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“My particular idols, Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young, were both in that picture,” Rollins said. “Those guys are much beyond me, but I guess I’ll be remembered with them when people look at this picture: ‘Oh, there’s Sonny Rollins, and wow, look, there’s Coleman Hawkins!’” Source: Music – nytimes.com More
We asked Jon Batiste, Arooj Aftab, Mary Halvorson and others to share their favorites.For over a year, The New York Times has been asking musicians, writers and scholars to share the music they’d play for a friend to get them into jazz. Now we’re focusing on Thelonious Monk, the innovative pianist and bandleader whose angular melodies and dissonant chords made him stand out among his peers in the bebop era.Where other pianists played light chords with their left hand and quicker notes with the right, Monk played equally complicated notes with both hands, leading to complex arrangements that traversed the entire scale. But he never overplayed; his use of space between the notes elicited peace and tension equally.“Those clashing intervals, you know?” the Monk biographer Robin D.G. Kelley once said. “Sometimes he’ll play, like, an F and F sharp at the same time.”Monk was born in 1917 in Rocky Mount, N.C., and his family moved to Manhattan when he was 4. At 9, after briefly studying the trumpet, Monk started playing the piano in church and at rent parties. He attended Stuyvesant High School for two years before dropping out to play on the road with an evangelist. Monk’s big break came in 1941 when the drummer Kenny Clarke hired him to be the house pianist at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem. It’s been said that’s where bebop was born: Charlie Parker, Max Roach, Mary Lou Williams and others would jam all hours of the night crafting this new sound.Monk’s solo career didn’t really take hold until the ’50s when, as a bandleader signed to Prestige Records, he recorded different ensemble sets with Sonny Rollins, Miles Davis and Art Blakey, which escalated his momentum. Shortly after he signed with Riverside Records in 1955, he broke through with the album “Brilliant Corners,” an acclaimed LP seen as the true launching point of his career. He played clubs throughout New York City, gigged with the likes of John Coltrane and Gerry Mulligan, then led big bands from the late 1950s to the early ’60s. In 1964, Time put Monk on its magazine cover — the fourth jazz musician in history to appear there.Yet you can’t talk about Monk without acknowledging his erratic behavior. He had mental health challenges and was first hospitalized in 1956; he got into a car accident and was uncommunicative when police arrived. Years later, he was diagnosed with depression. Onstage, he would sometimes get up from the piano and start dancing, leading some to believe these were autistic episodes. Others say he used dance as a way to convey to his band what he wanted to hear musically. Either way, Monk is on the Mount Rushmore of jazz, and deserves all the reverence he gets for shifting its modern sound. Below, we asked 11 musicians and writers to share their favorite Thelonious Monk songs. Enjoy listening to their choices, check out the playlist at the bottom of the article and be sure to leave your own picks in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Jon Batiste, pianist and composer“Introspection”It’s not possible for me to choose a favorite Monk song. At 19, I became obsessed with everything Thelonious and spent a year focused exclusively on absorbing as much as I could. Monk is a world. “Introspection,” from the album “Solo Monk,” is borderline atonal while still distinctively melody-rich. The melody is akin to a nursery rhyme in its playful logic and symmetry, all while whistling overtop a bed of through-composed dissonance. Those chords! The way he constructs the harmony to shift between at least three identifiable key centers creates a trance-like quality to the recording that rides the borders of Eastern mysticism and some obtuse sanctified hymn. The chord voicings are constructed for every note to have a deliberate intention. There’s no room for harmonic interpretation here — if you add or take away any of the notes from his chord voicings, the song risks completely losing its identity. Monk’s way of “super syncopation” is utilized significantly in this tune as well, making his charismatic approach to aligning the harmony and melody a defining characteristic of the composition.He named it “Introspection” ’cause he certainly had a lot on his mind with this one. Very concentrated in all harmony, melody and rhythm. The master of repetition. Over the years it’s the least played Monk tune of all. This is significant given that he is one of the most covered and influential composers of the modern age. I love the “Solo Monk” version because he doesn’t even improvise over the chord changes, he just states the melody twice and walks out of the studio (or at least that’s how I envision it). Sometimes that’s all that needs to be played: the tune.