Duke - Steve Dollar https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/author/steve-dollar en Hummable Genius https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/hummable-genius <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <table width="98%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr><td valign="top"><p>Monk abides. That's Monk, as in Thelonious Sphere Monk. If the name rings with a slightly off-kilter resonance, at once elegant and a touch uncanny, it's only appropriate. The jazz composer and pianist, who would have turned ninety this October, was a singular brand of genius, an idiosyncratic marvel, and a pivotal figure in American music. Once you'd heard him, you could never forget him. His indelible melodies and brusque, angular rhythms adhered to their own internal logic, and they came to shape a radical new way of thinking about jazz, erupting out of Harlem in the early 1940s and permeating cultural consciousness ever since</p><p>Monk's more protean contemporaries, such as Duke Ellington and Miles Davis, achieved greater renown earlier in their careers, and generated bodies of work that were both epic and epochal. But this composer was always an insider's favorite. He'd been performing and recording for a quarter century before he won mainstream recognition. Monk was an enigmatic character who took the stage with his goatee and his haberdasher's array of hats—jumping up from the piano bench in mid-tune to dance around the bandstand as his sidemen soloed—and was publicly known as a man of few and often coded words. "He was a true eccentric, that's the way you could put it," says Charles Tolliver, the jazz trumpeter and bandleader, who was seventeen when he first saw Monk at a concert in 1959. "A maximum eccentric." And so, he remained a tad obscure even as his music, including songs like " 'Round Midnight," "Straight, No Chaser," and "Misterioso" became instantly hummable staples of jazz repertoire.</p><p>"He set a standard of hipness," says Jason Moran, the thirty-two-year-old pianist who is one of Monk's contemporary heirs. "If you are able to find out who he is, you become part of a separate society."</p><p>Duke Performances, perhaps better known in the past for showcasing more mainstream fare, is making an unprecedented effort to spread the word. True, Monk has enjoyed retrospective tribute at jazz festivals worldwide, and has inspired programs at such cultural bastions as Jazz at Lincoln Center and the San Francisco Jazz Festival. But he's never gotten quite the kaleidoscopic treatment he received from Duke in the six-week "Following Monk" series, which ran through the end of October and comprised seventeen performances (music, theater, and dance), including  commissions for Monk-themed projects created by Moran, Tolliver, and the Kronos Quartet. The series was scheduled to coincide with what would have been the late musician's birthday, October 10.</p><div class="media-header" style="width: 580px; ;margin: 5px;"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 580px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/111207/images/111207-lg-39theloniouseugenesmith3.jpg" alt="In tune: Monk and band rehearse for the 1959 concert at Manhattan jazz loft" width="580" height="252" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption">In tune: Monk and band rehearse for the 1959 concert at Manhattan jazz loft. Michael Zirkle</p></div></div></div></div></div><p>"We wanted to explore the legacy in a bunch of different directions," says Aaron Greenwald, interim director of Duke Performances, "but also be respectful and musically uncompromising. That was critical. We wanted to create enough opportunities so people who don't know Monk's music [but] who were curious would accept the invitation."</p><p>Monk's music can strike a novice listener as being what jazz fans call "out," Greenwald notes. Certainly that was the perception in the 1940s, when critics and musicians outside his circle disparaged the pianist's percussive verve and his shifting, elliptical use of space between the notes as mere bad technique. As jazz historian Ted Gioia wrote, Monk favored "the stark repetition of the simplest melodic fragments, serving almost as a parody of traditional thematic development; thick, comping chords laced with dissonances, and dropped with the subtlety of a hand grenade."</p><p>It wasn't easy listening in 1942, but, over time, the idiosyncrasies of Monk's style have become an essential part of jazz language. "He's the first thing you learn now," Moran says, adding that after he first heard Monk, as a teenager growing up in Houston, Texas, in the 1990s, "I measured everything else up to him. Monk wasn't outside, Monk was inside." At Duke, Moran performed the world premiere of a new full-length piece he composed, based on Monk's music. (He was also a visiting artist first semester, coming to campus a half-dozen times to work with undergraduate and graduate students in various departments.)