassist Nick Fenton, and an eccentric pianist named Thelonious Monk. Although Monk recorded with Coleman Hawkins in 1944, he didn't record with his own group until 1947. Despite these kind of gaps that occur ...

PROFILE February 19, 2019

Brother Thelonious Re-Released At California North Coast Jazz and Ale House

By Arthur R George

"Brother Thelonious," an ale named in tribute to pianist Thelonious Monk using a Belgian Trappist brew style, is flowing again out of the North Coast Brewing Company in Fort Bragg, California and its jazz-devoted performance venue, The Sequoia Room. An intermission in production occurred after a dispute between North Coast Brewing and the Estate of the late Thelonious Monk, now resolved, over the use of Monk's image promoting the ale and related products. The Estate, represented by Monk's son drummer ...

RADIO February 19, 2019

Thelonious Monk Revisited

By Ludovico Granvassu

Thelonious Monk once said “play what you want and let the public pick up on what you are doing even if it does take them 15, 20 years." Luckily, he lived long enough to become fully embraced and celebrated before his passing. However, it's after his death that his music has really become central to the jazz canon. To mark the thirty-seventh anniversary of his demise, on 17 February 1982, this week we feature a very diverse range of renditions ...

ALBUM REVIEW December 2, 2018

Thelonious Monk: Mønk

By Ian Patterson

There is certainly no shortage of Thelonious Monk live albums--there are several dozen, in fact--but not too many such recordings have been rescued from a skip, as seems to be the case with this long-lost tape of Monk from a 1963 concert at Odd Fellow Palaeet, Copenhagen. Lovingly restored by Gearbox Records, the recording finds Monk with long-term collaborator Charlie Rouse on tenor saxophone and a cooking rhythm section of double bassist John Ore and drummer Frankie Dunlop. It is, ...