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, composer and multi-instrumentalist“Nutty”By my count, Thelonious Monk’s 1957 concert at Carnegie Hall was his 45th time being recorded on anything that was eventually released. He turned 40 years old the month before and was toward the end of his brief, but intense and deeply meaningful, collaboration with John Coltrane. While Monk’s sublime ballads “Ugly Beauty,” “Ruby, My Dear,” “Ask Me Now,” “Pannonica,” “Reflections” and “’Round Midnight” might represent some of his most genius work, I selected “Nutty” from the Carnegie Hall concert because of the depth of sophistication of the composition coupled with the sheer amazingness of his collaboration with Coltrane. It is a masterpiece, complete with disjunctive rhythms in the fourth measure of the form, perhaps most perfectly portraying Monk’s humorous dance style that he often did while getting up from the piano.For my personal taste, the epitome of virtuosity is when artists not only know their instrument and medium thoroughly, but know themselves well enough to be able to communicate highly personal or emotional concepts and stories through their work. “Nutty” is a tour de force of communication at the highest levels. So much happens within these five minutes that is mind blowing to me every time I listen, and I can’t help but to be left in utter awe and gratitude for the lives of these amazing gentlemen who continually chose transcendence and sophistication while the world around them so often chose barbarity.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Arooj Aftab, musician“Reflections”I found my mind kind of walking away from whatever was going on around me when I first heard this tune. I was just smiling and thinking about being at Zinc Bar in the West Village, talking to someone special. And then I kind of came back like, “Whoa, what is this beauty I’m hearing?” It was playing in a scene in some old movie I was watching on a plane. It’s become a beautiful mainstay in my vault of “deeper cuts” and I often head over to the “Thelonious Alone in San Francisco” album to listen to it. I really, really love this one. Every note kind of turns my head upside down and makes my ears smile. I love the way it’s paced, almost like a conversation. Other times it feels like a pendulum. There is an unbelievable amount of swag in the whole piece. I like hearing his voice quietly in the back, too. It perfectly sums up something very sweet and nostalgic, aptly “reflective,” like the “A” is the original story and the rest of what he plays around it is how we feel about the story as the years have gone by.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Andrew Winistorfer, writer and reissue producer“Ugly Beauty”Listening to Thelonious Monk sometimes feels like listening to Monk listening to Monk; he spent much of his recorded output reworking, rerecording and recontextualizing his masterwork compositions like “Ruby, My Dear” and “Crepuscule With Nellie” across multiple albums. His sense of the avant-garde meant not only breaking with established traditions, but also breaking his established songs.Which is why listening to “Ugly Beauty” feels like such a revelation: Here is Monk, on his last album with a quartet (1968’s “Underground”), playing the only waltz of his career. You can hear him roll and flit in and around the tenor work of Charlie Rouse, giving the proceedings a broken, emotional denouement in every key struck. Monk’s playing was always about feeling as much as technical proficiency, and here the entire composition is set up for him to be the emotional ballast, to the point that when he cedes the ground to his band in the song’s middle portion, you feel his return like a gut punch. But it’s not all mood music; he hits chords of dissonance that remind you that though it’s a waltz, Monk is still in there, fighting the fight against normalcy. One of his last original compositions before his semiformal retirement in the early ’70s, “Ugly Beauty” serves as a reminder that the true greats never stop evolving and pushing the bounds of their art.