Posted in Shows on Oct 13th, 2008
As a musician and a man, Thelonious Monk must have provided easy inspiration for the title-namer of his 1956 Riverside album, The Unique Thelonious Monk. His singular sound on the piano, his inability to perform in New York City for several years (due to NYC’s cabaret laws), and his unorthodox compositions that sounded like urban spirituals filtered through stride and bop, nodding at some strange deity of cool, all contributed to a relatively low profile until the late 1950s, when his star suddenly began to ascend into a wider popular culture. Monk’s style was so strong that it’s not surprising that he rarely performed as a sideman…
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Posted in Shows on Dec 31st, 2007
On this edition of Night Lights it’s “Moodsville 2,” a followup to our October program on Prestige Records’ early-1960s series that was a sort of “jazz-ballads-for-thinking-lovers” concept. This show features albums from vibraphonist Lem Winchester, a policeman-turned-musician who died in a…
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Posted in Shows on Oct 1st, 2007
As a musician and a man, Thelonious Monk must have provided easy inspiration for the title-namer of his 1956 Riverside album, The Unique Thelonious Monk. His singular sound on the piano, his inability to perform in New York City for several years (due to NYC’s cabaret laws), and his unorthodox compositions that sounded like urban spirituals filtered through stride and bop, nodding at some strange deity of cool, all contributed to a relatively low profile until the late 1950s, when his star suddenly began to ascend into a wider popular culture. Monk’s style was so strong that it’s not surprising that he rarely performed as a sideman–as pianist Ran Blake noted, “There’s never any doubt who’s at the keyboard…it may be a delayed attack on a chord…
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Posted in Shows on Nov 26th, 2005
On this edition of Night Lights it’s “Moodsville 2,” a followup to our October program on Prestige Records’ early-1960s series that was a sort of “jazz-ballads-for-thinking-lovers” concept. This show features albums from vibraphonist Lem Winchester, a policeman-turned-musician who died in…
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Posted in Shows on Oct 9th, 2004
Pianist McCoy Tyner joined John Coltrane’s group at the age of 22 in 1960 and signed with Impulse not long after Coltrane moved to the label in 1961. Over the next four years Tyner would record seven albums as a leader for Impulse, most often in the trio format that was seen as being both commercially favorable and a chance to showcase him in a setting different from the Coltrane quartet. Though Tyner’s playing on these records is considered…
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