Jimmy Smith, Prayer Meetin’

Jimmy Smith and Stanley Turrentine take us to school in this coolly soulful recording from the organist’s years on Blue Note.

Album of the Week, August 2, 2025

This week starts a new series of posts about the records in my collection, and this time instead of concentrating on one player (or a group of related musicians) we’ll be listening to different takes on the same instrument – the organ.

I’ve long been a fan of the jazz organ sound, which I featured in an episode of Exfiltration Radio (in which you’ll hear a few of the tracks we’ll write about), and have sought out and found quite a few of its proponents. But today we’ll begin at the beginning, because you can’t talk about the jazz organ—namely, the Hammond B-3 organ—without talking about Jimmy Smith.

Like so much else in jazz, the jazz organ trio came about through a combination of technology, economics, and genius. The Hammond Organ Company had begun selling their electric organs to churches that couldn’t afford a traditional pipe organ, but gradually jazz players started adopting the instrument because of the richness of sound that could be produced, and jazz clubs started booking organ trios (with drum and guitar) because they were cheaper than larger combos but produced a bigger sound than piano trios. And Jimmy Smith, born in the Philadelphia suburb of Norristown in 1928, started exploring the sound of the instrument after honing his chops in the Royal Hamilton School of Music and the Leo Ornstein School of Music, and after several years playing boogie-woogie piano. He spent the latter half of the 1950s and the early 1960s recording for Blue Note, taping 40 sessions in eight years. The last of these studio sessions, recorded in early 1963 and released in 1964, was Prayer Meetin’, an organ trio with Quentin Warren on guitar and regular drummer Donald Bailey, plus the tenor saxophone of Stanley Turrentine.

“Prayer Meeting,” one of two Smith originals on the album, gives us a meeting between the two leads as they take each other to church. The composition is a blues that’s also a showcase for Stanley Turrentine. After the laid back blues of the intro, he’s on fire—tossing off syncopated licks, firing off little moans in the high register, playing against the offbeat chords from Smith. Smith’s solo gives us that classic Jimmy Smith organ tone, made by pulling the first three drawbars all the way out (equivalent to setting the 16 foot, 5 1/3 foot, and 8 foot stops on a pipe organ). He starts by playing a countermelody against the accompaniment of guitar and drums, and then he starts preaching—he leans into the blue note for multiple measures, starts improvising in runs of full chords, gives a tremolo on chords for multiple measures, accentuated by a tossed-off arpeggio…  Turrentine’s closing solo on the melody is faded out; one wonders how much longer the duo could have gone on improvising like this.

“I Almost Lost My Mind,” originally a 1950 R&B hit by Ivory Joe Hunter, opens with Turrentine and Smith playing the melody in three part harmony. Where the chart-topping single keeps a burner going under the slow melody with blues guitar licks, here it’s Donald Bailey’s implacable drumbeat that gives us the forward momentum as Turrentine swoons deep into the blues. Quentin Warren’s guitar keeps the chords moving under the first solo, freeing Smith to simmer under the saxophonist and hit rippling accents. When Turrentine’s solo comes to an end, the simmering organ cooks harder, with dashes of heat against the melody and another hard “lean” on the left hand across eight bars with a right hand tremolo. But it doesn’t shout; throughout, the band keeps it cool, even as Warren takes a clean, note-bending solo in the last two verses before the recap.

“Stone Cold Dead in the Market,” by Trinidadian musician Wilmouth Houdini, was originally made famous by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Jordan in 1946 in a West Indies accented performance. Here Bailey’s subtle bossa nova and the syncopation of the players carries the Trinidadian flavor without the murderous undertones of the original lyrics.

“When the Saints Go Marching In” surely needs no introduction, and the players go right into it, with Smith playing the melody while Warren and Turrentine play a riff (in parallel fifths!) underneath. Here Smith and Bailey, especially, take the lid off, with the organist leaning into melodic improvisation over a bubbling backbeat from the drummer. Smith seems likely to go at this all day until Turrentine steps up to the plate, playing a continuous stream of eighth notes that swing hard against the groove established by the organ, drums and guitar. Smith picks it right back up after Turrentine steps back for another verse, and the combo cooks right down to the end (sadly faded out).

“Red Top,” a tune by soul-jazz saxophonist Gene Ammons, starts out with Stanley Turrentine doing what he did best over dark chords from Smith. It seems like a straightforward blues number, but the scampering syncopation from Turrentine on the first improvisation verse and the leaned-into subtonic by both Turrentine and Smith across eight bars of the second verse signal that there’s some playful strangeness at work beneath the surface. The descending chromatic chords under Smith’s later solo reinforce the playfulness, as does the trading of thoughts between saxophonist and organist in the final verses as the tune fades out.

“Picnickin’” gives us one last Smith original to go out on. This one is a blues by way of Broadway, and Turrentine swaggers up to the melody in his solo to signal that this one will go hard. Both Turrentine and Smith lean into the blues, but Turrentine shows off some of his rapid-fire chromatic work alongside the blues licks. Smith builds anticipation through repetition of suspended chords and the seventh, holding the leading tone for four to eight measures at a time in a favored trick from this session. The conclusion leads us out with the players reprising the melody in parallel fifths once more.

Prayer Meetin’ is a fair representation of Smith’s Blue Note recordings—deeply grooving, soulful, but always with a cool structure at its core. That signature sound was about to change as Smith parted ways with Blue Note for another label, known for jazz but also for stretching the boundaries of the music as it rubbed up against other styles. We’ll hear a prime example next time.

You can listen to this week’s album, with bonus tracks included on the CD reissue, here:

Thelonious Monk, Mønk

A recently discovered live recording of Monk’s greatest quartet in their prime.

Album of the Week, July 26, 2025

Thelonious Monk recorded his final record for Columbia, Underground, in 1968, following several live albums and Solo Monk. While the record featured a number of new compositions, it marked an end rather than a revitalization. By the early 1970s, Monk was done, having made a handful of recordings on smaller labels. He retired for health reasons, having been diagnosed with psychiatric disorders and prescribed medications that made him uncommunicative.1 He spent the last six years of his life as a guest of the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, dying of a stroke in 1982. So his would seem an unlikely wellspring in which to find a source of new recordings.

But, just as new Coltrane tapes have been turning up in odd places, so a few significant Monk recordings have surfaced in the last few years. An improbable session booked by a 16-year-old high school student and taped by the high school’s janitor, Palo Alto captured the final known performance of Monk’s last quartet with Charlie Rouse, Larry Gales and Ben Riley. And a 1963 live recording from the Odd Fellows Palaeet in Copenhagen surfaced on tapes rescued from a dumpster yields today’s album, a rare live document of his greatest quartet with Rouse, bassist John Ore, and drummer Frankie Dunlop. Together they had recorded two great sessions for Columbia; they were in the middle of sessions for Criss-Cross at the time of this concert, but Monk’s Dream had just been released, so three of the tracks come from those sessions.

“Bye-Ya,” one of the Monk’s Dream tracks, had a long simmer in Monk’s book of compositions, having been recorded for Prestige on Thelonious Monk Trio in 1952. The tune is a 32-bar Latin tune, originally titled “Go”; when producer Bob Weinstock wanted a name with more of a Latin feel, Monk literally translated it, called it “Vaya,” which became “Bye-Ya” in his inimitable dialect. The performance here starts out with a syncopated explosion from Dunlop, who had previously recorded with Sonny Stitt, Sonny Rollins, and Duke Ellington, among others. Monk enters on a two note pattern while Rouse states the melody, and then we’re off to the races with a brilliant contrafact from the saxophonist over two verses. Despite his reputation for eccentricity, Monk is tight here with the rhythm section, the whole unit performing with a snap and flair. There’s no sense of the mountain-climbing hard labor that characterized Brilliant Corners; Rouse, Dunlop and Ore knew this material like the backs of their hands, so they provide a sense of ease and delight as they stretch out through the material. Monk’s own soloing is similarly relaxed and joyous, at one point embracing an off-the-beat series of staccato exclamations that fit naturally with the rest of the tune.

“Nutty” also originated on Thelonious Monk Trio and had last been recorded on Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane in 1957, but was a staple of Monk’s live sets. Monk opens with a jaunty statement of the melody, and then Rouse is off to the races, playing brisk double-time runs over bursts of chords from Monk and a constant support from Ore and Dunlop. The bassist, who would go on to play with Sun Ra, gives a dry walking bass that touches the corners of Monk’s unusual chords and then walks off into other neighboring dimensions, all while keeping things tightly anchored. Monk’s solo breaks apart the bits of the tune; he finds a five-note pattern and holds onto it, repeating it four times against the changing chords. The last of his solo is sketched in bare chords that leave most of each measure open, allowing Ore’s bass and the pops and booms of Dunlop’s drums to show through.

While his own tunes show little of the stride piano that tinges his playing of Ellington and his later performance on Solo Monk, it raises its head on “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You”; presumably he reserved the technique for the compositions of others, like this 1932 tune written for Tommy Dorsey by George Bassman and Ned Washington. There’s very little sentimentality in Rouse’s solo, which takes off at high speed and gives us a briskly virtuosic tour through the corners of the tune. Monk’s solo eases off on the Fats Waller influence, giving a more modern be-bop take on the tune, complete with a descending line that sounds rather like someone coming down the stairs sideways.

The great classic “Body and Soul,” also appearing on Monk’s Dream, here gets a rubato solo take by Monk that plays some chordal adjacencies and re-voicings, as well as some of the chromatic vamps that make for some of the most distinctive Monk sounds in his own compositions. The subsequent verses are done in strict time, though some of Monk’s improvisations play against the beat in a way that threaten to unravel the momentum. Just as one begins to fear that we’re stuck in the offbeat eternally, Monk clicks the melody back into time, rewarding the listener with a breathtaking glissando. It’s a fine performance that would have shone on Solo Monk.

“Monk’s Dream” headlines the album of the same name, but its origins also go back to Thelonious Monk Trio. The chord progression threatens to make the listener’s ears cross-eyed, as it were, but the quartet makes it sound easy, with brisk rolls from Dunlop punctuating each phrase of the song. Monk plays a series of leading tones under Rouse, leading to a feeling of instability in the tune and a feeling that Rouse is about to come unmoored and play away into some other song. But as they continue to play the connection reiterates itself and the wooziness is revealed to be deliberate. Rouse plays the last verse of his solo without Monk; without the chords it’s easier to hear Rouse’s conception of the melody. When Monk returns, he brings back the leading tone patterns and then slowly builds a solo around them, exploring outward chromatically, anchoring one entire verse of the solo a defiant tone away from the tonic. Indeed, the performance might serve as a sort of Rosetta Stone to his overall conception of melody, as he digs into everything but the tonic, finding joy in the adjacencies of tone.

