"Working with Monk brought me close to a musical architect of the highest order. I felt I learned from him in every way--through the senses, theoretically, technically. I would talk to Monk about musical problems, and he would sit at the piano and show me the answers just by playing them. I could watch him play and find out the things I wanted to know. Also, I could see a lot of things that I didn't know about at all."
- John Coltrane (1960, in Downbeat Magazine)
Have a favorite song? Well, here's one of many by Thelonious Sphere Monk, born on October 10, 1917. It will be a few years before Friday the 13th falls on a Friday again, so here are a few renditions of Monk's catchy (yet very difficult to play) Friday the 13th.
Well, first and foremost (among many things), the incredible pianistic and compositional brilliance of the great Bud Powell (1924-1966) is what we music lovers at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog want, in 2021 and always!
For your original compositions, artistry and mastery of music, Mr. Powell, we can't thank you enough.
Wish we could time travel and correct the numerous wrongs that were done to you in your lifetime. At least Francois Paudras and many of your former bandmates made their best efforts to do right by you.
Hearing the trio sides from the 1953 Jazz At Massey Hall concert made a believer out of me.
The Bud Powell Trio concerts featuring bassist extraordinaire Oscar Pettiford and power-packed percussionist Roy Haynes on drums are incredible as well.
As Mr. Paudras did, wish we could give you some measure of the respect and love you deserved while you were here living among us. One who did just that was the legendary bandleader, recording artist and saxophone colossus Sonny Rollins, along with Roy Haynes the last still living in January 2021 who knew Bud, a professor of harmony and shooting star of the 20th century music world.
Thrilled and delighted to have lived through another year and made it to a new one? YEAH, BABY! As hap-hap-happy as Osgood Fielding? We wish!
It's officially Happy New Year from Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog AND the great George Harrison.
We are tickled as tickled could be to begin 2019 by approaching one of the newfangled devices around our house and then saying "Alexa, play Art Tatum!"
To my amazement and delight, Alexa did play some Art Tatum - thanks!
Here's a clip of Art, rocking the keys in one of his very, very few filmed performances.
As this blogger's favorite movie of 2018 (tied with the flawed and critically panned but musically wonderful Bohemian Rhapsody - we dig Queen tons at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog) was Won't You Be My Neighbor, Morgan Neville's splendid documentary on Fred Rogers, let's hear Johnny Costa, the super-talented pianist and music director for the Mister Rogers' Neighborhood program.
Here, Mr. Costa does his very best to give Mr. Tatum a run for his money with a ripping rendition of Tea For Two, the second interpretation of the Vincent Youmans - Irving Caesar standard in this YouTube video. Also in the mix and first up in the trio of ivory-tickling performances: the mighty Oscar Peterson.
Do these pianistic powerhouses sound amazing? Yes! Here, another pianistic powerhouse, the great Ray Charles, elaborates. . .
Oscar Peterson, chatting with fellow pianist/bandleader Count Basie about Art Tatum, used the phrase "musical intimidation."
It's difficult to equal Art, Ray, Oscar and Basie on New Years' Day (or any day), but we'll at least give it a try with this Academy Award winning MGM cartoon made by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera. It's one of the very best from their Tom & Jerry series and a prime example of the popular "ribbing the classics" genre, along with the Walter Lantz Studio's Musical Miniatures series and the Friz Freleng crew's Warner Bros. cartoon Rhapsody Rabbit, featuring soloist and Oscar winning rabbit Bugs Bunny.
"Working with Monk brought me close to a musical architect of the highest order. I felt I learned from him in every way--through the senses, theoretically, technically. I would talk to Monk about musical problems, and he would sit at the piano and show me the answers just by playing them. I could watch him play and find out the things I wanted to know. Also, I could see a lot of things that I didn't know about at all."
- John Coltrane (1960, in Downbeat Magazine)
With the understanding that whenever Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog posts about music, all readers BUT musicians appear to go away, we salute the one, the only Thelonious Sphere Monk, born on October 10, 1917. 100th birthday tributes are pouring in for the genius of modern music from NPR, the Mercury News and the Monk Institute, just three among many kudos from around the world. Jazz At Lincoln Center has been presenting the Thelonious Monk Festival, a series of concerts in tribute.
The prolific and original pianist-composer-bandleader - as well as a mathematician, ping-pong champ and chess master - is much celebrated 100 years after his birth. This was not so much the case during his heydey, which extended from the latter 1940's through the mid-1960's.
Fortunately for present-day music lovers, a good many complete concerts and television shows featuring Thelonious Monk and his Quartet are on YouTube. Monk's last concerts were in 1975.
The 1940's pop culture and music writers who covered jazz in the post-WW2 era were definitely interested in the trendiness of it all and being in on the shiniest, hippest new thing, but seemed to entirely miss out on who Monk was. Monk was dubbed "The High Priest Of Bebop" and, while this made great copy, it was also a big fat swing and a miss as far as comprehending what his music was about and why he was important.