</p><div class="media-header" style="width: 580px; ;margin: 5px;"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 580px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/111207/images/111207-lg-41mg2582-2b.jpg" alt="History revisited: Sax man Jeffrey, one of Monk's contemporaries, helped introduce modern audiences to the jazz master's repertoire " width="580" height="276" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption">History revisited: Sax man Jeffrey, one of Monk's contemporaries, helped introduce modern audiences to the jazz master's repertoire. Michael Zirkle</p></div></div></div></div></div><p>What made Monk's music remarkable was the way it could juxtapose a basic theme with a heady, complex treatment. At its core, a lingering ballad like "Crepuscule with Nellie," which Monk wrote for his wife, offers pleasures as instant as a lullaby. Something jauntier, like "Ba-lue Bolivar Ba-lues-are," was so accessible that it snuck onto the soundtrack for Disney's 1961 animated film <em>One Hundred and One Dalmatians</em>, its melody appropriated for a tune called "Cruella De Vil." Children across America were singing along to Monk without even knowing it. But just to certify Monk's underground cachet—he also turned up, after a fashion, in Thomas Pynchon's first novel, <em>V.</em>, which featured a cameo by an avant-garde saxophonist named McClintic Sphere.</p><p>"This is curiously complicated music to listen to," Greenwald says. "It's remarkable that so many people do. There're all kinds of elements we're trying to chase down in the series. Folk elements, for instance. He was born here in the Piedmont, so he would have been influenced by railroad songs, certain types of blues, of gospel music."</p><p>To best account for all those facets of Monk's life and art meant bringing in an array of Monk's more remarkable interpreters and contemporaries, such as jazz vocalist Andy Bey and jazz pianists Jessica Williams, Hank Jones, and Randy Weston, who could explore various facets of the composer's musical DNA: gospel, blues, stride piano, Negro spirituals, and folk songs. But Greenwald also wanted to explore the world that the pianist influenced.</p><div class="media-header" style="width: 470px; float: right; margin: 5px;"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 470px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/111207/images/111207-lg-40bmg4605.jpg" alt="Sound into motion: Alonzo King LINES Ballet " width="470" height="313" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption">Sound into motion: Alonzo King LINES Ballet Company premiered two new Monk-inspired works. Michael Zirkle</p></div></div></div></div></div><p>"If you Google 'Thelonious Monk' and the name of any major hip-hop producer, you'll find some interview where they're going to be talking about what a huge influence he is," Greenwald says. "There's a legacy that hasn't been explored fully. I don't mean just his impact on jazz, but his impact on contemporary music and dance."</p><p>That meant looking at Monk through the prism of his influence on contemporary classical music, salsa music, and ballet and modern dance. Choreographer Robert Battle cites Monk as a formative influence, especially in what he calls a "deconstructive" approach to melody and rhythm. What he heard in Monk was a process of taking apart essential aspects of a piece of music and sticking them back together again, casting the familiar flow of notes askew through the use of suspenseful pauses and tempos that lingered and crashed. "He had a way of turning the thing upside down and shaking it a little bit," says Battle, whose Battleworks Dance Company's <em>Monk Movements</em>, a program of short pieces devised especially for Duke, reflects that sensibility. "It's one of the things I try to emulate in my own work, even when I'm using classical music."</p><p>Perhaps it was the way that Monk's sound countered mid-twentieth-century jazz convention that now makes it so congruent with other forms in which artists think outside the box. "Monk's music always felt very natural to where I was coming from," says David Harrington, a founder of the San Francisco-based Kronos Quartet, a chamber group known for its embrace of eclectic sources and new composers. The group kicked off the six-week Duke series. "He's quite close to the avant-garde classical tradition, except for his rich sense of melody. That's something he had that they didn't."