Mini-review: Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane

Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall
Blue Note / Thelonious Records, 2005

Thelonious Monk, piano
John Coltrane, tenor saxophone
Ahmed Abdul-Malik, bass
Shadow Wilson, drums

Recorded Friday, November 29, 1957

Early show
Monk's Mood (7:52)
Evidence (4:41)
Crepuscule with Nellie (4:28)
Nutty (5:03)
Epistrophy (Monk-K. Clarke) (4:28)

Late show
Bye-ya (6:31)
Sweet and Lovely (Arnheim-Daniels-Tobias) (9:34)
Blue Monk (6:30)
Epistrophy [incomplete] (Monk-K. Clarke) (2:24)

All compositions by Monk except as noted

Nothing in the packaging of this cd indicates just how remarkable it is that this music is now available. The package could be mistaken for a Blue Note reissue--hip lowercase sans serif lettering and beautiful line drawings of the two principals (by Felix Sockwell). What's inside though is not a reissue; it's music newly discovered by Larry Applebaum, recording lab supervisor at the Library of Congress, on a tape made for the Voice of America, from two 1957 post-Thanksgiving Carnegie Hall concerts to raise funds for a Harlem youth center. The full lineup: Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, Ray Charles, Chet Baker and Zoot Sims, Monk's quartet, and Sonny Rollins. Tickets ran from $2 to $3.95, with shows starting at 8:30 p.m. and midnight.

John Coltrane played with Thelonious Monk through much of 1957, for six months or nine months, depending upon whom you read, but there's very little of the collaboration on record. So in purely historical terms, any recording of the Monk-Coltrane quartet is of interest. The music preserved in this recording though is, by any standard of performance, extraordinary. The opening tune, "Monk's Mood," is one of the most inspired Monk performances I've heard. With the addition of Abdul-Malik's bowing and Wilson's brushwork, the performance follows the contours of the April 1957 studio recording with Coltrane and bassist Wilbur Ware, but Monk's performance here has an unusual intensity and energy. He is all over the piano, almost Cecil Taylor-like in his rising and falling arpeggios (specifically, at 3:07-3:09, 4:06-4:08, 5:50-5:52, 5:58-6:03). And the piano-tenor sections of the piece form a genuine dialogue, each musician inspiring and feeding the other. The cd, I'd suggest, is worth buying for this performance alone.

The rest of the music is full of wonders and surprises too. The percussive theme of "Evidence" gets a boost from Wilson's tasteful embellishments. "Crepuscule with Nellie" becomes downright sexy, as the tune turns into a real slow drag. Wilson's cymbals help turn the first "Epistrophy" into music to accompany a kick-line of cubists, and the performance goes on to develop a Mingus-like turbulence. Other highlights: Coltrane's two choruses on "Nutty," his double-timed solo on "Sweet and Lovely," Monk's second chorus on "Bye-ya," and the rumbling figure he plays at the start of the last chorus of the first "Epistrophy." An added pleasure: The recording quality is excellent--full, clear, and vibrant.

It seems appropriate somehow that this recording should end with an incomplete performance. As with a Sappho fragment, the wonder of this art is that it has survived at all, and the abrupt fadeout is, for me, a reminder of how lucky we are to have any of it. Thank you, Mr. Applebaum; thank you, Library of Congress; and thank you, Messrs. Monk, Coltrane, Abdul-Malik, and Wilson. Is it too much to hope that this recording will be given its due in the form of a Grammy? Or that other performances from this remarkable night will be brought to light?

Cell tanka

For years, Ayano Iida used email on her cellphone mainly to tap out quick messages to friends like "Let's get together tomorrow."

But these days, Ms. Iida's mobile is spouting out heartfelt verse like this: "The guy who I liked / second-best, was second-rate / in the school that he / went to; and also in his / performance between the sheets."

Ms. Iida, 26 years old, is one of a growing number of young Japanese using mobile phones to write and exchange tanka, an ancient form of unrhymed poetry whose roots reach back at least 1,300 years. Scores of tanka home pages and bulletin boards are popping up on cellphone Internet sites with names like Palm-of-the-Hand Tanka and Teenage Tanka. Japan's national public broadcaster airs a weekly show called "Saturday Night Is Cellphone Tanka," which gets about 3,000 poems emailed from listeners' mobiles each week on topics like parental nagging and the boy in the next class.

The marriage of tanka and cellphones is all the more unexpected because tanka is so bound up with Japanese tradition. Tanka, literally "short song," is thought to have first emerged around the eighth century. It is composed of 31 syllables arranged in a rigid, five-line pattern of 5-7-5-7-7. It's big on archaic words and has long been associated with high culture.

