Yeah, the format might seem a little strange: soprano saxophone, unaccompanied. But Monk’s musical language—its tangy mix of geometric elegance and off-kilter bluesiness—is rarely spoken this eloquently.
Sam Newsome, Thelonious Monk Medley, live, 2008
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The clarity and logic of his [Thelonious Monk’s] work might have been compared with the craft of an architect. Each phrase, each fragment, each plump chord had its exact place in his musicial structure.—Mimi Clar (in Robin D. G. Kelley, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original[2009])
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‘All jazz musicians are mathematicians unconsciously’ was a favorite theory of Monk’s.—Randy Weston (in Deborah Kapchan, Traveling Spirit Masters: Moroccan Gnawa Trance and Music in the Global Marketplace [2007])
Here’s another musician who, like Dinu Lipatti (Tuesday’s post), died way too young: the great Chicago blues artist Magic Sam (AKA Samuel Maghett). He suffered a fatal heart attack just months after this performance. He was 32.
For Ursula Oppens, present and past aren’t far apart. In a concert I heard several years ago (at Northwestern’s Pick-Staiger Concert Hall), she opened with Beethoven (1712-1773) and closed with John Adams (1947-).
Elliott Carter (1908-), “Retrouvailles” (2000)/Ursula Oppens, piano, live, New York, 2008
David Schiff, author of ‘The Music of Elliott Carter,’ said in the program that the ‘Piano Sonata of 1946’ ‘invoked jazz.’ And during a panel discussion he smiled and said he thought he heard some influence of jazz pianist Thelonious Monk in the piano part of Carter’s ‘Cello Sonata of 2000.’
‘I’ve never heard Carter say anything about it,’ Mr. Schiff later added in an e-mail, ‘but when I play through the part (in private!) I like to give the many staccato notes that mark the pulse a kind of Monk edge to them.’—Roderick Nordell, “99 years of Elliott Carter in 5 Days,” Christian Science Monitor, 1/26/09
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An (often-fascinating) conversation between Elliott Carter and Phil Lesh (Grateful Dead) can be heard here.
While living in New York for a few months in the early 1970s (after my first year of college), I often heard Bill Evans at a place in Greenwich Village, the Top of the Gate, where, for the price of a beer, you could linger all night. Hunched over the piano, he looked at times as if he was about to fall inside and disappear.
Bill Evans, “My Foolish Heart,” live (TV broadcast), Sweden, 1964
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Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, Fred Hersch, Brad Mehldau: the list of piano players who wouldn’t sound the way they do but for Bill Evans, whose approach to harmony made him the most influential piano player in jazz since Bud Powell, goes on and on and on.
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The ‘open’ voicings that [Bill] Evans used [i.e., leaving out a chord’s root note] were not new . . . . They had been there in ‘classical’ music since the early part of the century, since Bartok and Stravinsky. But they were new to jazz, and they opened up melody and flow in new ways.—Martin Williams, The Jazz Tradition(2d ed. 1983)
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Bill [Evans] had this quiet fire that I loved on piano. The way he approached it, the sound he got was like crystal notes or sparkling water cascading down from some clear waterfall.
—Miles Davis (in Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography [1989])
Like all his [Monk’s] nieces and nephews, Teeny [Benetta Smith] treated her uncle as an uncle—not as some eccentric genius or celebrity. During one of her many visits in 1959 or ’60, when she was about twelve years old, Teeny noticed a book of compositions by Chopin perched on her uncle’s rented Steinway baby grand piano. Monk’s piano was notorious for its clutter. It occupied a significant portion of the kitchen and extended into the front room. The lid remained closed, since it doubled as a temporary storage space for music, miscellaneous papers, magazines, folded laundry, dishes, and any number of stray kitchen items.
Teeny thumbed through the pages of the Chopin book, then turned to her uncle and asked, ‘What are you doing with that on the piano? I thought you couldn’t read music? You can read that?’ The challenge was on. In response, Monk sat down at the piano, turned to a very difficult piece, and started playing it at breakneck speed.
‘His hands were a blur,’ she recalled decades later.—Robin D. G. Kelley, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (2009)
Saturday morning, driving down to Champaign-Urbana to visit my younger son Luke (Dads’ Weekend at the U of I),when the radio signal on Scott Simon’s NPR show started to fade (interviews this week with Wes Anderson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), I took out this CD and slid it into the dashboard player—something Luke gave me, a couple years ago, for Christmas.
Wyclef Jean, Carnival II: Memoirs of an Immigrant (2007)
“Sweetest Girl (Dollar Bill)” (with Akon and Lil Wayne)
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“Any Other Day” (with Norah Jones)
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“Fast Car” (with Paul Simon)
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A native of Haiti, WJ established a foundation to provide aid to the people of that country, which can be found here.
Haiti is my native country, one I know as the first black nation to gain independence in 1804. Most other people seem to know Haiti only by the statistics about how bad things are there. The majority of its 8 million residents live on less than $1 per day. Unemployment is close to 80 percent, and more than half the population is under 21 years old. Haiti is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere.
I have been spending a lot of time talking with people in my native country to try and understand what is behind these statistics and the past escalation of violence, all of which brings tears to my eyes. I have had conversations with gang leaders, met with the police officers and sat down with the leaders of the militias and the army. I have talked with Haitians from all walks of life, all colors of skin, all backgrounds and beliefs. From all these people I hear only one thing in my head and feel only one thing in my heart–that there is only one Haiti. Every Haitian loves their country like a mother loves her child.
I see old women with large bags of rice on their heads and men on street corners selling sugarcane and mangos, all just trying to survive with a strong sense of pride. Walking past a church in my village, I hear the congregation singing an appeal to God to hear their cries and grant deliverance to Haiti. Through experiences like this, I sense where my mother and my father got their strength. Now the whole country needs to reach deep into the spirit and strength that is part of our heritage.
The objective of [my foundation] Yéle Haiti is to restore pride and a reason to hope, and for the whole country to regain the deep spirit and force that is part of our heritage.—Wyclef Jean
classic, n. 1. An artist, author, or work generally considered to be of the highest rank or excellence, especially one of enduring significance. E.g., Johann Sebastian Bach, Blind Willie Johnson.
Blind Willie Johnson (1897-1945)
“God Don’t Never Change” (1929, New Orleans)
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“John the Revelator” (1929, Atlanta)
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“Trouble Will Soon Be Over” (1929, Atlanta; video from “The Soul of a Man,” part 4 of Martin Scorsese’s PBS series “The Blues”)
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“Dark Was The Night – Cold Was The Ground” (1927, Dallas)
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[Blind Willie Johnson’s ‘Dark Was The Night – Cold Was The Ground’] is the most soulful, transcendent piece in all American music.—Ry Cooder
