Rod Stewart - Every Picture Tells A Story
Rod the Mod finds his solo footing, headed for stardom, with the Faces in his wake.
6:00 AM GMT 22/06/2011
Features Disc of the day
Thelonious Monk
Plays Duke Ellington
(Riverside, 1955)
Unexpected side effects of paternity: Part One of an occasional series.
Within days of the births of each of my two daughters, oh happy days, I rediscovered dormant passions in modern jazz. Nineteen years ago, when Rebecca arrived, quite unexpectedly I found the need to hear the great jazz pianists again and bought many reissues of Bud Powell, and Bill Evans, a couple apiece by Sonny Clark, Elmo Hope, Hampton Hawes and others, but I was most rewarded by the gospel-soul-jazz vigour of Bobby Timmons and, well, the sheer iconoclastic genius of Thelonious Monk, the great incomparable one. A fecund composer who wrote quite as many jazz standards as Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Charles Mingus, his peers of the day, Monk's melodic facility was allied to the immense ingenuity of a thrower of improbable musical shapes. So, although originals such as Blue Monk, Ruby, My Dear, Epistrophy, Monk's Mood and, of course, Round Midnight linger in the brain and form an essential part of jazz's lingua franca, Monk's interpretations of the canon are mightily rewarding too. Here, with the subtlest of bebop drummers, Kenny Clarke, and bassist Oscar Pettiford, he gets under the skin of Caravan, Sophisticated Lady, I Got It Bad (And That Ain't Good) and five other memorable Duke classics, starting, mischieviously, with It Don't Mean A Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing). It does indeed swing brilliantly, in Monk's particular and inimitably off-kilter way. As an unexpected by-product of Dadhood, it has been a wonderful reacquaintance.
Geoff Brown
Posted by Ross_Bennett at 6:00 AM GMT 17/08/2009
Further Listening
Bud Powell – The Amazing Bud Powell Vols 1 & 2 (Blue Note, 1951 and 1953)
Bobby Timmons – This Here Is (Riverside, 1960)
Bill Evans – New Jazz Conceptions (Riverside, 1956)
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