Happy Birthday Thelonious Monk


Just a quick note to draw readers attention to today’s Thelonious Monk birthday broadcast streaming on WKCR.org.

KCR’s birthday broadcasts–24 hours celebrating and exploring a jazz great on his or her birthday–have long been one of the best things about living in New York that the Internet has made a global pleasure.

Monk was pure New York–born in the Carolinas but raised in NYC’s San Juan Hill, a neighborhood of largely Caribbean immigrants that was destroyed to make way for Lincoln Center (you can see the condemned neighborhood in Robert Wise’s West Side Storyserving as ghostly backdrop).  His piano playing in particular is under girded by Harlem stride and percussive Latin and West Indian rhythms he heard in the neighborhoods where he lived and worked.

In the end though the most commom epithet for Monk is sui generis,one of a kind. His oblique harmonies (and the way his melodies are inseparable from them); his cubist fractured self-accompaniment (a couple of bars of protoBeefhart boogie woogie bass here; a measure of stride there); his song’s intricate, gossamer bridges–these have made Monk’s music a jazz subgenre all its own.

I don’t think I could live long without steady doses of Monk. A 24-hr binge is exquisite.

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October 10th, 2008
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