Mønk is part of a wave of newly discovered jazz tapes that threaten to swamp the listener in an embarrassment of riches—and might seem to threaten the efforts of newer players. After all, why seek out the recordings of a Tyshawn Sorey or Linda May Han Oh when another lost recording from Coltrane, Monk or Bill Evans beckons? The answer, of course, is “¿Porque no los dos?” And there’s some truly fantastic material being recorded today (though not often being released on vinyl, which limits how much of it I’ll write about in this series). Next week we’ll start listening to different performers on the same (groovy) instrument in recordings that stretch from

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: 1963 was busy for Monk and his quartet. A less pristine tape capturing a performance in Stockholm by the group was released as the bootleg Live in Stockholm 1963, and it’s worth a listen as well.

  1. This may have contributed to some of Monk’s reputation for eccentricity. Or it could just have been his style. The saxophonist Charles Lloyd, who was up and coming in the late 1960s, tells a story about being on tour with Monk in which the great man danced around Lloyd’s dressing room between sets and, despite a plea from Pannonica, drank an entire pitcher of orange juice because Lloyd told him it was “tainted.” ↩︎

Thelonious Monk, Solo Monk

Monk alone is Monk distilled to a deceptively simple sounding essence.

Album of the Week, July 19, 2025

The mid- to late-1950s were a good time, compositionally, for Thelonious Monk. Following the critical success of Brilliant Corners, he released a series of additional albums, including the 1957 Monk’s Music with John Coltrane and Coleman Hawkins, that documented his growing list of original compositions. At the same time, his works were being covered, and celebrated, by a growing list of jazz luminaries, including Miles Davis on his ‘Round About Midnight, the first Columbia recording of his first great quintet and made at the same time as Workin’, Cookin’, Steamin’, and Relaxin’.

But not everything was idyllic. In 1958, Monk and the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter were detained by police in Delaware en route to a gig, who beat him with a blackjack when he refused to answer questions. And in 1960, his relationship with Riverside Records soured over royalties, which would ultimately declare bankruptcy in 1963 following cofounder Bill Grauer Jr’s sudden death. Monk ended up signing to Columbia Records in 1962. It was a great move commercially for Monk, as the larger label could devote more resources to promoting the genius. (He was to have appeared on the cover of Time Magazine in November 1963, but the story was delayed due to the assassination of John F. Kennedy; it ultimately ran in February 1964, at which point he became one of the only modern jazz musicians to ever be featured on the cover.) But his well of new compositions dried up, and many of the records featured re-recordings of earlier compositions with his new band, featuring Charlie Rouse on tenor, John Ore on bass, and Frankie Dunlop on drums.

So we come to Solo Monk, recorded in 1964 and 1965, in the middle of his eight-album run for Columbia, and featuring Monk on solo piano on a program of his own compositions and a set of unusual standards. The program kicks off with “Dinah,” a popular song from 1925 by Harry Akst with lyrics by Sam M. Lewis and Joe Young, and which was more associated with Louis Armstrong and Cab Calloway than with the bebop intelligentsia. The anonymous liner notes for Solo Monk sound a note of surprise at the stride flavor of Monk’s interpretation, which should be no surprise to us after our the last few weeks. The piece as a whole is a light-hearted romp that does prove that Monk has a sense of humor, but it’s more than just a joke. Though the first part of the work has the propulsive drive and left-hand block chords of the old stride piano style, giving the feel of a 1930s show tune, the end suddenly shifts to a freer style and we see through Monk’s eyes the title character, no longer a caricature but someone fully modern and distinctive—complete with a closing trill on the highest notes of the piano. As the liner notes say, Monk had a sense of humor, but that’s not all that’s shown here.

“I Surrender, Dear” is familiar to us, having appeared on Brilliant Corners. This version has fewer of the outer eccentricities that appeared on that album. We don’t get anything like stride until Monk gets to the B section, and it isn’t until the second repetition that he starts to elaborate the melody, complete with some of the flat-finger seconds and clusters—and some brilliant tossed-off runs. He takes the last chorus with a good deal of rubato and an octave-long run down the keyboard.

“Sweet and Lovely” (by Gus Arnheim, Charles N. Daniels and Harry Tobias) is one of those tunes that seems to lurk in the collective memory; I couldn’t have told you the tune from the name, but it’s instantly recognizable (probably from old “Tom and Jerry” cartoons). Monk’s rendition follows the same pattern as “I Surrender, Dear,” with the first verse played straight (albeit with stride left hand, a tremolo in the right hand, and the melody in octaves). The improvisation on the third chorus, however, turns the song into a new composition, with a single phrase repeated in rhythm across the whole verse. For the final run through, Monk returns to the tremolo effect, but again brings us into a deeper emotional moment in the final rubato section.

“North of the Sunset,” only recorded on this album, is a Monk blues with a syncopated opening theme, full of pauses. The B section takes the melody and elaborates it into a fuller sound. Monk only gives us two repetitions of the whole thing; the track ends at 1:50 with the sound of the pedal dropping back into place. He saves his energy for a solo version of “Ruby, My Dear,” which immediately follows. Written in 1945, it’s one of his oldest compositions and one that he returned to often; we previously heard it on Monk’s Music. Here the improvisation is limited: some alternate rhythms in the B section, a few accelerated and double time sections in the final repetition, and a dip into a new key at the very end. Otherwise we are left to soak in the ballad.

“I’m Confessin’ (That I Love You),” a jazz standard with origins in a tune recorded by Fats Waller, gets a similar treatment. Here Monk’s exuberance peeks through a bit more in the hard-swinging syncopation, the spontaneous arpeggios in the B section as it turns into the chord change, and the extended bridge linking the first and second repetitions. Monk’s improvisation on the second repetition seems to take flight with two voices, while still anchored by the steady chords of the left hand. Again, a brief pause and a rubato run down to a final chord, followed by a high, far-off twinkle.

Ray Noble’s “I Hadn’t Anyone Till You” takes a freer initial approach to the late 1930s popular song, at least until the B section when the steady stride chords make their return. The end, with a pause for effect before a final declaration that swoops up the entire keyboard, lands in a key of joyous wonder.

We’ve heard “Everything Happens to Me” before, on Wynton Marsalis’s Standard Time Vol. 3. This version is briskly unsentimental by comparison, but still retains the loveliness of Tom Adair and Matt Dennis’s melody, even as it swings into something a little more dancelike, if one can imagine Monk’s eccentric shuffle as a dance. And as he steps away from the strict rhythm into a free moment for a while, suddenly it is a dance that ends with that same high note of wonder.

“Monk’s Point” is another Monk blues, this one featuring a repeated “bent note” (as bent as notes played on a keyboard can get). It’s a spirited tune that seamlessly flows from the theme into a sort of hybrid ragtime reel; as with “North of the Sunset,” it’s in and out in less than two minutes, but sees far more development in those two minutes.

“I Should Care,” the standard from Axel Stordahl and Paul Weston with Sammy Cahn, has been covered by everyone from Bill Evans to Johnny Hartman to Frank Sinatra, and the interpretations usually skew to the sentimental or the jaunty. Monk steers away from both interpretations. His approach is less jaunty, more defiant; you can hear the determination to give the impression that the narrator is just sleeping fine, that he doesn’t go around weeping. But that twist ending—“And I do”—is present from the beginning of Monk’s interpretation, especially in the end as the moving parts fall away and we’re left with an aching suspended chord before the final resolution. All in two minutes.

“Ask Me Now” is the last Monk composition on the album, and the only one to get more than two minutes’ running time. It keeps good company with “I Should Care,” sounding like a more conventional ballad than “Ruby, My Dear,” but the constantly shifting tonality reminds us that Monk’s simplicity is usually complex even as his complexity often is in the service of something very simple. In this case, the melody is eminently singable, even as the tonality seems to shift like the facets of a crystal in sunlight. Monk takes some rubato into the final verse, and a splash of a high cluster chord together with a Woody Woodpeckeresque final run let us know the narrator’s demands ultimately grow increasingly insistent.

We last heard “These Foolish Things (Remind Me of You)” performed by Johnny Hartman, but again Monk takes a different interpretive path, shedding Hartman’s overt emotion for a more abstract interpretation. You can hear his tonal imagination at work in the chord sequence that ends the first chorus, the run that takes us into the bridge, the progression that seems to take us off a chromatic cliff into the final verse. The final bridge is taken freely in not-quite-double time for a moment, until it settles down for the final chorus, and one last surprise: a lingering chromatic chord that never resolves, fading into silence and the runout groove.

Monk would record three more studio albums for Columbia, but only the last one, Underground, would feature a significant amount of new works. Arguably, the most rewarding recordings from this period are the live recordings that document the band with Rouse, of which one (Misterioso Live on Tour ) was released while Monk was signed to the label. But he toured extensively during this time, and there have been other live recordings from this period, surfacing as recently as the last few years, that have been exceptional. We’ll close this series with one of those next week.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: “Monk’s Point” received new life on the 1968 album Monk’s Blues in a big band arrangement by the inimitable Oliver Nelson. Here’s that arrangement:

Thelonious Monk, Brilliant Corners

The genius of Monk is in full flower here in his third recording for Riverside Records in 1956.

Album of the Week, July 12, 2025

Thelonious Monk followed up the 1955 pair of standards albums (recorded as his first for Riverside Records) with a bang. Brilliant Corners consists of five Monk originals, of which only “Bemsha Swing” was previously recorded, and with a title track so complicated that producer and Riverside founder Orrin Keepnews had to assemble it from multiple takes. But unlike previous Monk outings that were doomed to obscurity, Corners was a critical smash hit, with Nat Hentoff calling it “Riverside’s most important modern jazz LP to date.”

The album was recorded in a trio of late 1956 sessions, with slightly different personnel. The October 9 and 15 sessions featured a quintet with Sonny Rollins and Ernie Henry on saxophone, Oscar Pettiford on bass, and mighty bebop drummer Max Roach. A follow-up session on December 7 saw trumpeter Clark Terry replacing Henry and bass giant Paul Chambers replacing Pettiford.