</p><div><div class="media-header" style="width: 580px; ;margin: 5px;"><div align="center"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 580px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/111207/images/111207-lg-43mg7621.jpg" alt="Wild nights: Theater studies department production of Misterioso included musicians, singers, actors, and dancers who captured the creative energy of the Sixth Avenue jazz loft. Monk character, center, and Smith, crouched at left" width="580" height="279" /><p class="caption-text"><span style="font-size: 10px; text-align: -webkit-center; background-color: #ffffff;">Wild nights: Theater studies department production of </span><em style="font-size: 10px; text-align: -webkit-center; background-color: #ffffff;">Misterioso</em><span style="font-size: 10px; text-align: -webkit-center; background-color: #ffffff;"> included musicians, singers, actors, and dancers who captured the creative energy of the Sixth Avenue jazz loft. Monk character, center, and Smith, crouched at left. Michael Zirkle</span></div><div class="media-h-caption"> </p></div></div></div></div></div><p>Harrington was fifteen years old the first time he heard Monk, in 1965, when his music teacher played a record for him. "I have a strong recollection of that, hearing this incredible sense of voicing and the spacing of chords and these beautiful asymmetrical rhythms." After Monk's death in 1982, the quartet was among the first groups to adapt his music outside a jazz realm, with its 1984<em> Monk's Suite</em>. The composition broke new ground by bringing Monk, and other jazz composers, into chamber repertoire. For their Duke performance, the musicians brought new arrangements of " 'Round Midnight" that tested the elasticity of what is Monk's most popular composition, bending it this way with electronic touches, and that way with an Eastern European feel. Yet, no matter how far afield the musicians carried the melody, the music always circled home.</p><p>Monk was born October 10, 1917, in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, but was only five when his family moved to Manhattan's West Side. He began playing piano four years later, and, as a teenager, hit the road for two years with a traveling evangelist. Mary Lou Williams, the great stride pianist and big-band arranger who was an artist-in-residence at Duke from 1977 until her death in 1981, met Monk in Kansas City during this period.</p><p>"He was already playing the music he would be playing in New York," says Sam Stephenson A.M. '97, director of the Jazz Loft Project at Duke's Center for Documentary Studies, who has written about the gospel influences Monk shared with Williams (whose name graces the Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture at Duke).</p><p>"Monk's playing is so dissonant," he says, drawing parallels to the rough, ecstatic outbursts of rural Pentecostal congregations, and the unvarnished communion of Sacred Harp singing. Monk was known to play spirituals like "Abide With Me," and Stephenson hears this as a perfect fit. "Listen to 'Monk's Mood,' " he says, referring to one of the pianist's best-loved ballads. "It sounds like an ancient hymn. It sounds like it's from another world."</p><p>During the early 1940s, Minton's Playhouse in Harlem was another world. It was here that Monk honed his style, playing alongside the likes of alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, drummer Kenny Clarke, trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis, and tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins. The musicians were incubating bebop, a revolutionary turn in jazz that emphasized often dizzying harmonic improvisations that rendered once-familiar melodic sources as a kind of higher mathematics. Monk was celebrated by some as bop's "high priest," but his own compositions, while highly influential, were far too personal and uniquely crafted to conform to any genre. He first recorded them for the Blue Note label in 1947 and, while he continued to compose throughout his career, would consistently recast the same body of work.</p><p>By 1959, he was approaching a pivotal phase in his career, which had been sidetracked by New York City's cabaret licensing laws. These required musicians to carry a performance license, which could be suspended or revoked if the performer was arrested. Unfortunately, Monk had suffered a few run-ins with the law over minor drug violations. Because of this, off and on during the 1950s, he wasn't allowed to play in New York clubs.