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆King Britt, professor and producer“Evidence”“Evidence” is one of the best examples of shifting time against the meter, and in the process disrupting the status quo. The Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall is otherworldly. ’Trane’s tone (timbre) and blazing response to Monk’s time traveling through meters. A transcendent masterpiece. However, I also love the ferocity of this video of the quartet playing “Evidence” live in Japan, in which Monk’s intensity pushes Charlie Rouse’s solo to truly have a serious conversation instead of a humorous one in which Monk always includes in his playing. Watching the performance also adds to the magic as opposed to just listening — truly seeing them as a unit.“Evidence” is the perfect title, as this song is a testimony to the fearlessness of Monk’s compositions and the magic of his playing. In contemporary music, I compare Dilla to Monk because of his placement of samples, challenging our idea of rhythm and hesitation. So much so, it changed the way drummers play.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Nikki Yeoh, composer, jazz pianist and educator“Trinkle, Tinkle”In the ’90s I was watching TV. An inventor was revealing their latest creation: a suit jacket that could record movement. The clever blazer would “remember” the motions and make the “model” involuntarily move in the same way. My mind wandered — what if you could do this with gloves? How would it feel to experience how Oscar Peterson, Bach or Monk moved across the piano? “Trinkle, Tinkle” is the invisible memory glove and almost the answer to my glove-desiring prayers. So ergonomically written, pianistic in its approach. It embodies ballet finesse, angular jazz-tap punchy stabs, a percussive African ancestral message and a portal into Monk’s movement and mind.I love the 2/4 bar at the end of the A section. The “extra” two beats remind me of when Monk thought the music was “cookin’” and would jump up and dance, a stumbling, twisty-turning dance like a soccer player dribbling the ball, with the utmost grace and purpose, the phrase landing being the “goal.” As with many Monk tunes, this piece is best heard and improvised to, while singing the melody. Just remember to substitute the 2/4 bar with a 4/4 bar in solos. Monk sticks closely to the melody on the original recording. Joshua Redman’s version on his self-titled album is excellent, albeit without piano. In my dreams they called me for that album, but I couldn’t go as my gloves weren’t ready!Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Morgan Rhodes, music supervisor“Let’s Cool One”Discovering “Let’s Cool One” was a complete love-at-first-listen experience. Having only heard “Solo Monk” before hearing this record, my introduction to big-band Thelonious was an awakening. While I’ll always appreciate the intimacy of the live recording on “Misterioso,” there’s something so compelling to me about the “Monk’s Blues” version. Oliver Nelson’s arrangement takes it to dramatic new levels. The upbeat tempo makes the song feel bigger and elegant, giving brass every opportunity to shine while marrying Thelonious’s well-known dissonance with traditional harmonies. The result sounds like a really good conversation between horns and piano — a call and response that holds space for both the avant-garde and the conventional. Monk’s playing is masterful on this one.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Anna Butterss, musician“Sweet and Lovely”I love Monk’s own compositions, but there is something exciting about hearing his interpretations of jazz standards. Monk tinkers with these songs, reconstructing harmony and melody alike until he might as well have written them in the first place. “Sweet and Lovely” is one of these standards that Monk revisited throughout his career — when he recorded this solo performance in 1964, he had been playing the song for over 10 years, and had made some characteristic tweaks to the original. The descending sevenths underlying the melody are classic Monk, as is his refusal to resolve the final chord to where we would expect. The lyrics of “Sweet and Lovely” (which we don’t hear, here) speak of a love with seemingly no complications: “Sweet and lovely, sweeter than the roses in May, and he loves me, there is nothing more I can say.”In contrast to this tone, Monk creates a more melancholy vignette. We first hear him play the melody in a lush, almost stylized, romantic manner, leaning into the warmth of his left hand, but the heavy descent of the bass line adds an uneasiness to the mood. Throughout his brief solo his articulation becomes more pronounced, until the melody returns in insistent, rolling octaves. Monk’s ending doesn’t quite seem to wrap things up neatly — leaving the listener slightly unsatisfied, and perhaps keeping the door open for him to return to this song once again.