“Brilliant Corners” begins slowly, as if the band is learning the melody by rote, following Monk’s initial solo statement, and then taking it through a series of key changes until it gets back to the beginning. But once that initial statement is underway, they restate the theme in double-time, demonstrating the band’s virtuosity as well as the difficulty of the composition. Rollins takes the first solo, playing ahead of and behind the beat in the single time section and unleashing a series of blisteringly fast improvisations in the double-time. Monk’s solo plays through the melody and demonstrates an unconventional solo technique on the fast passage: he plays a few bars, drops out, then reenters a few bars later with a blistering attack. Ernie Henry’s solo is fat, soulful, and not nearly as facile with the material as Rollins; the story goes that Monk dropped out under his solo to keep from distracting the alto player. He was not the only one to explore silence in the complex tune; the story goes that Orrin Keepnews had to check the microphones on Pettiford’s bass after one take, only to find that the otherwise highly skilled bassist was actually miming. The magnificent Max Roach seems fully at ease here, unleashing a blistering, melodically rich solo before the last chorus. Notoriously, the group never finished a complete take of the number; Keepnews assembled the version on the record from several fragmentary takes of the number. That may be so, but it’s a brilliant (no pun intended) assemblage.

“Ba-Lu Bolivar Ba-Lues-Are” (Monk’s phonetic rendering of the “Blue Bolivar Blues”) is named after the Bolivar Hotel, the Manhattan home ground of his patroness, the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter. The tune starts as a simple enough blues, but Ernie Henry’s smeary bebop improvisation over Roach’s precise stumble of a drum accompaniment quickly shifts it into something more. Monk’s imaginative and complex solo illustrates both his genius and his flat-fingered playing style, which often resulted in his hitting seconds and famously led to his assertion that “there are no wrong notes on the piano.” As if to underscore the genius of his approach, there are also virtuosic passages that introduce completely new melodies, one of which Sonny Rollins takes as a point of departure for his own solo. As before, Roach unleashes fusillades of snare sound under Rollins’ flights of improvisational fancy. Pettiford demonstrates his usual aplomb in an extended solo that leans into the blue notes of the tune.

“Pannonica” is an example of that most underappreciated of compositional categories: the Monk ballad. Played on the celeste rather than the piano by the composer, Monk introduces the melody dedicated to his patroness before the full ensemble joins and states the theme. Monk plays it more or less straight, with a few flourishes around the edges and the sliding chromaticism of the tune the only clues that we are in his genius realm. Sonny Rollins takes the first solo, seemingly at double tempo, though in reality the chords of the tune move at the same tempo as of the introduction; it’s just that he switches from quarter to eighth notes, as it were. Underneath him, Monk switches to the piano more or less undetected; one wonders whether this magic was accomplished with a swiveling chair or by the keen editorial hand of Keepnews. That it’s all live is eventually given away (and described in the liner notes) as Monk plays the second 16 bars of his solo with left hand on the piano keyboard and right hand on the celeste, before returning to all-piano to close out his solo. He moves back and forth between the two instruments in the final reprise, throwing high accents on the celeste and closing out with a repeated high arpeggio on a suspension, as we end the side.

“I Surrender Dear” is a pure Monk solo, recorded during the December recording session. Written by Harry Barris with lyrics by Gordon Clifford, the song appears to have struck a spark in Monk’s imagination, as he covered it several times in his recording career. We get all the Monk highlights here: the shift from stride into an almost hesitating rubrato that occurs even during the first statement of the theme; the introduction of an out-of-time series of arpeggios to accent the dramatic shape of the melodic line; and of course the Monkian splatted seconds that add so much to the color of the playing. At the end, Monk seems to drift away into a reverie of a different song altogether. For a cover song, it’s as pure a statement of Monk’s method on record as I know.

“Bemsha Swing,” the other song from the second session, brings Terry’s brilliant trumpet to the group. Terry had previously played for Charlie Barnet and Count Basie, but he was in Duke Ellington’s band at the time of this recording. (He would later be in the Tonight Show band for ten years and play with Oscar Peterson for an astonishing 32 years; he’d outlive most of the players on this session, dying in 2015.) This is the only of Monk’s compositions from this record to have appeared previously, recorded for his Thelonious Monk Trio record for Prestige in 1952. Monk essays the melody as a series of rising fourths in a sort of stumbling fanfare, then firmly states it in the opening proper. There’s both stumbling (virtually, via some impressive syncopation) and firmness in what follows, particularly from Roach, who seems to be playing cymbals and snare with one hand and foot and tympani with the other hand throughout. Chambers is completely unfazed by the melodic complexity, sliding through the changes without breaking a sweat. Likewise, Rollins appears completely at home here, essaying a series of improvised double-timed thoughts that unroll as a continuous melody over the chords. Terry follows Rollins’ lead but switches it up with some longer held notes and some judicious rhythmic pauses between phrases. Monk’s solo occasions both some out-there high improvisation and some of Roach’s finest work on the record, as he alternates some fine snare work with emphatic pronouncements on the timpani, both in time and in hemiola. Chambers takes a solo that alternates walking the changes with statements of the melody, and Rollins picks things up in media res. Monk joins Rollins for the second verse of his solo with his own improv, and Terry comes in seamlessly to single the final chorus. There are many fine examples of collective improvisation in recorded jazz history, but I’m fairly certain there are no finer moments in Monk’s recordings to this point.

With Brilliant Corners, Monk had finally tipped the balance on the critical appraisal of his works, and his compositions and recordings began attracting more favorable notice. This affected not only his freedom to record but also the players he attracted. It was two short months after the April 1957 release of the record that he recorded Monk’s Music with John Coltrane and Coleman Hawkins. There followed a series of studio and live recordings for Riverside that ended in a royalty dispute. But Monk wasn’t done yet; his biggest selling recordings were ahead of him. We’ll hear one of those next week.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Thanks to the archival work done to assemble various biopics of Monk, we have a recording of Monk playing “Pannonica” for his patroness shortly after he wrote it, including his spoken introduction. There’s so little of Monk’s spoken voice out there that this is a rare treat indeed.

Thelonious Monk, Plays Duke Ellington

How do you convince a reluctant public to buy into a great genius’s work? In this landmark 1955 album, by allowing them to hear him play—and transform—music they already knew.

Album of the Week, July 5, 2025

We’ve written about a lot of musicians in this series. There have been heroes, back room figures, producers, composers, soloists and sidemen. There’s one whose work has been touched on a few times, but who has only appeared in these virtual pages one time as the leader of his own group—and in that write up, I was mostly focused on his sideman. That man is Thelonious Sphere Monk.

When I reviewed Monk’s Music, I started in the middle of his story, so let’s step back to the beginning. Born in 1917 in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, a city east of Raleigh known for cotton, tobacco, racial segregation, the civil rights movement and the original headquarters of Hardees, Monk and his family relocated to the Phipps Houses in the San Juan Hill neighborhood of Manhattan when he was five. He learned piano from a neighbor, Alberta Simmons, beginning at age nine. Simmons taught him the stride piano style of Fats Waller and James P. Johnson, as well as learning to play hymns from his mother. He attended Stuyvesant High School but left to focus on the piano. He put his first band together at age sixteen and honed his chops in “cutting contests” at Minton’s Playhouse, where the new jazz form of bebop took shape in jam sessions that included Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Kenny Clarke and Charlie Christian. (Minton’s is, improbably, still around today.)

Monk was a psychiatric reject from the US Army and was not inducted into the armed services during World War II. He played with Coleman Hawkins, who promoted the young pianist, and made the acquaintance of Lorraine Gordon, the first wife of Blue Note Records founder Alfred Lion. Gordon became the first of many to champion Monk’s work to an initially resistant public. She recounted trying to convince Harlem record store owners to carry Monk’s records, only to be told, “He can’t play, lady, what are you doing up here? That guy has two left hands.” Gordon helped Monk secure his first headlining gig at the Village Vanguard, a weeklong engagement to which, reportedly, not a single person came.

The bottom came, as previously recounted, when Monk’s car was searched and police found Bud Powell’s drugs; Monk refused to testify against his friend and lost his cabaret license, costing him the ability to play in any licensed nightclub that served liquor. He got by playing guerilla shows at Black-owned illegal clubs, but the loss of venues hurt his already struggling recording career even more. In 1952, he began recording for Prestige Records, cutting several pivotal but underselling records, including a 1954 Christmas Eve session with Miles Davis that produced Bags Groove.

By 1955, Monk was highly regarded but broke, and the turning point came when Orrin Keepnews’ Riverside Records bought out Monk’s contract from Prestige for a mere $108.24. Keepnews took the challenge of marketing the eccentric Monk head-on. Reasoning that listeners stayed away from Monk due to his reputation for difficult music, Keepnews convinced him to record an album of Ellington tunes; as the producer recounts in the liner notes, “he retired briefly with a small mountain of Ellington sheet music; in due course he reported himself ready for action; and thus this LP was born.” Monk was accompanied by bebop giants Kenny Clarke on drums and Oscar Pettiford on bass. The album’s initial 1955 release featured photos of the three players; the 1958 reissue shown above has a portion of the Henri Rousseau painting The Repast of the Lion.

Monk begins with the well-known “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing),” opening with the scatted tag-line from the refrain. He leans forward into the syncopation until it’s almost but not entirely straightened out; plays fistfuls of cluster chords under the chorus; but otherwise plays the tune pretty straight. There’s a nifty countermelody that comes out in the second verse, riding in on the back of a triplet flourish, and a burst of stride in the last chorus. In other words, it’s pure Monk.

“Sophisticated Lady” is a tougher challenge for the album concept, as Ellington’s melody has to keep its sophistication and its savoire-faire even with Monk’s unusual approach to the keys. Monk nails the assignment, albeit with some unusual rhythmic approaches. The sequence of downward glissandi in the B section, the trills and slightly off accent notes that read a little like stride piano heard through a skipping record player, all add to the general Monk flavor while honoring Ellington’s basic melodic sensibility.

“I Got It Bad (And That Ain’t Good)” calls to mind Marcus Roberts’ later homage to Ellington (surely Roberts listened to this recording). Here Monk begins alone, playing the Ellington classic as though it were a sonata, with an unexpected tenderness despite the clusters of chords under the melody. When Pettiford and Clarke join in, the tempo picks up and Monk begins to explore the contours of the verse. His final essay climbs the octave chromatically, sounding a wistful note.

“Black and Tan Fantasy” opens in an unusual place, exploring the funeral march quote that Ellington ends the piece with. Where forty years later Marcus Roberts played this tune with a heavy debt to the stride tradition, Monk’s version is considerably more subtle, exploring the chromaticism and major-to-minor flourishes in Ellington’s tune.

Monk begins “Mood Indigo” with an imaginative vamp on the I – dim VI – VI portion of the tune’s famous chorus, underpinned with a syncopated running pattern. He takes the tune more or less straight, but with embellishments at the turns that could have come straight out of Erroll Garner were it not for the unusually crunchy chord voicings. A word must be said about Pettiford’s playing here; he not only keeps up with Monk’s imaginative chordal gymnastics but also picks up on his rhythmic variations, all the while sounding completely unflappable.