</p><p>But in 1959, he booked a concert at Town Hall, a venerable Manhattan concert hall that wasn't affected by cabaret laws. He organized a big band and presented new arrangements of his music. It was a big deal. Even as Monk had prospered in the studio, making a series of brilliant albums for Riverside Records, he hadn't been heard in a New York nightclub since 1957, when he enjoyed a six-month residency at a club called the Five Spot with a group that featured tenor saxophonist John Coltrane. There was a growing audience that wanted to see what the buzz was all about. The event also was an occasion for Monk to expand his terrain, since his music was not usually performed in a larger ensemble.</p><p>The historic concert made a natural centerpiece for the Duke series, which took both a retrospective and an interpretive angle in exploring the performance. "It was remarkably intense music, and the ensemble played the daylights out if it," Greenwald says. He commissioned Tolliver, the musician who had witnessed the concert as a teenager, to put together a re-staging of the show, with transcriptions of the original charts. He also invited Moran to work up a piece based on the concert. Both musicians relied extensively on recordings of Monk archived at Duke's Jazz Loft Project, which oversees a massive collection of tapes made of jazz musicians, such as Monk, who played at a Manhattan loft rented by the photographer and amateur recordist W. Eugene Smith. (Students in Duke's theater studies department also made use of the materials in the loft project, presenting a ninety-minute performance piece, <em>Misterioso</em>, based on the people and events documented by Smith.)</p><p>A significant portion of the collection includes taped conversations about plans for the Town Hall concert between Monk and arranger and pianist Hall Overton, an instructor at the Juilliard School who lived in the loft. In a digital file from one of their sessions, you hear Monk pacing back and forth, talking with Overton, who sits at a piano. They're working on an arrangement for "Little Rootie Tootie," which got a stomping live performance at the concert. Throughout his life, Monk had the reputation of being a man of few and cryptic words. In fact, the tapes reveal that he's quite loquacious, if gruff and emphatic, and knows exactly what he wants. "Just hearing him talk is wonderful," says Moran, who was impressed hearing how the composer offered specific directions to Overton, almost making the arranger an extension of his own fingers. "It shattered my myth about Monk."</p><p>Moran's performance of his own Duke commission, "In My Mind: Monk at Town Hall 1959," which he is now touring, makes use of the recordings to create a sense of time travel. He frames the concert in three chronological sections: 2007, 1959, and the mid-1800s, "the time of Monk's grandfather, when he was a slave in North Carolina," he says.</p><p>Much has been written about "otherness" in jazz, and Monk's outsider status was lifelong, reinforced by his own gradual retreat from performing after he lost his contract with Columbia in 1970. "He'd play about once a year," recalls Paul Jeffrey, who ran Duke's jazz program for twenty years. Jeffrey was Monk's last saxophonist, onstage for what turned out to be the pianist's final show, at Carnegie Hall in 1976. "The audience was a real cross-section from a lot of different walks of life," Jeffrey recalls. "Intellectuals. Street people. He had a real underground society." It's not so underground anymore, not when Starbucks sells compilations of his most familiar tunes and his goatee appears on the label for a Belgian-style beer called Brother Thelonious. But as the Duke Performances series makes evident, there's still plenty of digging left to do, in both a literal—investigative—way and in the idiomatic sense: to enjoy.</p><p>"In the same way you engage people in a conversation about Shakespeare," Greenwald asks rhetorically, "doesn't it make sense to engage people in a conversation about Monk?"</p><p class="byline"><em>Dollar is a freelance writer based in New York. He is the author of <span class="pubtitle-nonital">Jazz Guide NYC: Second Edition</span> and a frequent contributor to such publications as <span class="pubtitle-nonital">The New York Sun</span> and <span class="pubtitle-nonital">Time Out Chicago</span>.