Courtiers of the 10th century exchanged love letters in tanka form, and the imperial family still pens tanka at the start of each year on topics like "happiness" and "spring." Tanka are often used to commemorate pivotal moments like death: Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima wrote two tanka before he slit his belly in ritual suicide in 1970.

But young Japanese say tanka is surprisingly suited to the cellphone. It's short enough to fit on little mobile screens, and simple enough to let young poets whip out bits of verse whenever the spirit moves them.

In many ways, tanka is similar to the kind of terse, sparse messages Japanese kids have tapped out on their handsets for years--especially in the early days of the cellphone when just a small number of characters could be crammed into one email.

"The rhythm and the length of tanka make it exactly the right vessel for what I want to say," says Ms. Iida, an ebullient woman in red-framed glasses who works nights at a bookstore in the city of Tochigi, a few hours north of Tokyo.

Here is a link to
the article I'm quoting.
It's from the Wall Street
Journal though, available
only to paid subscribers.

LINK: "Tiny Screens Are Just Right for 31 Syllables in 5 Lines Dashed Off on the Run"

Nipsey Russell

Dressed in a conservative business suit and tie but wearing a raffish porkpie hat, he offered a confident, sophisticated approach to comedy. His jokes and topical observations were often delivered in the form of aphorisms and rhymes. He had begun reading Shelley, Homer, Keats and Paul Laurence Dunbar when he was 10 and sometimes quoted from Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales." Hip, glib and conspicuously intelligent, he attracted downtown crowds to Harlem, becoming a standout attraction at the Baby Grand, Small's Paradise and other cabarets with quips like "America is the only place in the world where you can work in an Arab home in a Scandinavian neighborhood and find a Puerto Rican baby eating matzo balls with chopsticks."

Nipsey Russell was one of the people who seemed to be living in the television when I was a teenager. He was always there. I'll miss him.

LINK: "Nipsey Russell, a Comic With a Gift for Verse, Dies at 80" (from the New York Times)

[To read the Times online, use mediajunkie as your name and password, or create an account of your own.]

"What Should We Call the Professor?"

From a well-researched and funny commentary on a mysterious question:

I came to teaching midcareer, without a doctorate, and didn't give much thought to what I wanted students to call me. Somehow "Ben" didn't seem right--even though, in the professional world, college-student interns always had called me that, no problem. What I wasn't prepared for was being addressed as "Dr. Yagoda." I corrected that the first couple of dozen times, then stopped when it became clear that my quip of choice--"I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV"--wasn't funny. I realized, in any case, that I had to give students a clue to my preference, so I started signing e-mails and syllabuses "Prof. Yagoda."

LINK: Ben Yagoda's essay "What Should We Call the Professor?"

JK Chocolate Truffles

My friend Jim makes truffles. That's like saying that Rolls-Royce makes cars. Jim's truffles are hors commerce (not for sale), but you can at least look by going to his website. The photo gallery alone is worth a visit, with the JK box turning up in the most surprising places.

LINK: JK Chocolate Truffles

Happy anniversary

Oh, how we danced on the night we were wed!
We vowed our true love, though a word wasn't said.
The world was in bloom, there were stars in the skies,
Except for the few that were there in your eyes.

"Anniversary Song" (Al Jolson and Saul Chaplin)

Happy Anniversary, Elaine!

More on e-mail

I added some thoughts this morning to what's become the most visited page on my blog.

LINK: "How to e-mail a professor"

Ithaca?

From BBC News:

An amateur British archaeologist says he has located Ithaca, the homeland of Homer's legendary hero Odysseus.

Robert Bittlestone and two experts say research shows the rocky island in The Odyssey was in the western part of Greek tourist destination Cephalonia.

Satellite imagery was used to match the landscape with descriptions in Homer's poem about the return of the man behind the wooden horse of Troy.

My immediate impulse is to say, It's a story. But Bittlestone and his co-authors have a book forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

LINK: " Study 'locates' Homer's Ithaca" (from BBC News)

LINK: Odysseus Unbound : The Search for Homer's Ithaca, by Robert Bittlestone, James Diggle, John Underhill, from Amazon.com

Continental Paper Grading Co.

This picture is me--I mean, I. (I graded eighteen papers in three hours last night and this morning.)

[Photo taken on an Amtrak train leaving Chicago.]

Being productive in college

Various bits of advice from MetaFilter. I especially like the suggestion to use cds as units of studying time (study through one cd, then take a short break, then another cd, and so on).

LINK: "Being productive in college"

[Via 43 Folders.]