Well, for the record, I don't hate "strings", I just hate "CTI Strings". I love a lot of classical music, and tastefully done strings in rock or pop (Eleanor Rigby, Strawberry Fields, etc.), but on an album such as George Benson's "Breezin'" for example, they just get in the way, IMO. It's not a threat to my masculinity, as one poster here posited. I have no ideas where that came from.
Somebody probably alerted SONY's lawyers about this. All copies are probably sitting at the seller's office next to the "cease and desist" letter from SONY (I am assuming it was SONY, though it may be estate attorneys). I was listening to some Scott Joplin yesterday and started to imagine Thelonious Monk playing Scott Joplin. There is an exercise for your imagination.
What bothers me more is synthetic sounding rhythm (drums and bass in particular), especially when they are mixed right up front.
Pat Metheny Group: First Circle (Japanese Gold Collection) The Pat Metheny Gold Collection are just wonderful. They’ve all been remastered. I don’t own all of these particular issues as what I ended up doing is buying the ECM hybrid SACD issues of Metheny as well, which there were only three of those: Pat Metheny Group, Offramp and Travels. Here is a complete list of the Metheny Gold Collection: Pat Metheny Gold Collection
That's a bummer. I guess it wouldn't have mattered if I had ordered it since it would have been cancelled anyway. Like others, I thought I had time.
I should have ordered Thursday before asking the seller any questions. Damn. No refund yet, but I guess it's imminent.
I just wrote to my Congressman demanding that the tapes be released. Maybe after January, he replied.
Great photo of Monk --- totally stole (errr....’borrowed’) this and saved it to my hard drive that has all of my photographs of classical, jazz and rock musicians.
The original painting for the Time Magazine cover. The cover story had originally been scheduled for the issue just after November 22, 1963, but was obviously cancelled. Fortunately, the story ran in February 1964 just while Beatlemania was raging. Time Magazine did not do a Beatles cover story. They had editorial principles to maintain! The painting was done by Boris Chaliapin, the son of the most legendary Russian singer in history, Feodor Chaliapin. It was painted specifically for the magazine cover, this the unusual field of red at the top. A more crisp image, sans frame
Apparently, the original painting hangs in the National Portrait gallery in Washington DC. the cover once again This issue of Time included this statement: "When this week’s cover artist first met this week’s cover subject, neither quite knew what to make of the other. Painter Boris Chaliapin, son of the late, famed Russian basso, is somewhat more at home in the hot world of opera than in the cool domains of latter-day bop. In answer to requests, Jazz Pianist Thelonious Monk would mutter “All reet,” greatly confusing Chaliapin. When he finally caught on, Chaliapin replied in Russian-accented retaliation: “All root.” During four sittings Thelonious had a disconcerting habit of dropping off to sleep. Chaliapin would yell at him, “Monk, Monk, wake up!”, then prod him out of his armchair and walk him around the studio. Says he: “Monk’s very strange – in the best sense of the word.” As for Thelonious, it took him a week to learn to pronounce the painter’s name. Having mastered it, he improvised a song that repeated “Chaliapin! Chaliapin!” over and over again, in the manner of “Hallelujah!” The article in Time was titled "The Loneliest Monk". Of course it was a clever play on his name, but it was also sadly prophetic, as Monk never spoke one word for most of the last decade of his life, not to anyone. From the web, about the article in Time: "When Time magazine made Thelonious Monk the subject of its February 28, 1964, cover, it was the fourth time that a jazz musician had been so recognized, the first three being Louis Armstrong (1949), Dave Brubeck (1954), and Duke Ellington (1956). It also instigated a minor spate of public discourse about how the mainstream media had presented Monk and jazz musicians in general, and whether of not Time’s cover article was an honor or a patronizing profile of yet another eccentric entertainer. The sentence “Every day is a brand-new pharmaceutical event for Monk: alcohol, Dexedrine, sleeping potions, whatever is at hand, charge through his bloodstream in baffling combinations” attracted some attention and was construed as damaging to Monk and jazz musicians in general. In fact, other comments in the article about Sonny Rollins, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, and Miles Davis cast the jazz musician in an unfavorable light. There was anger that mass media had appropriated something that really belonged to a knowing audience. But there was no denying that Monk was one of Columbia’s artists, available through the Columbia Book and Record Club just like any other mainstream artist, and that he was fair game for the publications like Time. Moreover, his peculiar lifestyle and persona made for good copy." "At every turn of his long life in jazz, Monk’s hats have described him almost as well as the name his parents had the crystal vision to invent for him 43 years ago – Thelonious Sphere Monk. It sounds like an alchemist’s formula or a yoga ritual, but during the many years when the owner merely strayed through life (absurd beneath a baseball cap), it was the perfect name for the legends dreamed up to account for his sad silence. “Thelonious Monk? He’s a recluse, man!” In the mid-’40’s, when Monk’s reputation at last took hold in the jazz underground, his name and his mystic utterances (“It’s always night or we wouldn’t need light”) made him seem like the ideal Dharma Bum to an audience of hipsters; anyone who wears a Chinese coolie hat and has a name like that must be cool."
