SPHERE- jody's blues

[jporter]

It occured to me that an antidote for the "SPHERE to Eternity" blather that
has been clogging my email of late, might be to pull out the actual music
and just, well, listen to it. But damn! What's this? My copy of: Thelonius
Sphere Monk "Monk's Blues" is is...empty! Shit!

Only Mark Humphrey's liner notes for the CD with which to erase the bitter
taste of lit/crit p-list cat fighting from my parched soul. It will have to
do. Here's some of it, which does seem appropriately oblique to the current
drek:

        Two of the many Monk stories afloat serve especially well to
illustrate his artisitic
        purpose, and, too, what Bill Evans would laud as his "direct speech
in an age of
        insurmountable conformist pressure." Writing in the fall 1992
_Musically Quarterly_
        Martin Williams tells us: "I observed Monk at a rehearsal for his
1959 Town Hall
        concert...One of the musicians had just improvised on one of Monk's
harmonically
        simpler pieces, and the composer remarked, 'You can make a better
solo if you use
        the melody. Anbody can run these [chord] changes.' The musician abruptly
        responded, 'You want me to play the melody?' At which point
Thelonius simply
        repeated, 'You can make a better solo if you use the melody.'"

        In _From Birdland To Broadway_... bassist Bill Crow relates a
profound comment
        from the often mute Monk: "I found his compositions difficult from
a bass player's
        point of view," writes Crow. "I told Monk that some of his
intervals surprised me.
        They would sound unusual, but when I checked them out, they were
ordinary fifths,
        sixths, sevenths. It was his touch that made them sound different.
He nodded and said,
        'It can't be any new note. When you look at the keyboard, all the
notes are there
        already. But if you mean a note enough, it will sound different.
You got to pick the
        notes you really mean!'"



"You can make a better solo if you use the melody."

"You got to pick the notes you really mean."

"Direct speech in an age of insurmountable conformist pressure"


I'm off to Tower Records.
jody