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Mary Halvorson, musician“Crepuscule With Nellie”Thelonious Monk was one of the first jazz musicians I listened to (on an album called “The Composer,” in the form of a cassette tape) as a preteen. At first I didn’t understand it at all, and the improvisations were totally lost on me, but somehow I kept coming back to that tape. What drew me in initially were the melodies. There is a version of “Crepuscule With Nellie” on that album. It’s classic Monk, instantly identifiable. There is so much beauty and strength of melodicism, with rhythmic quirks and whimsy integrated seamlessly, like the most natural thing in the world. You can feel Monk isn’t trying to do anything tricky; he’s just being himself. Underneath the wonderfully twisted logic, it’s still a melody you can sing along to. And once you learn Monk’s melodies, the improvisations unfold from there and enhance everything.Fast forward to 2005: I was happy, as a lifelong fan of Monk, when Blue Note released a live recording from 1957 of the Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane: “At Carnegie Hall.” This version of “Crepuscule” is spare, as that song often is: essentially just the melody, first with Monk alone, then with the band. It’s a perfect entry point into Monk’s sound. Then, listening to the rest of the record, you’ll hear Coltrane absolutely take off — dancing around Monk’s tunes and then effortlessly plowing through to another dimension. Some of the most inspired moments on that album are when Monk stops playing and simply lets Coltrane go.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Christina Wheeler, composer, musician and multimedia artist“Misterioso”While “’Round Midnight” is Monk’s most well known song, “Misterioso” encapsulates everything I love about his music. This was the first of his blues compositions, which he always wrote in B flat. It begins with a sparse, gentle piano introduction that unspools into a seemingly spare melody of repeating intervals that ascends harmonically. The steady rhythm accents on the two and four, moving with the hypnotic ticktock of a cat clock’s darting eyes or a dog toy’s bobbing head. What I love is how Monk twists the traditional blues structure so subtly, substituting these unexpected minor chords so he can add chromatic note clusters, only to leave the ascending melody dangling on an unresolved note. For me, this amplifies the enigmatic mood of the song’s title. Monk complements Milt Jackson’s limpid vibraphone solo of cascading notes with angular piano jabs. Monk then follows Jackson with a solo filled with all my favorite signature expressions: rhythmically off-kilter melodic splashes counterpointing the steady, 4/4 pulse; flourishes of whole-tone scales that juxtapose quick bursts of dissonant notes; and distinctively empty spaces that emphasize Monk’s flat-fingered, percussive playing. The melody’s reprise bookends the recording with a symmetry that makes “Misterioso” as accessible for dancing toddlers as it is for grown-up listeners like me. Blues is the foundation of jazz, and with “Misterioso,” Monk transmutes the blues so exquisitely and uniquely as his own.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆James Francies, pianist and producer“’Round Midnight”“’Round Midnight” is one of the best-written songs in the canon of American music; it’s a master class in counterpoint, theme and development, and harmony. For me when a song is truly great, most of the time both the harmony and melody can stand independently and still be beautiful. “’Round Midnight” is one of those songs. The melody is so thoughtful that it captures me every time. Hearing it by itself reminds me of when I first heard Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.” It also reminds me of hearing Bach chorales for the first time, or Mozart. Each melodic cell develops in a way that truly shows how Monk’s mind was working during that period. The ascending five-note gesture that begins the A section of “’Round Midnight” is one of the most iconic melodic statements in the world of instrumental music; instantly recognizable. “’Round Midnight” is blues with baroque counterpoint and romantic harmony. Perfection.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆ More