“I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart” borrows the same trick that Monk used to begin “Mood Indigo,” a little riff on the closing triplet bit of the chorus. Here Monk uses the brisker tempo of the standard to keep the triplet meter running as a commentary throughout, and we get some real moments of virtuosity (“two left hands,” indeed!). This piece is also a showcase for Pettiford, as he not only plays the melody but gets a few verses of improvisation. Monk picks up the running triplet meter again into the back of the tune, and ultimately lands it with a series of chords up to a resolution. This is as close to jolly as I’ve heard Monk on material other than his own. It’s a blast.

“Solitude” is more exploratory and more introspective, as Monk takes the tune more or less directly, albeit with some rhythmic commentary from the left hand in the beginning. He takes this one completely solo, and takes advantage of the opportunity to slow into the end of the last chorus and finish with some delicious rubato.

“Caravan” is Kenny Clarke’s moment to shine, with a polyrhythmic energy driving the classic tune from the first beat. Monk gives him room in the wide expanses of the chorus for his rhythmic explorations, and takes his turn in the verse. In the second chorus, Pettiford takes a forthright solo on the higher strings and shows how his imagination and virtuosity contributed to the bebop movement. Finally, Monk takes the lead once more and gives us a whirling-dervish finale. It’s as though the camels stepped onto the dance floor for one last boogie before the groove ran out on the record.

Keepnews’ instincts as a producer were sound. By subtracting one element from the rich and strange brew of Monk’s overall conception, he found a way to allow Monk the pianist to put his distinctiveness forward in material with which the general listening public was familiar. A second album of standards followed later in 1955, and by the time the third album came along in late 1956 the listening public was primed to hear Monk’s full artistic direction. We’ll hear that album next week.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Monk continued to play some of the tunes on this album throughout his career, albeit in different conceptions. Here’s a great concert video of him performing “Caravan” solo, live in Berlin in 1969.

“The flames kindled”

In Congress, July 4, 1776, A Declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress Assembled.

I wrote the paragraphs below 22 years ago, and sadly they still seems relevant.

A fleuron is a typographical symbol that looks like a flower.

Thomas Jefferson is on my mind, as he is every July 4th (I wouldn’t be a good Wahoo otherwise, I suppose). I wonder whether today, looking out at the world, and at his own United States, he would still feel the same as he did in 1821, when he penned the following to John Adams:

The flames kindled on the Fourth of July, 1776, have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism; on the contrary, they will consume these engines and all who work them.

And there’s another optimistic note that seems to speak directly to today’s nation:

The spirit of 1776 is not dead. It has only been slumbering. The body of the American people is substantially republican. But their virtuous feelings have been played on by some fact with more fiction; they have been the dupes of artful maneuvers, and made for a moment to be willing instruments in forging chains for themselves. But times and truth dissipated the delusion, and opened their eyes.

Buckshot Lefonque

If Sting brought pop toward jazz, Branford Marsalis’s collaboration with DJ Premier brought jazz toward hip-hop and pop.

Album of the Week, June 28, 2025

I started off my review of Branford Marsalis’ The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born with the observation that Branford effectively was managing two brands by the time the early 1990s rolled around. There was Serious Jazz Branford, which that record represented very effectively. And there was Crossover Branford, who played with Sting and the Grateful Dead and collaborated with hip-hop artists on the soundtracks to Do the Right Thing and Mo’ Better Blues—and, by 1992, was the new music director of the Tonight Show with Jay Leno.

The thing about having two brands, as any marketing expert will tell you, is that at some point it gets confusing. It’s great if a follower of your one brand will branch out and try your other, but more often than not it just leads to confusion and disappointment. The trick is to go all the way and embrace the new brand completely, including a new name. I don’t know for sure if that’s why Branford embraced the name Buckshot Lefonque for his new crossover hip-hop/R&B band endeavor, but it seems likely. It also helps that the name was just sitting there; Cannonball Adderley called himself “Buckshot La Funke” for contractual reasons on a 1958 Louis Smith session.

There’s a lot of musicians on this one, including stalwart bandmates Kenny Kirkland, Robert Hurst and Jeff “Tain” Watts, but there are some new faces too. Roy Hargrove, who died at the age of 49 in 2018, is here on trumpet, and Delfeayo Marsalis on trombone. Guitarist Kevin Eubanks, who played in the Tonight Show band with Branford (and later became its director), is here. But the main collaborator is DJ Premier, who was Guru’s partner in the pioneering jazz-inflected hip-hop combo Gangstarr. The hip-hop duo was one of a small crowd that mixed jazz samples with rapping and turntables in the late 1980s and early 1990s; I put together a mix from this period a little while ago.

The album takes no prisoners, dropping you directly into the scratch and sample filled “Ladies and Gentlemen, Presenting…” It’s a stage setter akin to the opening of Us3’s Hand on the Torch, in which chopped up dialog samples play over a horn vamp from Branford and Roy Hargrove. It leads directly into the “Blackwidow Blues,” a far more ambitious production that starts with a keyboard track from Kenny Kirkland and then drops in the first significant sample, an Elvin Jones drum and cymbal beat from John Coltrane’s “India.” Branford does some drum programming on top of this loop, and the band as a whole plays a sinuous melody that sets up a Branford tenor followed by a meaty trombone solo (both Matt Finders and Branford’s brother Delfeayo are credited on trombone here). Roy Hargrove, playing the Freddie Hubbard part in this stew, gives a fine, high trumpet solo and then passes the ball to Branford for another go. The blues swings hard right up through Kenny’s electric piano solo. This is jazz filtered through a hip-hop sensibility, not the other way around, and it’s a rich listen. 

The single most memorable track on the album comes early. “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” is built around a sample of birdsong and around author Maya Angelou’s reading of her poem, and two samples, from Ruben Blades’ “Prohibido Olvidar” and Fela Kuti’s “Beasts of No Nation.” But the groove, and the tasty duet between Branford and Hargrove, allows us to be blissfully ignorant of the bones on which everything rides. There are four guitarists credited on the track, including Branford’s successor on the Leno Show Kevin Eubanks and genius Nils Lofgren, but they blend seamlessly into each other. Mino Cinelu’s percussion sits at the bottom along with Kenny’s piano, keeping everything together.

“Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters” is an adaptation of the Elton John/Bernie Taupin and is performed as a more straight ahead R&B track, albeit with some interesting touches like Amharic vocals in the opening. But the beat, driven by Cinelu’s percussion and none other than Jeff “Tain” Watts’ mighty snare, provides more traditional accompaniment to vocalist Frank McComb. The last chorus, which combines some compelling vocal licks from McComb atop some equally tasty keyboard work from Kenny Kirkland, is the best part.

“Wonders and Signs” is built around a reggae vocal from Blackheart, and pulls together most of the band, including Branford, Hargrove, Kenny, Cinelu, and fellow Sting band alum Darryl Jones for a dub-inflected improv atop the “Introducing” vamp.  If you don’t enjoy extended passages of toasting in a thick patois, this one is probably not for you, but there’s still some worthwhile listening in the form of Roy Hargrove’s angular trumpet solo atop David Barry’s guitar, and the flurrying Branford soprano solo atop the sung final chorus.

“Ain’t It Funny” is another more traditional R&B track, with strings (arranged by Clare Fischer) providing the bed for Tammy Townsend’s vocals. While I was prepared to dislike this thanks to the clumsy marriage of song and band on the lead-off track on Branford’s Mo’ Better Blues soundtrack, this one is far more successful; if it had played on R&B radio circa 1985-1986, I think it would have been a hit in its own right. There are, unusually, no horns on the track, but that’s Kenny Kirkland on the keyboards and Kevin Eubanks laying down the guitar solo in the outro.

“Some Cow Fonque (More Tea, Vicar?)” is another number that leans hard into the alchemy between DJ Premier’s sampling and the full band, atop a vaguely country-meets-Delta-Blues soundscape thanks to Kevin Eubanks’ slide guitar work. The horn charts are thick, with Chuck Findley’s trumpet and Matt Finders’ trombone joining Branford and Hargrove, along with both Robert Hurst and Darryl Jones on acoustic and electric bass and Tain on drums. It’s a romp.   

“Some Shit @ 78BPM (The Scratch Opera)” is a DJ Premier showcase, and how much you like it will entirely depend on whether you find scratching enjoyable or annoying. It’s OK once the beat drops, but the horn sample that he chose as the backbone of the track doesn’t seem to entirely know what key it’s in. I covet the vocal samples that he uses throughout here, though, especially “We have reached our rendezvous… with destiny!” And Branford’s sax on top is quite good. 

“Hotter Than Hot” brings Blackheart back for a faster paced reggae number. It’s a sparer track, with a little bit of Branford, drum and cymbals, and bass left to back up rapid-fire patois. The riddim is toasty, but I’d love some deeper bass here. Branford’s solo, including overdubs, is worth a listen.

“Blackwidow” (also called “Blackwidow Blues” on the streaming services and reprising the “India” sample with heavy scratching) is introduced by a sample of a Jay Leno monologue in which he calls out a now-all-but-forgotten incident when six African-American Secret Service agents, guarding President Clinton, were refused service at a Denny’s in Maryland. (Tl;dr: they sued, it became a class action suit, they won.) The track plays like the dub cousin of the opening “Blackwidow Blues,” with a heavy Robert Hurst bass line helping to anchor the horns. We get extended horn solos — 32 bars rather than 16 — which are further extended by sampling and scratching. The spoken word sample, in which a white announcer exclaims “I’d like to have the pleasure of introducing the greatest living master of jungle music,” underpins the harder edge to the track, but Branford reclaims the narrative with a fiercely overblown tenor solo.

“Breakfast @ Denny’s” adds a James Brown sample to the basic “Blackwidow” track, but most of the story here is the tight, angry rap from little-known emcee Uptown, who spits bars about discrimination: “Imagine being hungry and man you want to eat/You go inside the restaurant and can’t get a seat.” In this context, Branford’s tight solo reads less like a party and more like a challenge.

There’s a link, “Shoot the Piano Player,” with “sad assed piano” courtesy of Delfeayo, leading into “No Pain, No Gain.” The song builds around a sample from Bela Fleck’s “Sex in a Pan” and settles into a vicious Victor Wooten bass line, guitar from blues legend Albert Collins, and vocals from Uptown, leaving an overall impression of Living Colour or even Rage Against the Machine. It’s the hardest rocking track on the album and makes me wonder what a Branford/Rage collab would have sounded like.

