Very very cool album with great sound. Paolo Fresu 5et* - P.A.R.T.E. (Plays The Music Of Attilio Zanchi)
Thad Jones and Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra - Monday Night (Solid State) yellow stereo label Big band done right....
New member of the forum here and just discovered this thread a few days ago. I have made it through about 30 pages so far and am enjoying all of the conversation regarding Jazz. I am using this as a way to delve deeper into the music I like to listen to and to find new music to explore. As a bit of background, I am a Band Teacher and amateur saxophone player. Discovered jazz in HS by hearing Maynard Ferguson's MF Horn 2, specifically Give It One. Previously my idea of jazz was Lawrence Welk and an occasional viewing of the Tonight Show. I have been exploring the 50/60's Blue Note era lately but want to broaden my horizons a bit. Will try to contribute what I can to this thread, but feel a little lacking compared to what I have read so far.
Welcome! Please contribute, there is room for all here and I would really enjoy your impressions. It's such a great thing that we have this thread to talk about jazz and how it weaves in and out of our lives. Each day I come to a conclusion: I'm lucky because life is good--I have such great components and such great recordings and also a great place for to share my jazz passion.
now playing- Steve Khan "Evidence", very nice acoustic guitar album. Favors melody over "virtuoso" wanking.
This fascinating work has captured me again. Second listening this morning via my newly arrived (Tuesday) headphone amp, the Decware Taboo Mk IV. Sounds fantastic.
Just got this one too. lots of music on this and some new touches on classic themes. Lay Lady Lay and Woodstock sound so good on Scofiled's guitar!
Oooooh, that looks interesting. Aside from Paolo Fresu who I have seen live a few times I am not familiar with the other names on it but I expect them all to be quality players as Italy produces outstanding young Jazz musicians.
Crepuscule. What a word. I'm not sure that I ever saw it in any context except from Monk's tune for his wife Nellie. Given Monk's predilection for dancing, I thought it had to do with that as well. As the word means "twilight", and with all of the shades of meaning that the word twilight has, Monk seems to have hit on his most profound song title. Twilight often means the declining years or obscurity. Monk certainly spent those years in a completely silent obscurity with Nellie. Though he lived in Pannonica's apartment, because Nellie could not care for him in their extremely tiny apartment, she spent every day with him there. In total silence, as Monk preferred.
Nellie Monk, 80, Wife, Muse And Mainstay of a Jazz Legend JUNE 27, 2002 Nellie Monk, who as the wife of the jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk was the prime supporter and muse of a troubled genius, died on Tuesday at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. She was 80. She had had a cerebral hemorrhage, said Gale Monk, her daughter-in-law. Of all the stories about jazz musicians who cannot quite handle worldly matters and the companions who manage their lives, the long love affair of Thelonious and Nellie Monk may be the most famous. Monk, a socially awkward eccentric who was absorbed in his art and lived through his imagination, depended on Ms. Monk and relished her company. In 1957 Monk wrote one of his most beautiful ballads for her, ''Crepuscule With Nellie,'' while Ms. Monk was undergoing surgery for a thyroid disorder. In the early 1970's, when Monk moved into the large Weehawken, N.J., home of his patron, the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, Ms. Monk moved there with him. Nellie Smith was born in 1921 in St. Petersburg, Fla. She and her family moved to New York City early in her life, first to Brooklyn and then to the San Juan Hill area of Manhattan, west of Lincoln Center, where Monk's family lived. When she was about 14, she met Monk, who was three years older, on the neighborhood basketball court. The Monks were together from around 1947 until his death in 1982. She provided financial as well as emotional support, working as a seamstress during World War II in a factory and sporadically making clothes thereafter for her husband and for friends. She never became Monk's manager as such, but she collected money from promoters, paid musicians, made sure band members had airline tickets and even helped Monk get dressed. The 1988 documentary film ''Straight, No Chaser'' showed proof of their mutual devotion, as Mrs. Monk shepherded her husband through airports and hotels. A small, delicate and sensible woman who contrasted with her bearish, abstracted husband, she was never interviewed at length about her husband; they both kept their family life private. But in Nat Hentoff's book ''The Jazz Life,'' Ms. Monk made revealing comments in discussing her and her husband's clashing sense of home décor. ''I used to have a phobia about pictures or anything on a wall hanging just a little bit crooked,'' she told Mr. Hentoff. ''Thelonious cured me. He nailed a clock to the wall at a very slight angle, just enough to make me furious. Finally I got used to it. Now anything can hang at any angle and it doesn't bother me at all.'' The story has served ever since as a metaphor for Mr. Monk's relation to the world, and for his music, in which a pretty melody is set slightly askew by dissonance, or a swinging rhythmic phrase is gapped with an irregular rest. Ms. Monk lived on the Upper West Side, where she had spent most of her adult life. Her daughter, Barbara, known as Boo Boo, died in 1984. She is survived by her son, Thelonious Monk Jr. (known as T. S. Monk) of South Orange, N.J., a drummer, composer and chairman of the Thelonious Monk Institute; a grandson, Thelonious Monk IV; and a granddaughter, Sierra.
Note that there were FOUR generations of men named Thelonious Monk, from Monk's father to his son and grandson.
Wagner is the other context I have for this word, Le Crépuscule des dieux being the standard French translation of Götterdämmerung. Wagner has his place, but these days I'd more often rather spend my time with Monk.
For sure, but if Monk himself had appeared in a Wagner opera, in full costume (with hat), that would have been an "happening" To quote Monk, when asked "What's happening?", he replied: "It's always happening!"
Been a while since I've posted to any of the classical/jazz listening threads, sort of goes in phases for me... Played this earlier in the morning, one of my favorites from John Zorn (Electric Masada's 50th Birthday Celebration). Simply spectacular!
I know Monk was diagnosed (by people who may never have met him) with various disorders. Although I did meet Monk, my comment is not based on anything but my experience as the father of an adult child with both autism and bipolar disorder. I believe Monk was autistic, in addition to whatever else may have ailed him. Although many highly accomplished people have been said to have been autistic, it is still an astounding thing for an autistic person to have made a name in this world.
