Category Thelonious Monk
Carlos Henriquez: Monk Con Clave
You wait ages for a decent Thelonious Monk covers album and then two come along within a year. Monk Con Clave, devised and arranged by bassist Carlos Henriquez and featuring his contemporaries from NYC’s Jazz At The Lincoln Center Orchestra, is a really exciting collection which engages both brain and body. A big band including […]
Dayna Stephens: Monk’D (Review and Interview)
Thelonious Monk was one of jazz’s great entertainers. But good Monk cover versions are generally as rare as hen’s teeth. You could probably count on one hand the interpretations that have really captured Monk’s playful spirit and/or created music of lasting value. But now we can add Dayna Stephens’ recent album Monk’D to that small, […]
Rewind & Play: Thelonious Monk
It’s a great era for jazz documentaries. The latest exhibit is Alain Gomis’s ‘Rewind & Play: Thelonious Monk’, based around some long-lost footage of the jazz piano giant filming a French TV special at the end of his 1969 European tour. Some of the edited footage was shown on French TV as ‘Jazz Portraits: Thelonious […]
Three Views of the Piano @ London Jazz Festival 2017: Monk’s Centenary, Nik Bärtsch and Kate Williams
The sumptuous Cadogan Hall hosted the fitting finale to this year’s London Jazz Festival, a recreation of Thelonious Monk’s famous New York Town Hall concert of 28th February 1959. Charles Tolliver, who had attended the original concert as a teenager, conducted and added occasional trumpet. In a neat touch, the band set up in the […]
Rescued From The Vaults: That’s The Way I Feel Now
Most jazz players don’t really seem to ‘get’ the music of Thelonious Monk. Decent cover versions are hard to come by, of course with some notable exceptions (Steve Khan, Kenny Kirkland, Lynne Arriale, Paul Motian and probably a few more). During the centenary of the genius’s birth, it seems as good a time as any to […]
Book Review: Nica’s Dream by David Kastin
Interviewer: What is jazz? Thelonious Monk: New York, man. You can feel it. It’s around in the air… If the ‘Jazz Baroness’ Kathleen Annie Pannonica Rothschild de Koenigswarter hadn’t existed, would the great beboppers have had to invent her? The benefactor and friend to the stars was an important figure in the jazz lexicon but […]
Sounds Of Surprise 