We return to the “sad assed piano player” for “Sorry, Elton,” where we actually get the promised shot and the sound of the piano player collapsing against the keys, leading into “And We Out.” The last track on the LP reprises the “Presenting…” theme with a sort of party ambience, minus the vocal samples. We began in a sampling playground, but we end with something more real and organic, especially with Matt Finders’ trombone solo bumping right into David Barry’s guitar. It’s a party I’d like to be at.

Branford’s pop-star brand wasn’t destined to last forever. He got more serious about the jazz side of his career in the late 1990s, especially after the unexpected 1998 death of Kenny Kirkland. There was one more Buckshot Lefonque album and a few more pop credits, but he’s largely been a serious jazz artist since then. This year’s Blue Note Records debut, an album-long cover of Keith Jarrett’s Belonging, is an outstanding example of his craft, and there have also been great collaborations with Kurt Elling and others along the way. He seems to have many more vital years in him.

Next week we’ll shift gears and pick up a thread I’ve left dangling for quite a while, about a pianist and a composer who was, as the great saxophonist Charles Lloyd once observed, “not exactly linear.” Stay tuned.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: There was actually a music video for “Breakfast @ Denny’s” — minus the Uptown rap, and with the Jay Leno monologue joke layered over the top. The video is eloquent even without the narrative.

BONUS BONUS: Buckshot LeFonque did some media behind the original album. Here’s “Some Cow Fonque” live from the Conan O’Brien show! The band for this one doesn’t have a lot of overlap with the players on the record, but that’s Mino Cinelu on percussion, and one of the two keyboard players is none other than Joey Calderazzo, who went on to fill the piano seat in the Branford Marsalis Quartet after Kenny Kirkland’s death and has held it for over twenty years.

Marcus Roberts, Alone With Three Giants

Roberts’ solo recital explores three distinctive jazz composers’ voices and finds his own.

Album of the Week, June 21, 2025

The challenge of mastering your influences has come up several times in this series, and it’s one that permeates the practice of jazz: how do you move beyond imitating those that came before you and shaped your thinking about music? Over the course of several records we saw Branford Marsalis arrive at a sound that is distinctively his own, particularly with The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born.

Marcus Roberts was on his own such journey, working through his compositional and performing influences in his first few solo outings. Today’s record finds him confronting those influences head on in a solo recital that performs music from three of his greatest influences: Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, and Thelonious Monk. And he comes out the other side with a sound that is distinctively Marcus Roberts.

“Jungle Blues” opens the album; one of three Jelly Roll Morton compositions here, Roberts keeps the mood placid but with an undercurrent of perpetual motion from the stride chords in the left hand. He also adds harmonic interest with his left hand, bringing in notes of gospel and blues that add complexity and interest. Also noteworthy is the way the melody migrates from the right hand to the left, so that he can add what almost seems a third voice with the right hand.

“Mood Indigo” takes a quiet path into Duke Ellington’s great composition (last heard in this column on Ellington’s 1950 recording Masterpieces by Ellington). on a theme from clarinetist Barney Bigard. The initial statement of the melody is in the high register of the piano, but just as Ellington did, Roberts takes the first verse down into the lower register of the instrument, coming back up for the chorus. He plays the choruses with a great deal of rubato and dynamic variation, sounding a bit as if the music is coming in a dream, an effect emphasized by the seventh chords in the coda.

“Solitude” starts out in the same pensive mood, but with considerably more warmth by virtue of its lower voicing. Legendarily the piece was composed in a recording studio in 20 minutes, as Ellington arrived for a recording session with 3 works and in need of one more. There’s no haste about the arrangement here, with Roberts using effects in the higher octave to add additional urgency and variety to the latter verses. Again, there’s a shift in tonality in the coda as Roberts seems to drift away into a reverie. “I Got It Bad (And That Ain’t Good)” feels a bit like the bluesier cousin of “Solitude,” but still holding the reflective move.

“Trinkle Tinkle,” the first of the Thelonious Monk compositions on the record, puts us in a different mood, more uptempo and vigorous. If you didn’t know it was Monk you’d think you were hearing more Morton, as the stride left hand technique Roberts used on the first track is also present here, albeit at a brisker tempo. Roberts’ rubato and octave-hopping improvisation keeping a thematic continuity with the Ellington tracks, and there’s some spectacular meter-shifting in the second half of the composition along with some swooping arpeggios, all while that stride left hand keeps rolling along.

“Misterioso” loses some of the mystery of the original composition but underscores Monk’s debt to Jelly Roll Morton in emphasizing the constantly moving chords in the melody. The improvisation carries us to some different places, with a combination of a high gospel improvisation and some left hand work that swings enough to feel a little shaggy. Overall there’s considerably more swing in Roberts’ interpretation than in Monk’s insistently four-square original. “Pannonica” gives us a more meditative Monk original; except for the ever-moving tonality of the melody, we might be back with Ellington. Roberts’ read of the tune has the rubato of his Ellington readings but the insistent swing of his Monk, adding up to an original synthesis of the different voices in the recording.

“New Orleans Blues” returns us to Jelly Roll Morton, where we hear a little of Monk’s conception in Roberts’ syncopated placement of the chords and the off-angle rhythmic drive. Roberts plays Morton like Bach, not in a fugueing sense but in terms of the absolute authority of the statement.

By contrast, in “Prelude to a Kiss” he continues to underscore the mystery in Ellington’s incredible ballad, lingering over the suspensions in the melodic line to call out the dissonance in the composition. Hearing it reveals the connection from Duke to Monk; both men heard harmonies differently than everyone else. The bridge gives us the connection back to Morton, as well, with the rooted stomp of the chords revealed as the harmonic language settles down. It’s a nifty Rosetta Stone for Roberts’ vision of the three composers, in just over three minutes.

And it segues flawlessly into “Shout ’Em Aunt Tillie,” with the opening chords feeling like an extension of the delirious chord progression in the opening of “Prelude.” Roberts takes the opening out of time and then downshifts into a vigorous 4/4. Listening to his performance, which shifts from fairly straightforward left-hand chords and right hand melody to some all-hands harmonic improvisation, is like listening to an orchestra come out of the wings. You’re reminded that Ellington didn’t only write swooners; this tune could have been repertoire for Louis Armstrong. And yet Roberts doesn’t just play it like New Orleans jazz. Listen to the rhythmic improvisation at 3:30, where he shifts the right hand half a beat behind the left, or 30 seconds later where the shifting rhythmic emphasis in the left hand gives the effect of a hemiola. It’s arresting, and one of the highlights of the record.

Roberts signs off the Ellington portion of the recording with “Black and Tan Fantasy.” The early Ellington composition on a theme provided by trumpeter Bubber Miley is a pocket symphony, and Roberts gives us the funereal march at the beginning, the rhythmic opening, and a solo that seems to float over the deeply regimented blues happening below. Again it seems like there might be more than two hands on this keyboard!

When we wander into “Monk’s Mood” it seems both casual and otherworldly. Like “Prelude to a Kiss,” the song takes us through multiple tonalities; unlike the earlier work, it doesn’t seem to resolve to any of them. But the main tune is still quotable, albeit fragmentary. There’s a broad romantic statement followed by a musical laugh in the lower piano, and just as it seems that we’re going to resolve in F major, it pivots to C, a brief dip into B and then finally back to C, using three octave arpeggios and asides to facilitate the key changes. And the whole thing feels effortless throughout.

“In Walked Bud” is more effortless Monk, with the eccentric genius’s salute to eccentric genius Bud Powell sounding positively straightforward compared to some of the other tunes—at least until Roberts gets into the first improvisation, where he shifts the rhythm, seems to linger over the phrases, all while keeping everything moving forward. In the second improvisation there’s a second where it feels like the wheels have come off, but he’s just slowing down into a swinging prelude to the final recap.

“Crepuscule With Nellie” is a composition we’ve heard a few times before—and critically, it’s a composition, as in written out from beginning to end, so if you play it right the opportunities for improvisation are limited. But Roberts finds them. Again as with “Misterioso” he swings where Monk played straight time, and—most scandalously of all!—he repeats the tag at the end of the second and third repetitions of the melody, like a private joke. The effect is to add a certain earthiness to Monk’s strange love song, which leads effectively into Morton’s “The Crave” to close us out. The last number is played on what seems to be a de-tuned piano and hearkens back to his rendition of “Shout ’Em, Aunt Tillie” with its rhythmic drive. There’s even a moment that seems to quote Scott Joplin and lean forward to Gershwin simultaneously. It’s just another great Marcus Roberts performance, effortless but ingenious all at once.

Roberts went on from this recording to do a series of albums in the 1990s, starting with my personal favorite of his albums, As Serenity Approaches, which features a combination of solo and duet performances and showcases his self-assurance as performer and composer. The recordings tailed off in the early 2000s as the industry changed and he went deeper into his teaching at Florida State University College of Music. He revisited Deep in the Shed in 2012 and has continued to record music that is steeped in traditional jazz while adding his own distinctive voice.

Next week we’ll close out this series with a sharp left turn that was both unexpected and inevitable when it was released in 1994.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS BEATS: I couldn’t resist highlighting my favorite track on When Serenity Approaches. While there doesn’t appear to be a full-album playlist of the CD-only release on YouTube, there is my favorite track, a magnum opus original that goes from a blues to a classical concerto and back within one massive seven-minute solo performance. Here’s “Blues in the Evening Time.”

Branford Marsalis, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

A free jazz outing for Branford’s trio yields more than a few whistleable melodies, and some fiercely ascetic improvisation.

Album of the Week, June 14, 2025

Branford Marsalis had built two brands by the time 1991 rolled around. He was still appearing periodically with Sting, most recently on the rocker’s concept album The Soul Cages, and in 1990 had started to perform from time to time with the Grateful Dead, even appearing on their 1990 live album Without a Net. But he also had an increasingly solid run of more traditional jazz albums to his name, and his most recent one, Crazy People Music, had hit Number 3 on the Top Jazz Albums chart and been nominated for a Grammy award for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Soloist (he lost to Oscar Peterson). In this context, his 1991 album, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, feels a bit like a statement that he had serious things to say about jazz.

In Branford’s earlier albums you can hear his influences at work, with a solid Wayne Shorter and Ornette Coleman, to say nothing of Ben Webster and Jan Garbarek, on display in Random Abstract. Those influences were consolidated into Branford’s own musical conception by the time of Crazy People Music, and on The Beautyful Ones we’re in an entirely new landscape, by turns bleak, playful and primal in its approach. We’re also in a land of burnout, in the sense coined by Ornette Coleman, in which the soloists take their improvisations as far as they can go rather than being constrained by bar counts. This record is as close to free jazz as Branford had gotten to this point in his career.