Alain Gomis’s documentary uses rushes from a 1969 French TV interview to make a smart indictment of music industry bias and offer viewers a subtle tribute to Monk.The documentary “Rewind & Play” makes damning use of a 1969 interview Thelonious Monk did with Henri Renaud for the French television program “Jazz Portrait.” Monk’s European tour was set to end in Paris and the show was recorded shortly before. The interview took place nearly six years after Monk was featured on a Time magazine cover under the banner “Jazz: Bebop and Beyond” and one year before he stopped making music.Directed by the French-Senegalese filmmaker Alain Gomis, this 65-minute, freighted documentary creates a portrait — or two — out of rushes and outtakes Gomis received from the National Audiovisual Institute while researching a fiction film about Monk. One is a study of an interview turned wincing for reasons of glib arrogance — racial but perhaps personal, too. The other is a more gleaming portrait of Monk at work.More film essay with critical chaser than straight-up documentary, the film suggests that Renaud — a jazz pianist turned record producer and later music executive — aimed for something revelatory, but also something that shined a spotlight on his own insightfulness. But Renaud is continuously dissatisfied with Monk’s answers to his questions: about not being understood by French audiences in the 1950s, about his wife Nellie’s role in his life, about being avant-garde. Renaud asks for take after take, unable to improvise when seemingly thwarted by Monk’s responses. (In the actual 30-minute show, Monk speaks eight words, according to Gomis.)The film is not merely playback or payback on behalf of one Black artist by another. “Rewind & Play” dazzles because it is and will remain a wonder to witness Monk seemingly discovering his compositions again and again, his fingers conjuring, his right foot etching rhythms.Rewind & PlayNot rated. In English and French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 5 minutes. In theaters. More
Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell: They altered the course of American music and raised the bar for improvisation. Listen to 10 experts’ favorites.What five minutes of music would you play for a friend to make them love Alice Coltrane or Duke Ellington? After a few years of listening to a wide range of classical music, The New York Times has been asking musicians, writers, editors, critics and scholars to share their jazz favorites with readers.This month, our focus isn’t an artist, but a style: bebop. Think of a horn player zipping through a dizzying line, over a swinging beat that sizzles so fast you can almost see smoke drifting from the cymbals. That’s bebop.Forged in the fires of Black urban life during the postwar era, bebop was, as Amiri Baraka writes in “Blues People,” the style that “led jazz into the arena of art.” It was also laced with irreverence. “To a certain extent, this music resulted from conscious attempts to remove it from the danger of mainstream dilution or even understanding,” Baraka says.By way of its corrugated harmonies, its dashing tempos and the particular spotlight it placed on the interplay between horns and drums, bebop altered the course of American music, and raised the bar for improvisation and composition worldwide. And it’s never really gone out of fashion: Bebop is the music Jean-Michel Basquiat painted to, and it’s the foundation of jazz theory that music students around the world are taught when they learn to improvise.Enjoy listening to these tracks selected by a range of the genre’s practitioners, commentators and devotees. You can find a playlist at the bottom of the article, and be sure to leave your own bebop favorites in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Jon Faddis, trumpeterFor me, any discussion of bebop must include Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. This is not to negate the contributions of Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Oscar Pettiford, Kenny Clarke, Fats Navarro, Max Roach and many others. Parker spearheaded bebop; Gillespie, a consummate teacher, conveyed this complex musical style to others. On an autumn evening over 75 years ago, at one of my favorite venues, Carnegie Hall, a groundbreaking concert made many fall in love with bebop. It still inspires and resonates. Although there are many classic bebop recordings, such as “Complete Jazz at Massey Hall,” “Parker’s Mood,” “Koko,” “Groovin’ High,” and another favorite of mine, Bird’s solo on “Lady Be Good,” this version of “Dizzy Atmosphere” epitomizes the genius abilities of Bird and Diz to create at such a high level. Charlie Parker is on fire, and Dizzy Gillespie is right there with him. As Dizzy used to say, “Two hearts as one.”