Thelonious monk album1/3/2023 ![]() ![]() ” Raise Four“ is a wiggy blues-waltz: as quintessentially Monkish as anything. ” Ugly Beauty“ (a ravishing title!) is one of Monk’s most haunting pieces, like an étude by Schoenberg crossed with a dreamy ballad by Ellington. ![]() (Many musicians have played Monk’s music, but the best of them aim to capture his adventurous spirit in their own language and style.) Today, no other pianist sounds at all like him nor have any, however otherwise brilliant, bothered to try to. ![]() He could play, simultaneously, honky-tonk stride with his left hand and avant-garde dissonance with his right hand pound out arpeggios with the oddest flats and sharps imaginable disrupt phrases with abruptly angular turns-and manage somehow to make it all sound right. He worked out his own concept of time, his own rules of harmony, and his own method of touch. Thelonious Sphere Monk was a musician and composer every bit as unique and strange as his name. And, as is the case with many Columbia sessions from the ‘60s, the master tapes still sound terrific-tonally rich, acoustically natural, and dynamically wide (i.e., accurately conveying the differences between loud sounds and quiet sounds and all the little accents in between). The original master tapes were unscathed by Macero’s post-production meddling. ![]()
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