By all rights 'Brilliant Corners' existed once and only once. They laid it down and walked away never thinking they could do it again. Once and done, ala hara kiri, fin-eato and yet here we are. Your listening and I'm riffing.The music plays.And I'm wondering where all of the brilliance has gone.You built an alright world, not perfect, but alright.You don't ask for it, they just come. Sometime...
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"How do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways..." could be the title for all the rambling diatribes against jazz offered by my friend D. whenever our conversations turn to the subject of music that I like. (It so happens that I'm quite fond of the music of Satchmo)To start with, D. doesn't like the straw-hatted-clarinet-and-horn-blowing music which he says must have been the classic form of the ...
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...Thelonious Monk (above, left, at Minton's in NYC, circa '47) is one of those way-out-there jazz originals who, along with laying down the foundation for hard bop, tended to color his sonic pastiche outside the margins of even the loosely applied fringes of serious jazz (all the while maintaining a sense of humor that he'd sprinkle over everything he did)...in doing so, he's issued a grip of ...
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Thelonious Sphere Monk was born on October 10th 1917 in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. By the age of 5 he was uprooted and transplanted in New York City where he began to play piano. By the age of 13, he had won the weekly amateur contest at the Apollo Theater so many times that they barred him from entering again. He was only 19 when he joined the house band of Minton's Playhouse, the Harlem ...
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There are friends we come upon in life ... at the start we can't predict how much they will come to mean to us. Chris was brilliant, funny, outspoken, and paved his own way ... and I'm proud to be among those he called 'homebiscuit.' My heart is heavy at your loss, and you'll be dearly missed, my friend. love and peaceI know you loved this one...
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is hardly unknown on MOG, but this track from 1947, with Art Blakey on drums and George Tait and Sahib Shihab taking the horn duties, doesn't appear to have been posted before.
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Thelonious Monk's 1964 Monterey Jazz Festival performance is finally being released. Here's the performance of "Rhythm-a-Ning" from the album.
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In 1964, the year this previously unreleased set was recorded, Monk was a certified jazz superstar. Then two years into what would be a ten-year association with Columbia Records, the year began with Monk gracing the cover of the February 28, 1964 issue of TIME Magazine - only the third jazz musician in history to do so (bonus round: name the other two).So all of this is to say Monk was about a...
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So in attempting to clean out the fireplace a bit, we learned that a shop-vac in a small space serves as an excellent transmitter of soot into the general atmosphere of your open first floor. I came home from work to find my lovely wife and son transformed into extras from Mary Poppins, my wife's usual auburn tresses a dark gothic black at the edges, even after a shower. Yikes! The bonus: th...
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Woke up the other morning to find myself on Sutter street, half a BART stub in my pocket. Wha' happened?Seriously, I've been in Mog hiatus for the last month or so because I've been helping to get my step-daughter ready to go to college out in San Franny. It's felt like the olympics - uphill and backwards, with a big dollop of beuracurcy (or however the hell you spell it. I'm tired). Well, we f...
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I really can't say much more than that. It's a show from 1965 with Charlie Rouse on Tenor. Go to your OnDemand function on your cable box and find concert.tv under music. I just spent an amazing hour entranced by Mr. Monk.similar to:
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Bob Edwards used to be on NPR but now hosts an interview show on XM radio called the Bob Edwards Show. He always has interesting guests but yesterday he had one of the most interesting people I had never heard of but should have. I have talked about my deep desire to be a muse and then you see somebody who does it right. Lorraine Gordon. In the 1930's she became a jazz fanatic. In 1942 she mar...
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