For this music aficionado, Thelonious Monk's importance was not just his ability to create an original, very specific compositional style and musical universe, much as Duke Ellington had, but his knack for synthesizing ideas from highly varied sources (Fats Waller, Willie "The Lion" Smith, James P. Johnson, Earl Hines) and keeping the tradition alive while creating something entirely original, new and different in the process. This is also true of Monk's renditions of standards by other composers.
The following page, Monk bandmate Steve Lacy's jottings of Thelonious' handwritten guidelines and advice for group members still constitutes a primer for anyone who is playing music in an ensemble or otherwise working in non-WWE variants on the arts. His philosophy of music, life and art informs all of it.
Even 70 years after the release of Thelonious Monk: Genius Of Modern Music on Blue Note Records, his compositions are frequently performed but not necessarily entirely understood, even by world-class musicians. In the composer's words, "when you're swinging, swing some more!"
This is because Monk's compositions, even the simplest ones, remain difficult to play but easy to botch! Incredible music . . . and not for the dilettante or amateur!
2017 turns out to be the centennial for Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie and Dean Martin as well.
"Why would anyone come to hear me, a Negro," she told Time Magazine, "and refuse to sit beside someone just like me?"Hazel Scott"
Ringing in the new year by, you guessed it, watching 1940's movies and looking up excerpts from same on YouTube, this blogger found himself totally flabbergasted by the following clip: an awe-inspiring keyboard wizard playing two pianos at the same time.
The thought, who was that lady - an astonishing musician and strikingly beautiful, elegant woman, giving Paderewski, Gershwin, Earl "Fatha" Hines and Teddy Wilson a run for their money?
The answer to "who was that lady?" was not "that was no lady, that was my wife" but the exceptional virtuoso pianist, vocalist, performer, actress and recording artist Hazel Scott (1920-1981).
Among various points in her relatively brief but eventful life, she was a prodigy, concert pianist, radio star, social and political activist, celebrated Parisian expatriate and actress in television in the late 1960's and early 1970's. Clearly, from reading such articles as Hazel Scott's Lifetime Of High Notes from Smithsonian, a bio penned by Dwayne Mack for Black Past.org, as well as watching the following 20 minute YouTube piece, those researching her life were mightily impressed.
Her influence spread far beyond the confines of the concert hall. Ms. Scott was quite the social activist: a mover and a shaker, at one point married to Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell. Perusing a few books and articles about Ms. Scott, it was clear all who researched her life were astonished - and worked very hard to just begin to scratch the surface. Karen Chilton's biography, Hazel Scott: The Pioneering Journey of a Jazz Pianist, from Cafe Society to Hollywood to HUAC, tells her story in detail.
Hazel was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and mastered the Euro-classical and jazz repertoires at a very tender age. She studied at Juilliard, began playing in a jazz band in her teens and began frequently performing on radio at age 16. Hazel recorded prolifically, starting in the late 1930's.
Her specialty would be "swinging the classics." Musically, Hazel explores a similar boogie woogie + classical + jazz artistic terrain to the Cab Calloway Big Band's virtuoso pianist Dorothy Donegan.
In Miss Scott's early work as a jazz piano soloist, arguably only the aforementioned Dorothy Donegan, Art Tatum, Oscar Peterson and Jaki Byard could rival that ability to fly up and down the 88 keys and execute double-time and triple-time in "Super Waller" fashion.
Her movie career spanned several performances in 1943-1945, appearing as herself in musicals. One particularly jaw-dripping clip is Hazel's performance in the MGM revue picture I Dood It, which also featured Lena Horne.
Insisting on better roles for African-Americans in movies, Hazel turned down any and all roles as maids and other servile characters and took on no less than Harry Cohn at Columbia over demeaning costumes chosen for her female co-stars in The Heat's On.
That run-in with the not genteel, refined and forward-thinking Columbia Pictures chief would end the flurry of roles for the concert pianist in American movies. Hazel would make one more American film, Rhapsody In Blue, then record, tour and, in 1950, host her own TV show for the Dumont Network. Unfortunately, no clips of this exist.
While Hazel preceded Nat King Cole as a person of color to host a TV show, her progressive political activism made her a target. She was listed in the infamous "Red Channels" publication. Seems that in 1950, if one was an activist, union supporter or progressive - and didn't slip at least $50,000 bucks under the table to the right people to make sure that one's dossier gets overlooked - one's hosting gig and showbiz career could end abruptly. The show was cancelled a week after her appearance before HUAC, as she didn't "name names."
Undaunted, Ms. Scott relocated to Paris and resumed her music, acting and recording careers there.
Hazel did continue to play with her trio in clubs and record albums.
There were more acts in her life, including a comeback in frequent cabaret performances and, in the late 1960's and early 1970's, a return to acting in television. But before that, she made her mark with some exceptional albums.
Arguably her greatest recording as a jazz artist was Relaxed Piano Moods on the Debut Label. The style is less flashy and more contemplative than the earlier recordings, more akin to the ballad sides of Bud Powell (1924-1966) and Powell's friend and fellow under-appreciated pianist/composer of the 1950's and 1960's, Elmo Hope (1923-1967). This and her subsequent album on Decca would be a fitting coda to Hazel Scott's brilliant career in music.