As with Trio Jeepy, he was without frequent collaborator Kenny Kirkland on this one;1 the trio included Branford, Jeff “Tain” Watts on drums and Robert Hurst on bass. Younger brother Wynton shows up for a tenor/trumpet battle on “Cain and Abel,” and Courtney Pine appears on a CD-only bonus track. For the most part, though, you just get the trio, giving them an enormous amount of freedom to explore their sonic world.

“Roused About” opens with a Robert Hurst-penned tribute to Charlie Rouse, the tenor saxophonist who collaborated with Thelonious Monk from 1959 to 1970. Like the best of Rouse’s playing, Branford’s solo statement of the melody here is all angles and unexpected austere turns, but it’s also deeply swinging and convincingly melodic, in spite of the odd modal twists of the melody. Bob Hurst plays a sort of omnitonal walking bass that never stops moving but also seems to never settle down into one key. Likewise, Jeff “Tain” Watts gives us a sort of shambolic swinging pattern on cymbals and snare, what Branford’s brother Delfeayo calls in the liner notes his “‘stumbling drum’ technique.” But it’s a whistleable melody and a genuinely fun performance.

There’s also a strong melody in “The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born,” but as the basis for a series of variations. Hurst’s bass provides single notes and chords of support, playing a gentle harmony in the head and then providing strummed, almost kora-like support under the improvisation. Branford improvises rhythmically, at first slowly but by the fourth peak in a spiraling frenzy. The title of the piece is taken from the 1968 novel of the same name by Ayi Kwei Armah, who wrote about conditions in a post-independence Ghana and the struggle of the narrator to find his way amidst corruption and decay. Branford’s work can be heard as a lament, if not a threnody, and by the time Tain’s drums crest like a wave under the soloist the lament has reached a fever pitch. Hurst’s solo plays melody and harmony at once, punctuated by the pulsing kora sounds as Branford returns to recapitulate the melody. It’s an engrossing listen even at 13+ minutes.

“Cain and Abel” sets up a conversation between two brothers, who by now had evolved to very different perspectives of what jazz could be. They play the head together, a melody that seems designed to disguise that it’s in 4/4 time, and quickly swing into a call-and-response, with Wynton making the opening statement and Branford responding—sometimes echoing, sometimes inverting, sometimes wryly commenting. At times it sounds like Wynton is winning some musical battle, but then Branford hits a lick back or inverts the harmony and we’re in a very different place. At the end Branford swings into a different key and mood entirely, and the horns end the piece in parallel harmonic descending arpeggios, landing in a different key as Bob Hurst supports them with a two-note ground that sounds as though they might be ready to start an entirely new tune. The whole thing swings all through thanks to Hurst and Tain’s shambolic rhythm work.

“Citizen Tain” has the strongest melody of the faster pieces on the record, consisting of a series of arpeggios in triple meter that swing into a fast four over Tain’s explosive drumming and Hurst’s ground bass. As the trio swings into the first variation, Hurst’s bass finally snaps out of its repeated accompaniment into a brisk walk, proving that basses can walk in time signatures other than 4/4. When the bassist takes a solo, it’s the first time we hear something other than the walk as he plays syncopated open fifths and sixths. The trio comes together at the end, doubling up on the triple-meter arpeggios into a fade-out.

“Gilligan’s Isle” is a free, slow ballad that bears no resemblance to the television show’s theme. The group’s musicianship means things are constantly in motion, but without a strong melody to latch onto it’s hard for me to find much to write about. “Beat’s Remark,” the other Bob Hurst tune on the record, has a stronger, wistful melody that’s doubled in the bass over a constantly moving roll of the tide of Tain’s drums. Hurst takes the first solo, sowing bits of the melody among a long swinging statement that ends in some high bass harmonics as Branford comes back in. The band double- and triple-times the melody but somehow seems to still shamble their way into a transformation, when at around the 7:45 mark Branford hits and holds a series of notes, playing a sort of “B” version of the original melody, and giving a quiet line interrupted only by one outburst note and supported by a series of suspended subtonics on the bass. The head returns, but the band seems to look around one more corner and find one more iteration of the melody to collectively improvise into, this time finding a rhythmic pattern that they ride into the end of the groove.

This is among the last of Branford’s run of recordings for Columbia Records that I can find on vinyl; the CD format had won by this point for many reasons, not least of which was the greater capacity offered. Case in point: the CD version contains two more tracks than present on this LP, “Xavier’s Lair” (continuing the X-Men theme begun in Crazy People Music, and “Dewey Baby,” a blistering tenor battle with English saxophonist Courtney Pine. The whole set is pure fire. I confess with some residual cringing that this is the second time I’ve reviewed this album; the first was for UVa’s alt-weekly The Declaration, and I am grateful that it has yet to be digitized because I seem to recall using words like “ceremonial dances around the fire” to describe how the music made me feel. Ultimately The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born is about three musicians exploring how far they can take their music. It’s heady stuff, and I can only wonder what the Deadheads who might’ve picked it up thought.

Branford had a few other surprises in him, and we’ll check them out in a couple weeks, but first we are going to check back in one last time with Marcus Roberts and find him in a very different context.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Branford’s live album with this trio, Bloomington, provides a technicolor window into the power of his compositions (and the players). Here’s the title track in its live version.

  1. In late 1990 and early 1991, Kenny seems to have been quite busy producing and performing on Charnett Moffat’s solo debut Nettwork, appearing on Jeff “Tain” Watts’ solo debut Megawatts, backing up UK tenor sax sensation Courtney Pine, and recording his own self-titled solo debut. It’s a little hard to tell because these albums don’t list recording dates, but it’s a safe assumption he was pretty busy. ↩︎

Blogaversary 24

Looking back, and forward.

The original home of Jarrett House North, from just before this blog really started.

I used to mark the anniversary day when I started this blog, on June 11, 2001, as my Blogaversary. I haven’t really marked the date since 2016, but something feels right about calling it out today.

When I started, I posted several times a day, whenever the thought struck me. I’ve since had a career, and children, and both those things have made it so I’m picking my words more carefully. But I missed the impetus for regular writing.

So a few years ago I started my Album of the Week series, which has grown into the longest running thing I’ve consistently done on this blog. Originally just a fun excuse to sit down and listen to vinyl, it’s become a rhythm of my week, a way to make my brain slow down and really think about something other than the day to day. And a way to build up writing stamina and to exercise the long form writing, once my first book was done.

Who knows? Maybe someday I’ll write the next book, about something completely different. Or about jazz. Or glee clubs. But for now, I just love that I can write and share the music I love with you.

Marcus Roberts, Deep in the Shed

A lesser-known but brilliant suite in the Ellingtonian tradition from Marcus Roberts and a bunch of Wynton Marsalis alumni.

Album of the Week, June 7, 2025

We’ve written a bit about the fights between the Wynton Marsalis side of 1980s jazz, of which Marcus Roberts was part due to his role as pianist in Wynton’s small groups, and the “old guard” then represented by Miles Davis and the fusion movement. Some of the pro-Wynton writings of critic and liner-note author Stanley Crouch seem in retrospect to be hysterically overblown. But one positive aspect of Wynton’s circle and their desire to conserve the jazz past was a fresh attention to composition and harmonic development, a path that led Wynton directly to Ellington.

The Marsalis association with Ellington is plain in hindsight, between the formation of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, his album-length (or double-album-length) composed suites, and the Essentially Ellington high school competition. But in the late 1980s and early 1990s the trend was revealing itself slowly, through a series of albums by Marsalis and his band, including today’s offering by Marsalis’s pianist and arranger Marcus Roberts.

Deep in the Shed presents a striking contrast with Roberts’ first album, The Truth is Spoken Here. There’s nary a solo piano work here, and little to remind us of the Miles Davis Quintet. Instead, the composer brings a suite of works full of harmonies so thick you could slice them like pie, full of tight solos and assembled like jeweled boxes.

The band he put together had more than a family resemblance to the Wynton Marsalis band. The horns—Wessell Anderson on alto, Todd Williams on tenor, Wycliffe Gordon on trombone—all were performing with Wynton’s larger group, and were joined or replaced on some numbers by Herb Harris on tenor and Scotty Barnhard on trumpet, also part of the Marsalis machine. Reginald Veal and Herlin Riley are both well known to us by now; the duo of Chris Thomas (bass) and Maurice Carnes (drums), both little known, perform instead on the first two tracks. And on trumpet for two of the tracks, one E. Dankworth—Marsalis, under a pseudonym due to his Columbia contractual commitments (or maybe just for fun).

“Nebuchadnezzar” opens with a flourish: a single note on the tonic, a modal solo in the piano, against a throbbing beat from Thomas, Carnes and Herlin Riley on percussion. The horns play the theme in a tight harmony that’s reminiscent of some of Duke Ellington’s finer big band writing. Wycliffe Gordon has the best moment, a growling trombone solo that starts at the low end of the instrument’s range as if telling a quiet joke at the back of the band room. Roberts’ solo is restrained, sounding a bit like his production on “Single Petal of a Rose” at first but growing in intensity through different rhythmic gestures. Throughout the bass from Chris Thomas stays almost entirely constrained to the pentatonic scale, continuing to drive that Middle Eastern feeling.

“Spiritual Awakening” starts with an almost Motown-inflected solo from Herb Harris followed by a restrained but church-inflected solo from Roberts. Thomas and Carnes are restrained to the point of invisibility, leaving room for Roberts to shift keys into Wycliffe Gordon’s wah-wah trombone solo. Gordon both elevates the proceedings with the unexpected texture and leaves a much-needed smile behind—and a small wash of applause, one of the only clues that some of the album was recorded live in concert (as the liner notes indicate, at the Saenger Theatre in New Orleans, on December 15, 1989). A concise solo from Scotty Barnhard follows, but Harris gets the last word, taking us out on a sigh.

“The Governor” has another modal theme in C, stated by the four horns together, this time with Todd Williams on tenor and Wessell Anderson on alto. No retiring Marcus here; his solo is fiery and his punctuated block chords are bold. Wessell Anderson gets a burning alto sax solo in A minor, bringing it back to C for Todd Williams’ solo. It’s overall a lesson in minor-key exuberance.

Side two opens with “Deep in the Shed,” and some seriously funky work on drums, cowbell and bass from Herlin Riley and Reginald Veal, whose arco bass on the tonic underscores the prelude. Herb Harris states the theme, with all the horns coming in on the chorus. The form, as Roberts states in the liner notes, is an extended blues, two four-bar sections followed by an elongated six bar closure on the head; for the solos we’re back in twelve bar form. Wycliffe Gordon again gives us a growly solo that arises from the depths, followed by Herb Harris, who takes two verses to rise from the low end of his instrument up to an extended series of interrupted utterances punctuated by the piano. The recap leads into Roberts’ first solo, and the first break in the funk groove as we swing hard through the blues. Throughout his solo he switches from swing rhythms to triplets to syncopation, growing in intensity throughout. Scotty Barnhard gives us a Marsalis-inflected solo with mute that then shifts into a high register for another run. The rhythm section leads us through a coda that slowly drops away until only Veal is playing over Roberts’ quiet chords. Underneath Roberts suddenly shifts from the swung chords into a triple meter in the lower reaches of the piano that becomes a concerto, ultimately crashing down to the very lowest note on the piano. It’s head-swiveling and powerful.