“Dizzy Atmosphere”Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie (Blue Note Records)◆ ◆ ◆Camille Thurman, saxophonist and vocalistCharlie Parker was the epitome of bebop. His improvisations were innovative, limitless, freeing, bold, boundary-pushing and unapologetically groundbreaking in the way he transcended all preconceived understanding of western harmony. This version of “Just Friends” is what bebop is all about in a nutshell. You have this beautiful orchestration of strings, with a whimsical yet eerie backdrop, and like a bolt of lightning, Bird comes in with a highly imaginative, vivid, rapid flow of endless ideas that for four measures is exhilarating, taking you on a virtuosic sonic roller coaster ride. He ever so gracefully lands into the melody of “Just Friends” and perfectly introduces the song at the end of his improvisation. To love bebop is to recognize how musicians like Bird had the gift of hearing beyond the scope of what we might take for granted when listening to a standard. Bird could take something ordinary and recreate it into something that was iconic, sophisticated, unique and timeless while freely and honestly expressing himself. He set the standard for what makes bebop, bebop.“Just Friends”Charlie Parker (Verve Reissues)◆ ◆ ◆Gary Giddins, former Village Voice jazz criticOnly in bebop could you take a pop song, strip it of its melody and lyrics, and create a defining standard from the remains: the chord changes. The British musician Ray Noble’s 1938 “Indian Suite” harkened to the romantic Americana of Victor Herbert and Coleridge-Taylor, yet the first movement, “Cherokee,” was a swing-era hit, despite a slow-moving melody and a fast-moving harmonic episode considered so challenging (B major, A major, G major) that Count Basie relieved Lester Young from having to solo on it. Charlie Parker obsessed over those chords, and in 1945 launched bop with his transformational “Koko.” Several classic versions ensued, none more dazzling than Bud Powell’s masterpiece. He begins with a caricature of Indian music à la Hollywood, witty but also rhythmically intense so that you smile but don’t laugh, which leads to Noble’s often-ignored theme, powered by a contrapuntal plateau of chords, as if he’s laying out the territory before he explores it, which he does in two choruses of electrifying linear invention, against a barrage of bass clef chords. The solo is staged within two octaves, dipping only once as low as the area of middle C, spelled by infrequent breath-like rests, a minimal reliance on triplets, and a few heady riff episodes. After dozens of hearings over six decades, it hasn’t lost one iota of its joy, ingenuity and wonder.“Cherokee”Bud Powell (Verve)◆ ◆ ◆Giovanni Russonello, Times jazz criticAn unforgettable tune, hung loosely upon chord changes that originated in a George Gershwin composition but are adapted here and restructured, turned sideways and adorned with a rockslide of rhythmic melody. A French announcer atop the sound, running through titles and names. A young Miles Davis, not yet 23, blasting forth with enough squiggly canned heat on the trumpet to leave the announcer’s words sounding lifeless, irrelevant. In each of these facets, this recording of “Good Bait” — penned by the quietly revolutionary pianist Tadd Dameron — epitomizes the brilliant moment of bebop: a reckoning for Western modernism, the greeting of its own limitations, the Molotov cocktail concealed under the lapels of a three-piece suit.“Good Bait”The Miles Davis/Tadd Dameron Quintet (Legacy Recordings)◆ ◆ ◆Natalie Weiner, writerScat singing wasn’t a bebop innovation, but it was a core part of the subgenre’s development — right down to its name, derived from common scat syllables. Betty Carter shows why on this 1958 record, cramming a nearly unfathomable number of notes into a whirlwind minute and 48 seconds of slick big band sound. Her tics and riffs sound so familiar because they’ve become standard, but here Carter was forging new ground, extending the scat innovations of Dizzy Gillespie with wild virtuosity and never conceding to the mellow, background music stylings often expected of “girl singers.”