Jazz - What's your bag, man?

[markof]

[dhyantyke]

Thanks Sean. I also have a few early Monk and a live with Coltrane at Carnegie Hall. Can you reccommend a couple other recordings?
I know you are a Stan Getz fan so I'll offer this for comment: I've only got the 'Sweet Rain' album but I don't connect emotionally with it in the way that Monk grabs me and draws me into the music.
Different genres?[/quote]
An entirely different rhythmic pulse to be honest. Sweet Rain is marevllous though.

As for Monk, his music is very dinstictive, it's very much his own. Monk's Underground album is very good and you will get it and four more on this fine collection on Amazon.fr for €15:


http://www.amazon.fr/Original-Album-Cla ... 766&sr=8-3


and/or Monk with a variety of Jazz artists on this fine collection of 8 albums on amazon.fr for less than €9:
http://www.amazon.fr/8-Classic-Albums-T ... pd_sim_m_3[/quote]

Thanks Sean. I'll grab the Columbia set though I already have 'Straight....', I'm sure I'll find a new home for the extra copy. BTW the price seems comparable on the UK site.

[mcq]

Monk is one of the great musical masters of the 20th century (regardless of genre).  I think his gift was an ability to mix and intermingle the achievements of the past with the music of the present, a gift that the great Charles Mingus also shared.  I sometimes get the impression that the scale of his technical achievements have been consistently underrated.  It is impossible to overstate the significance of his contribution to the music.  His work is demanding on the listener, but profoundly repays close listening.   The rewards are considerable.  This music is, quite simply, inexhaustible, in its cerebral depth and emotional profundity.  It is worth highlighting the fact, even at its most abstract, there is an adherence to the pulse, an underlying coherence and instinctive logic that drives the music.  And, at the very heart of this music lies a very personal charm, warmth and intimacy that is quite rare.

Monk was also an exceptional piano player, rivalled only by the great Bud Powell.  His solo recordings are his most private but perhaps his most adventurous, when he did not feel hamstrung by a static rhythm section and did not feel the need to rein himself in.  Alone in San Francisco is perhaps the greatest expression of his art in a solo environment. 

In terms of recommendations,  the easy answer is to buy all of the Blue Note, Prestige and Riverside albums, but, if forced to bring a select few to my desert island, I simply could not leave behind the following masterpieces: Genius of Modern Music Volume One, Thelonius Monk Trio, Brilliant Corners, Monk's Music, Thelonius Himself, Alone in San Francisco, With John Coltrane and his wonderful album with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers.  

The albums for Blue Note, Genius of Modern Music Volumes 1 and 2, represent his genius at his most distilled.  They also reprsent perhaps the most harmonically complex music that any jazz composer was recording at this time, despite which it is to Blue Note's founder Alfred Lion eternal credit that he recognised Monk's unique genius and recorded his work.  His albums for Prestige strike me as his most underrated. One of my earliest purchases was a CD "two-fer" comprising Thelonius Monk Trio and Blue Monk Volume 2 which instilled a lifelong love of Monk's music in my heart.  I adored his renditions of two standards in particular, Just a Gigolo and Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, which, to my mind, have never been surpassed.  There are also wonderful versions of masterpieces such as Blue Monk, Bemsha Swing, Reflections, Bye-Ya and Monk's Dream, to name just a few.  Whilst at Prestige, he also recorded wonderful  albums with Sonny Rollins and Miles Davs that form significant parts of those great musicians' canon as much as they do Monk's.  His work at Riverside with producer Orrin Keepnews was unfettered by compromise and produced such astonishing achievements as Thelonius Himself, Brilliant Corners, Monk's Music, Alone in San Francisco and With John Coltrane.  Brilliant Corners might just be the man's masterpiece (certainly within a group framework).  It contains some of Sonny Rollins' finest solo work and Max Roach's work here evinces his reputation as the most cerebral of all jazz drummers.  And the glorious solo performance of I Surrender Dear is very special.  

His recordings for Columbia, whilst very good by any standards, pale in comparison to his achievements for Blue Note, Prestige and Riverside.  His regular horn player, Charlie Rouse, simply couldn't match Coltrane, Rollins or Hawkins, and the rhythm section of bassist John Ore and drummer Frankie Dunlop were static in comparison to Pettiford/Roach and Heath/Blakey.  His best work for this label was collected as Monk Alone.  This collection of his solo work showcases Monk at his purest, the angularities of his rhythmic invention unfettered by incompatible musicians, a cultured mind engaging in the moment with his music, breaking it down into its constituent parts and reassembling it in new and startling ways.  What he finds in standards like These Foolish Things, Everything Happens To Me, Just a Gigolo and Body and Soul (to take four examples) is a source of constant wonder to me.  This is music that can be difficult to engage with, initially, but, believe me, is time very well spent.

I cannot mention Thelonius Monk's music without reference to the great Cecil Taylor's debut album, Jazz Advance, recorded in 1956.  To my mind, this represents one of the most accomplished and fully-formed debuts in jazz.  More than any other jazz pianist working in the Fifties (with the possible exception of Herbie Nichols), he was capable of assimilating the impact of Monk on jazz composition in general and jazz pianism in particular, and he produced a breathtaking, forward-thinking album which strikes me as an enduring masterpiece.  His take on Monk's Bemsha Swing highlights his debt to the master in its sense of playful dissonance and his versions of the standards, You'd Be So Nice To Come To and Sweet and Lovely, are models of startling inventiveness that seek to challenge - rather than cosset - the listener in ways of which Monk would surely have approved.

[Fran]

TGIF!!!

[Ivor]

Picked up in Freebird on 180gm vinyl. very nice album this.

[cybot]

Ancient vinyl 1957 :)

[markof]

[markof]

[Seán]

Ancient vinyl 1957 :)

GoAwayOutAThat young man, 1957 is not ancient.

Featuring the late, great Bob Brookmeyer, lovely stuff.

[Seán]

Picked up in Freebird on 180gm vinyl. very nice album this.

Mclean was a lovely musician.