“Mysterious Interlude” starts with just Roberts, Riley and Veal again, with the theme stated by Williams, Anderson, Gordon, and “E. Dankworth.” Wessell Anderson takes a high yearning solo that circles us back to the theme. Roberts’ solo blends the blues and gospel across two verses, and back into a key change. Marsalis’s distinctive trumpet gives us a bluesy, lazy float down the river, leading into the final statement of the theme. It’s definitely an interlude in that it is full of anticipation without the payoff.

That payoff comes in “E. Dankworth,” as Marsalis tosses off a virtuosic high solo leading into a jitterbuggy blues. Roberts’ piano trio with Veal and Riley is in high spirits here, racing down the piano at breakneck speed. When Marsalis returns it’s in slightly more restrained form, but still swinging, throwing rhythmic variations and leaning hard against Veal’s swinging bass, until he returns once more to the head. The horns—Williams and Anderson—are there just as a Greek chorus to punctuate the theme, as Wynton rips the last phrases. Someone shouts out, “Homey, you was in there!” at the end.

Deep in the Shed hasn’t been always well recorded critically, with reviewers noting its relative darkness and “an excess of seriousness.” For me that darkness and seriousness is one of its strengths, leavened as it is with humor and humanity from the soloists, particularly Wessell Anderson. But for me the lasting impact was the compositional form. If the large format jazz suite was to ultimately become Wynton Marsalis’s greatest compositional legacy (beginning with the trio of albums under the name of Soul Gestures in Southern Blue, particularly the second volume, Uptown Ruler, moving on to In This House, On This Morning and Citi Movement, and culminating in his Pulitzer-winning oratorio Blood on the Fields and its sequel All Rise), it’s with records like this one by his band member Marcus Roberts that this musical direction had its origins. The move toward long form works also illustrated a fundamental difference in the approach to the art from Wynton’s older brother, Branford; we’ll hear a high point in Branford’s pursuit of his vision next time.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Not a listening, but a spectacular collection of writings about and interviews with Marcus Roberts courtesy of jazz critic Ted Panken.

BONUS BONUS: Here’s the 2012 version of Deep in the Shed, this time minus Marsalis but with a full nonet, producing a sound that I think is more organic and lived-in than the original recording:

Branford Marsalis, Crazy People Music

Summing up where Branford had been and pointing to where he was headed.

Album of the Week, May 31, 2025

Around the recordings of Random Abstract and Trio Jeepy, Branford had been busy flirting with Hollywood—albeit a very specific version of it. He made a memorable appearance as one of Laurence Fishburn’s Greek-baiting fellas in Spike Lee’s School Daze, and played on the soundtracks of Lee’s Do the Right Thing. He also played saxophone on Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power,” recorded for the soundtrack of Do the Right Thing. But he didn’t leave serious jazz alone, and by January 1990 he was entering the studio for the first of what would eventually be three recording sessions for Crazy People Music.

I remember the day in the summer of 1990 that I picked up this album. I had just gotten my first personal CD player (a Sony CD plus cassette combo that served through most of my undergraduate years), and headed to the local independent music store in my neighborhood of Denbigh. I hadn’t ever really bought much jazz music before, though I had listened to some, but after …Nothing Like the Sun I was curious. A small step of curiosity that led me to a lifetime of jazz listening, for which I am grateful.

Of note, that purchase was not the LP above. I bought my copy of Branford’s Crazy People Music on CD, as I purchased all my music back then. I valued the convenience and low noise level, and perceived higher audio resolution more than the readability of liner notes or analog warmth of the vinyl format. I was not alone, of course; by 1990, fewer and fewer releases were appearing on vinyl. Crazy People Music only received a vinyl release in Europe (my copy is a promo).

In contrast to our last few releases, note the graphic design on the album cover; rather than positioning the album as an affluent luxury product, there’s at least an attempt to make the music seem more contemporary. As played by this quartet, which featured Kenny Kirkland and Jeff “Tain” Watts returning on piano and drums and bassist Robert Hurst joining from Wynton’s band, the music certainly was more playful and risk-taking, even if the sequencing was familiar. In some ways Crazy People Music feels like a summing up of Branford’s work to that date, to the point that you can call out the analogue to several of the tracks from a prior release.

“Spartacus” is a Branford Marsalis composition, but its modified blues form and chord progressions hearken back to Wayne Shorter’s “Yes or No” as recorded by the quartet on Random Abstract. Both songs feature a twelve-bar blues structure in which the tenor sax makes a statement, followed by a held note while the piano comps, all over four bars; this is repeated with a different base chord, and then the cycle comes back with a more complex tenor statement in the final bars. In the case of “Yes or No,” the initial statement is a complex sixteenth-note pattern, but in “Spartacus,” it’s just three descending eighth notes, the melody stripped down to the basics. (Aside: Branford’s melodies seem increasingly to hew toward the simple and unfussy, a trend that started with his “Housed from Edward” on Trio Jeepy.) After the initial 12-bar head, he jumps immediately into a solo over Bob Hurst’s running bass line, with eruptions from Tain and bursts of chords from Kenny Kirkland keeping things moving along. Throughout the solo he plays with both the melody and with the rhythmic patterns he uses to express it, changing things up frequently. Kenny’s solos are always notable for his combination of harmonic complexity and aggressive melodic lines, and this one is no exception. When Branford comes back on the head, again we hear it just once, and then the band swings into a coda characterized by a syncopated two-note pattern in the piano over which the band solos until finally everyone locks into place on the two-note vamp at the end, followed by a fade into a six-note melodic fragment from the saxophone on a suspension, leading us directly into…

“The Dark Knight.” I have to confess that as a young recently-employed comic book store clerk I was thrilled with the evidence that Branford and his band were reading the good stuff. This Bob Hurst tune explores the moody darkness with a repeating bass line that is worthy of some of the best from Jimmy Garrison or Paul Chambers and a series of misty chord changes. The overall effect is a little like “Crescent,” and Branford appropriately blows some sheets of sound across his solo. But my favorite part of “The Dark Knight” is probably a toss up between Kenny’s piano solo, in which we get both his best McCoy Tyner impersonation and his distinctive chord voicings, and Hurst’s bass solo, which explores the tune’s harmonic corners before falling back into the bass line to signal the recapitulation. The band cooks on the recap, then plays out into a coda that seems to fade away into the night. Who was that masked man, anyway?

We get a different type of comic-book flavor on “Wolverine,” which is structurally reminiscent of “Broadway Fools” from Random Abstract and has the same happy-go-lucky soprano sax wandering-down-the-boulevard feeling, until the inevitable fight breaks out, here sketched as an explosion of free playing that gives Tain a place to stretch out. But where “Broadway Fools” was tightly swung, this one has a little more of a feeling of rhythmic freedom, truer to the Ornette Coleman conception in many ways. Kenny finds some joyous church amid some fairly abstract playing throughout his solo. The final recap of the head threatens to spiral out of control, with players shouting at each other and even with a sneaky overdubbed second saxophone line at the very end, before the berserker is caged once more. There’s a final recapitulation ending with a blown harmonic, hinting that the wildness isn’t gone.

“Mr. Steepee,” a play on Coltrane’s “Mr. P.C.,” is effectively a rearrangement of the Trane number filtered through Kenny Kirkland’s McCoy Tyner-influenced harmonic sensibility. Which is to say, it’s played brilliantly, briskly (at a touch over six minutes long, it’s the second shortest track on the album!), and reverently. And then there’s the outro, in which Bob Hurst plays a few familiar Jimmy Garrison inspired bass notes, only to have Branford lean in and say, “Uh, no, Bob, that’s the next album.” Ironically, this quartet never quite did a full version of A Love Supreme, though they did record some of the music; Branford wouldn’t revisit the Coltrane work in earnest until his 2002 release Footsteps of Our Fathers, with a later incarnation of his quartet.

Instead, the band segues into “Rose Petals.” Occupying the same position on this album as “Lonely Woman” did on Random Abstract, while the earlier recording was Ornette Coleman played in the Keith Jarrett European Quartet style, this is a full on Keith Jarrett American Quartet cover, featuring a work that originally appeared on his 1976 Impulse! album Shades. The playing is romantic, full of rubato and grand pauses and big rolls on the drums and cymbals, but also the quiet romanticism of Kenny Kirkland’s Chopin-inspired classicism. It’s gorgeous and to my ears more successful than the earlier record’s romanticism. It sounds more lived-in and organic, less an imitation and more an homage.

The gear shift into “Random Abstract (Diddle-It),” a full quartet rendition of the earlier “Tain’s Rampage” from Trio Jeepy, puts more of its scamper in the piano, though there’s plenty of burnout happening in the saxophone as well. Indeed, all four musicians seem to be exploring at once, with Branford alternating between fierce sheets of sound and romantic tails of melody, while Kenny appears to be in the throes of a Shostakovich piano sonata. With a cry the musicians seem to head over the cliff…

… and into “The Ballad of Chet Kincaid,” a rearrangement of Quincy Jones’ classic funk theme for the first Bill Cosby Show, “Hikky-Burr.” This version is less bonkers, thanks largely to the absence of Cosby’s insane voice-over, but retains much of the fun, albeit with the funk bass replaced with a more conventional walk and with Kenny’s distinctive post-Tyner keys keeping it firmly modal even as it keeps things moving along. It’s a great cover, playful and joyful but also seriously listenable. There’s even a section or two where the band swing into full funk mode, Branford’s pop sensibility shining through and seamlessly shifting back to post-bop. A “Whoo Lord! Hikky-burr!” wraps up the proceedings.

I could have picked a worse album with which to start my journey into jazz. Crazy People Music is melodic, searching, and extroverted. It’s also just plain fun. It doesn’t exude the level of seriousness that a Wynton album from the period did, but that’s OK. Branford could play that game too, and we’ll hear one of those albums soon. But next week we’ll hear another musician from the Marsalis brothers’ orbit get very serious—and playful—indeed.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Kenny Kirkland played with Branford, off and on, for the rest of his life, following him to the Tonight Show and playing on his other ventures (one of which we’ll hear in a few months). Here’s the quartet, with Eric Revis sitting in the bass chair alongside Kenny and Tain, in Basel in 1998 playing a monumental version of “Spartacus”:

BONUS BONUS: This particular configuration of the Quartet didn’t make a ton of recordings, but it’s pretty well documented live. Here’s an hour-plus set from Munich just after the album was released, playing a bunch of tunes from Crazy Pe0ple Music along with some treats from earlier albums.