</em></p></div></td></tr></tbody></table> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2007-11-30T00:00:00-05:00">Friday, November 30, 2007</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/dm-main-images/111207-lg-38mg6493.jpg" width="620" height="291" alt="In tune: Charles Tolliver Orchestra recreates Monk&#039;s Town Hall concert at Page Auditorium Michael Zirkle" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/author/steve-dollar" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Steve Dollar</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/nov-dec-2007" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Nov - Dec 2007</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue<section class="field field-name-field-sub-header field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Sub-header:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Jazz pianist Thelonious Monk helped shape a radical new way of thinking about jazz. With an ambitious six-week series, Duke Performances set out to explore Monk&#039;s music and its widespread influence.</div></div></section> Fri, 30 Nov 2007 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18500868 at https://alumni.duke.edu Replaying Jazz, Reel by Reel https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/replaying-jazz-reel-reel <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <table width="98%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr><td valign="top"><div class="media-header" style="width: 580px; ;margin: 5px;"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 580px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/111207/images/111207-lg-40misteriosoeugenesmith.jpg" alt="Aural vision: Smith's experimental portrait of 821 Sixth Avenue" width="580" height="372" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption">Aural vision: Smith's experimental portrait of 821 Sixth Avenue. Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona</p></div></div></div></div></div><p class="articletitle">One man's midlife crisis a half-century ago has given jazz fans and historians a mother lode of vibrant, off-the-cuff recordings whose rediscovery will influence the way many of the music's singular figures are perceived.</p><p>W. Eugene Smith was pretty much a mess in 1957. At thirty-nine, he had abandoned the suburban security of Westchester County, New York, and quit his job as a photographer for Time-Life, for whom he had captured some of the most resonant scenes of day-to-day Americana in the 1940s and '50s. Then, with quixotic devotion, he turned a three-week freelance commission to document life in Pittsburgh into a four-year project. "While still in the throes of his Pittsburgh obsession," as documentarian Sam Stephenson A. M. '97 puts it, he took comfort in a new one.</p><p>He rented a loft in a building in Manhattan, at 821 Sixth Avenue, a place that was known as a hangout for jazz musicians. One of its tenants was Hall Overton, a pianist and arranger, who had turned the address into a kind of ongoing jam session three years earlier. The situation wasn't unusual, as artists and musicians often lived and worked in such spaces. But, in most cases, what occurred was rarely documented.</p><p>Delighted with his new arrangement, Smith set out not only to take pictures of the players, but also to record them, placing microphones throughout the space and collecting 1,740 reel-to-reel tapes—about 4,000 hours of impromptu gigs, rehearsals, conversations, even encounters with the cops. Since the musicians included such future legends as Thelonious Monk, Don Cherry, Booker Ervin, Roy Haynes,  Rahsaan Roland Kirk,  and Zoot Sims—during an astoundingly fertile period in jazz—even seemingly trivial moments come loaded with cultural significance.</p><p>"It's a dream," says Stephenson. "We don't know what we're going to hear next." Stephenson, who directs the Jazz Loft Project at Duke's Center for Documentary Studies, found out about the tapes while putting together a 2001 exhibit and book on Smith, <em>Dream Street: W. Eugene Smith's Pittsburgh Project</em>.</p><p>As he immersed himself in the Smith archives at the Center for Creative Photography (CCP) at the University of Arizona, Stephenson saw an opportunity to bring to light an entire new dimension of Smith's work. Since the CCP had no resources for exploring the trove, Stephenson put together the necessary grant funding and launched the Jazz Loft Project (<a href="http://www.jazzloftproject.org"><strong>www.jazzloftproject.org</strong></a>). Five years later, Stephenson and his assistants, Dan Partridge and Sarah Moye, have sifted through 1,600 hours of tapes, which they have rendered as digital copies of the originals.</p><p>Stephenson has also collected 250 interviews with surviving individuals whose voices are heard on the recordings, which run through 1965. "At one point on the recordings, a policeman shows up," Stephenson says. "He's very familiar. He calls Smith 'Smitty.' I'm trying to find that cop. We've even put ads in Fraternal Order of Police newsletters. There was a lot of minor gangster activity that the cops were in on, so I'm thinking that's maybe why we haven't gotten a reply."