“You’re Driving Me Crazy”Betty Carter (Master Tape Records)◆ ◆ ◆Sean Jones, trumpeterThis group’s performance with Thelonious Monk on “Evidence” is one of the greatest displays of bebop musicians communicating at a highly sophisticated level at extremely brisk tempos. This form of communication, improvisation, is one of the world’s best examples of spontaneous composition. The improvised section is based on Jesse Greer’s iconic “Just You, Just Me,” showing bebop’s ability to recontextualize the pop song form. Referencing that title, Monk thought, “Just Us/Justice” — which requires “Evidence.” This track also reflects the most profound aspects of rhythm and its relationship to harmony through the African American experience, creating new sonic phrasing that would become the foundation of hip-hop and other American styles of music.“Evidence”Thelonious Monk Quartet With Johnny Griffin (Riverside Records)◆ ◆ ◆Charles McPherson, saxophonistBird comes from the middle of the country, Kansas City, in the middle of the 1930s, when that area was in a good musical period. But besides absorbing all the Kansas City blues and the Kansas City swing, Bird was pretty eclectic. He very much knew about people like Stravinsky: He quoted passages from “Firebird Suite” or “Petrushka.” Bird listened to cowboy country-western; he listened to everything. So he was like a sponge, musically. He also probably listened to Middle Eastern music — certainly Dizzy did that. So they’re pushing all kinds of envelopes. These guys were particularly smart and wide open, with the technique to merge it all. Billy Higgins, the drummer, said that bebop was the beginning of “sanctified intelligence.” That says it all.The way that Bird and Dizzy play “Shaw ’Nuff,” they’re so accurate it almost sounds like one person playing. It’s a lot of moving parts, it’s very notey — but they’re played very cleanly. And these guys are right with each other. When I talk to California musicians who are of that age, they say: “We just heard Bird and Dizzy on record, they had never come out here to Los Angeles, so we thought it was one person playing. So when they came out there in the 1940s it was the first time we saw them playing, and it amazed us. Because a lot of the compositions that we thought were one person playing — no, it was two people playing.” That floored them.“Shaw ’Nuff”Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie (Savoy)◆ ◆ ◆Marcus J. Moore, jazz writerI’ve always admired the brazenness of the trumpeter Freddie Hubbard: No matter how powerfully the music swirled around him, and whether he was the bandleader or a sideman, his wail scorched through the arrangement every time. On this 1969 version of “Space Track,” from the live album “Without a Song,” Hubbard dots the composition with brisk upper-register notes that float atop the band’s turbulent mix of piano, drums and bass, bolstering the song’s urgency while guiding its shape-shifting journey. “Space Track” dips into occasional silence meant to reinforce its balance of power and tranquillity. With each of the band’s upswings, Hubbard also ascends, at one point following Louis Hayes’s spirited drum solo with an equally blistering tone. To me, the track typifies Hubbard’s command of his instrument alongside the message he wanted to convey. His mastery of tension was unparalleled.“Space Track”Freddie Hubbard (Blue Note Records)◆ ◆ ◆Kenny Barron, pianistThis is a very melodic piece. I know some people may be intimidated by bebop — the lines can be very fast and complicated — but this is a very melodic piece, with a very accessible line. It’s not a simple melody but it’s not super-complicated, either: You can actually sing along with it. And it’s taken at a tempo that’s not too fast, so it’s really very clear. Where the rhythmic emphasis falls, that’s one of the things that makes it work. One of the things that makes bebop work is that the way the one is felt — the first beat of the bar — is actually the “and” of four. So that gives it a certain kind of propulsion and forward motion, at any tempo. So when the tempo’s not that fast, you really hear that forward motion. Bud Powell’s important because he improvised like a horn player. There were some things that he did that were kind of demonic, they were so incredible. Speed-wise, and also some of the things he wrote. He was an amazing pianist.“Celia”Bud Powell (Verve)◆ ◆ ◆Melissa Aldana, saxophonistTo me, this album — “Charlie Parker With Strings” — captures the deepness of Parker’s innovative nature as an artist in a way that is beautiful, lyrical and emotional. Bird’s sound is raw and personal, but this track shows what it means to simply have a beautiful sound. It made a particular impact on me years ago, and continues to affect me now.“April in Paris”Charlie Parker (Verve Reissues)◆ ◆ ◆ More