</p><p>The impact of the Jazz Loft Project is only beginning to be felt. Until all of the material is duplicated and catalogued, it won't be available to the public, but recordings of Thelonious Monk played a critical role in developing commissions for Duke Performances' six-week-long "Following Monk" series.</p><p>David Harrington, founder of the San Francisco-based chamber group Kronos Quartet, was so inspired listening to tapes of Monk and Overton conversing about musical arrangements that he incorporated them into the quartet's recent performance at Duke. Their voices—even the sound of Monk's feet as he paced restlessly—could be heard, playing at an ambient level, before the show began.</p><p>"It's incredible," says Harrington. "You just hear him walking around, these footsteps creating this rhythm." </p></td></tr></tbody></table> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2007-11-30T00:00:00-05:00">Friday, November 30, 2007</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/default_images/dukmag-horizontal-placeholder.jpg" width="238" height="140" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/author/steve-dollar" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Steve Dollar</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue Fri, 30 Nov 2007 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18500863 at https://alumni.duke.edu Following Monk - At Home https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/following-monk-home <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <table width="98%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr><td valign="top"><div class="media-header" style="width: 400px; float: right; margin: 6px;"><img src="/issues/111207/images/111207-lg-theloniousmonkbyw4c784e.jpg" alt="Thelonius Monk" width="400" height="251" /><div class="media-h-caption"> </div><div class="media-h-credit">Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona</div></div><p class="articletitle"><span class="faqquest"><em>The Complete Blue Note Recordings</em><br /></span> This four-disc boxed set is a handy introduction to Monk's music. The collection includes the sessions for his 1947 debut recordings, eventually released as <em>The Genius of Modern Music</em>, and also features encounters with John Coltrane, Horace Silver, and Sonny Rollins as Monk's style evolves out of jazz's bebop era into his 1950s prime.</p><p class="articletitle"><span class="faqquest"><em>The Complete Riverside Recordings</em></span><br /> Novice listeners may think fifteen CDs of Monk are too much, but this is the mother lode: seven years of studio and live recordings with which the pianist defined his body of work. These tracks, made for producer Orrin Keepnews at Riverside Records, show off Monk's tunes in a variety of settings and emphasize the inspired variations he could constantly wring out of the same material. If this comprehensive set is too imposing, try one of the individual albums it includes, such as <em>Brilliant Corners</em> or <em>Thelonious Monk Plays Duke Ellington</em>, which used Ellington standards to introduce the then little-known Monk to a wider audience.</p><p class="articletitle"><span class="faqquest"><em>Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane Live At Carnegie Hall</em></span><em> </em><br /> Until a tape of this concert popped up, there wasn't much at all to document the six months tenor-saxophone giant John Coltrane spent playing with Monk. It was 1957 and, arguably, the time of jazz's greatest creative ferment. Monk's rhythmic gamesmanship, his manner of changing tempos and turning his piano lines into elliptical puzzles shines up Coltrane's lighter side.</p><p class="articletitle"><span class="faqquest">T<em>helonious Monk–Straight, No Chaser</em></span> <br /> This 1988 documentary uses footage shot twenty years earlier by filmmakers Michael and Christian Blackwood, giving rare glimpses of Monk in the studio—scrapping with his record producer at Columbia, Teo Macero—and on the road, including a visit to Australia where he insists on hauling back a suitcase of empty soda bottles … so he can claim the deposits.</p></td></tr></tbody></table> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2007-11-30T00:00:00-05:00">Friday, November 30, 2007</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/default_images/dukmag-horizontal-placeholder.jpg" width="238" height="140" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/author/steve-dollar" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Steve Dollar</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue Fri, 30 Nov 2007 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18500861 at https://alumni.duke.edu