A chance encounter with Thelonious Monk led to a 14-year stint as his manager. After seeing a young Michael Keaton at a stand-up club, he became his manager, too.Harry Colomby was a schoolteacher with a love of jazz when he stopped by the Cafe Bohemia in Greenwich Village in 1955 to remind the drummer Art Blakey that he and his band, the Jazz Messengers, were scheduled to perform in a few days at the school where Mr. Colomby taught.While waiting, Mr. Colomby greeted the celebrated composer and pianist Thelonious Monk; they had met once before. “Oh, Harry. Yeah, I remember you,” Mr. Colomby recalled him saying, as detailed in the liner notes to the live 1965 Monk album “Misterioso.” “Say, you got your car here? You can drive me uptown?”In the car, Monk asked if Mr. Colomby was ready to quit teaching. “So I drove Thelonious to his house at 2:30 in the morning and at 3 a.m., a half-hour later, became his personal manager,” he wrote. “I’m still not sure how it happened.”Mr. Colomby’s younger brother, Bobby, the original drummer with Blood, Sweat & Tears and later a record producer and an executive at several record companies, said in a phone interview that Monk viewed Harry as someone who was “bright, honest and would work hard,” adding, “Harry told him, ‘I can’t promise you you’ll be rich, but you’ll be appreciated as an artist.’”Thelonious Monk in 1961. “I realized that Monk was more than a jazz musician,” Mr. Colomby said. “He was potentially a symbol.”Erich Auerbach/Getty ImagesMr. Colomby died on Dec. 25 at a hospital in Los Angeles. He was 92. His brother confirmed the death.When Mr. Colomby began working with Monk, he was little known beyond the jazz cognoscenti and his unorthodox approach divided critics. He was also rarely heard in New York City because he lacked a cabaret card, which in those days was needed to perform in bars and nightclubs there; he had not had one since 1951, when it was revoked because of a drug arrest. In 1957, Mr. Colomby helped Monk get his card back. His subsequent extended engagement at the Five Spot in the East Village was the beginning of his emergence as a jazz star.For most of the 14 years that he managed Monk from obscurity to renown, Mr. Colomby taught English and social studies at high schools in Brooklyn, Queens and Plainview, on Long Island. “I had no illusion about how much money there is in jazz,” Mr. Colomby told the historian Robin D.G. Kelley for his biography “Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original” (2009). “But I realized that Monk was more than a jazz musician. He was potentially a symbol. He was symbolic of strength, stick-to-it-iveness, purity, you know, beyond music, beyond jazz.”Harry Golombek was born on Aug. 20, 1929, in Berlin, and fled with his parents and his brother Jules to New York City in the spring of 1939 to escape Nazi persecution. Family members who had immigrated earlier to the United States changed their surname to Colomby. His father, Saul, who became Fred in the United States, started a watchmaking company in Manhattan. His mother, Elsie (Ries) Colomby, worked there.After graduating from New York University in 1950 with a bachelor’s degree in English, Harry began his teaching career.As a manager, Mr. Colomby had only four clients: Monk; the singer and pianist Mose Allison; the comedian and impressionist John Byner; and the actor Michael Keaton.Mr. Byner said that he met Mr. Colomby in the early 1960s at a John F. Kennedy impression contest. “He was fantastic,” he said in a phone interview. “He knew everybody.” But they parted in 1986 because Mr. Colomby became focused on his business with Mr. Keaton.“He left me for another guy,” Mr. Byner said.Mr. Colomby first encountered Mr. Keaton, then a stand-up comic, performing at the Comedy Store in Hollywood in the late 1970s.“What I saw in Michael was something original,” Mr. Colomby told The Los Angeles Times in 1988. “I also saw charisma onstage. Something about his look and timing was exquisite.”Mr. Colomby was also the producer or executive producer of starring vehicles for Mr. Keaton including the television series “Working Stiffs” (1979) and “Report to Murphy” (1982) and the films “Mr. Mom” (1983), “Johnny Dangerously” (1984) and “One Good Cop” (1991).In addition to his brother Bobby, Mr. Colomby is survived by his wife, Lee, and his son, the actor Scott Colomby. His brother Jules, who briefly ran a jazz record company, Signal, died in the 1990s.Mr. Keaton was Mr. Colomby’s client for about 25 years, and the two remained friends afterward.“What we shared was, we saw things in an offbeat way and we’d talk for hours and make each other laugh,” Mr. Keaton said in a phone interview. “I was probably the only stand-up whose manager was funnier than he was.” More