BONUS BONUS BONUS: In between the hint about A Love Supreme at the end of “Mister Steepee” and the 2002 recording with the later trio, we did get a Branford version of the composition, but in abbreviated suite form, and not on his own record. The brilliant jazz + hip-hop AIDS benefit compilation Red Hot + Cool had a second CD enclosed which featured Alice Coltrane’s hallucinatory 1971 take on the great work, and this 18 minute long condensation of the suite:

When the notifications stop

I used to use this blog as my backup brain for all sorts of things, a practice I’d gotten away from, but this one feels like it needs memorializing: what to do when the notifications stop coming on a modern (Sequoia-era) Mac, or when the widgets don’t show there.

I noticed a while ago that I could no longer quickly bring up the sidebar, which I use regularly to peek at the calendar, and that I wasn’t getting notifications showing up any more, but I couldn’t figure out why, only that there was probably some preference file corrupted somewhere. This morning I found the trick, or more specifically, where all the preference files live. Turns out that if you remove all files and directories from this folder it does the trick:

~/Library/Group Containers/group.com.apple.UserNotifications/Library/UserNotifications/Remote/default

Hat tip to Reddit for finding the right directory.

(On a general note, the good news is that there are several cases on the Mac where clearing the application state and letting the Mac rebuild it just works, and the application state is almost always saved somewhere in the Library. The bad news is that there is definitely some fragility that caused the problem in the first place and I don’t know what it is. Also, finding where in the thousands of folders in the Library that state is preserved is, to put it lightly, a problem.)

Brent Simmons on corporate developers

Brent Simmons: “My Wildly Incorrect Bias About Corporate Engineers.” Great blog post from Brent, who I had a beer with once, long ago, in Seattle, and whose work in the early days of this blog I frequently followed and linked to. (I had written an AppleScript based blog posting client for my old blog platform, which he had worked on, and he wrote a modern blog posting client (MarsEdit) and blog aggregator (NetNewsWire), so he was on my radar a lot. Also he’s a nice guy.)

I don’t actually have a ton of experience being an indie developer, nor have I worked with a lot of them, but I can say with 100% certainty that his description of corporate developers rings true. They’re not all as great as Brent describes, but the ones who don’t rise to the level of excellence don’t tend to stick around—and if your company prioritizes good management as well, you won’t see many of the bad ones because good interviewing and hiring tends to weed them out.

Congrats on your well-deserved retirement, Brent—though is it really retirement if you’ll “have a lot more time for working on NetNewsWire”? 🙂

Wynton Marsalis, Standard Time Vol. 3: The Resolution of Romance

Is there such a thing as too much beauty in jazz? This Wynton Marsalis album trades perfection for risk-taking, in a different approach to the standards album.

Album of the Week, May 26, 2025

Wynton Marsalis released an album called Marsalis Standard Time, Vol. 1 in 1987, following the release of J Mood. Recorded with the same band as the earlier album, it brought the same post-bop sensibility to the collection of standards, almost as if a later incarnation of a Miles Davis group had done the recording. Fast forwarding about two or three years, we get Standard Time Vol. 3, skipping Volume 2,1 and it’s a completely different animal.

Let’s talk about cover photos for a second, because Columbia’s marketing folks had clearly changed their minds about how to position the new young lions of jazz in the market. Marsalis Standard Time featured Wynton looking severe in a tux — signifier of authority and of the canon. If you took the text off and showed it to someone who knew that Wynton had recorded both jazz and classical albums in the 1980s, I think they’d have been just as likely to guess that Vol. 1 was a classical album. If you look at the cover of Vol. 3 (above), there’s a more relaxed, almost casual Wynton, smiling and listening to his father play the piano. Both men are well dressed, but in expensive suits rather than formal wear. The background looks like an extremely upscale hotel lobby. (See also the cover of last week’s Trio Jeepy, also on Columbia, by Wynton’s older brother Branford.) Columbia was positioning Wynton as respectable, upper class, yet approachable—a very different position than the rock and funk iconography that they used to sell Miles’ last albums for the label.

Oh yes, Wynton’s father. This particular quartet album featured the Marsalis patriarch, Ellis Marsalis Jr., on the piano. Ellis was the son of a Louisiana businessman—Ellis Sr. owned the first Black-owned gas station in Louisiana and ran a hotel that catered to African Americans who could not stay at white-only hotels in nearby New Orleans—turned civil rights activist. Ellis Jr. served in the Marines for a year, graduated from Dillard University with a degree in music education, and played with the Adderley brothers (separately), Ed Blackwell, and Nat Hirt.

But his biggest impact, at least until his sons transformed the jazz landscape in the 1980s, was as a music educator; he instructed the likes of Terence Blanchard, Donald Harrison, Nicholas Payton, Marlon Jordan and even Harry Connick Jr. from his studio at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. This was father and son’s second appearance together, having previously performed together with Branford on Side 1 of the anthology recording Fathers and Sons. They were joined by two new (to us) faces to the Marsalis group, Reginald Veal on bass and Herlin Riley on drums. Both musicians hailed from New Orleans, and both had joined Marsalis for the two preceding albums, 1990’s Crescent City Christmas Card and 1988’s simultaneously great and off-putting The Majesty of the Blues (I’ll be reviewing that one someday); they would make many more recordings with him in the future.

There are 21 tracks on this album! Across all of them there are some common threads: a sense of bounce and energy, courtesy of Herlin Riley and Reginald Veal, pervades the uptempo tracks, and a focus on melodic clarity, courtesy Wynton’s pristine trumpet technique, pervades the others. You get both in the opener, Wynton’s tribute to early New Orleans jazz, “In the Court of King Oliver.” His composition captures some amount of the energy of early New Orleans jazz as played by King Oliver and his disciple Louis Armstrong, without exactly parodying any of the many tunes from which the music originates. The whole thing is played muted, leading to a growly trumpet solo at the end that hints at something much more visceral and bluesy. (Wynton could, and did, take this to great lengths in live performances.) But the backbone of the performance is definitely the “engine room” of Veal’s rock-steady bass and Herlin Riley’s swinging, stuttering, wondrously multi-tonal drums. Riley, who has had a productive career (including a stint as the drummer in Ahmad Jamal’s most sensational late-career trio) has a distinctive way of wringing more color out of the drums than one would think possible, to the point that he is one of the few drummers whose work I can reliably identify by ear.

Ray Evans and Jay Livingston’s “Never Let Me Go” is played briefly, just the chorus, as though a prelude to Victor Young’s “Street of Dreams.” Ellis takes a solo that is relaxed and classy, with enough New Orleans around the edges to keep it from lapsing into background music. Wynton then takes a brief solo before his father reclaims the spot, playing the song out.

Rodgers and Hart’s “Where or When” is given the chorus-and-verse treatment, but here Ellis’s development of the chords under his son’s restrained solo is the focal point. The tone of the trumpet on that slow climb to the peak at the end is gorgeous, as is the unaccompanied solo Wynton takes in the quiet range of the trumpet’s sound. This leads to a pair of Wynton originals: “Bona and Paul” gets some of his by-now-distinctive harmonic complexity with a deceptively simple solo line and a spare piano accompaniment, while “The Seductress” is an exercise in control on the plunger mute, in which the trumpeter achieves vocal tones across the range of the instrument.

“A Sleepin’ Bee,” a Harold Arlen number with lyrics, improbably, by Truman Capote, gets a trio rendition with bouncy snare and forthright bass under Ellis’ masterful elicitation of the melody. The Louis Armstrong standard “Big Butter and Egg Man” follows, beginning as a pianoless trio. Most of the first verse is played as a duet between Wynton and Veal; the bassist gets an assertive but supportive role courtesy of his high octave improvisation, which stands up nicely to the trumpet. Ellis provides muted harmonic cover under the second verse and takes a solo with those bouncing Herlin Riley snares accompanying. The best part might be Veal’s bass solo, which spelunks its way across the instrument’s whole range with spare accompaniment from Riley and Ellis.

Ray Noble’s “The Very Thought of You” gets a tender duet treatment by father and son, accompanied unobtrusively by Riley and Veal; Ellis’s solo reaches quiet heights of lyrical sincerity without ever breaching the late-night volume limit. Edward Heyman’s “I Cover the Waterfront” is a more “daytime” number; the tone of the piano is brighter and the solos more sprightly. When Wynton enters, playing a bucket muted solo, it’s jovial but still controlled.

I have to give points to this record for dipping deeply into the standards well and pulling up some rarities. “How are Things in Glocca Mora?” is a Burton Lane tune with words by Yip Harburg from the musical “Finian’s Rainbow,” which is about an elderly Irishman, his pot of gold, and the leprechaun that follows him to the States (you can’t make this stuff up). It has relatively few jazz recordings; one of the first was by Sonny Rollins and Donald Byrd, with Marsalis’s namesake Wynton Kelly on the piano. The performance here borrows heavily from that version, albeit with Wynton’s standard rubato approach to the ballad; it’s gorgeous, and an entirely different approach to the ballad than the weepy version in the 1968 film, which featured Petula Clark, the last movie-musical appearance of Fred Astaire, and a young Francis Ford Coppola as the director. (Again, you can’t make this stuff up.)

Rodgers and Hart are the only composers represented with more than one tune on this collection; their second, “My Romance,” gets a straightforward solo piano rendition that turns poignant in the final chords. Tom Adair and Matt Dennis’s “Everything Happens to Me” is a gorgeous song that gets a little bluesy in Ellis’s solo, and an extended trumpet cadenza that takes us out to the end of the tune. Ted Grouya’s “Flamingo” is one of the few non-Broadway standards on the album, originally a popular song recorded by Duke Ellington’s band, features a touch of samba rhythm from the band and a glorious vocal line from the trumpet, which I may have sung a few times when we visited the Camargue in southern France to see the mysterious birds.

Mort Dixon’s “You’re My Everything” gets a straightforward rendition, as does Hoagy Carmichael’s “Skylark” and the last Rodgers and Hart tune, “It’s Easy to Remember.” Indeed, as the record goes on, the gorgeousness threatens to rise like a somnolent tide.

Thankfully, Vernon Duke’s “Taking a Chance on Love” gets a faster tempo and some of that Herlin Riley bounce to set it apart, and Harold Arlen’s “I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues” gets a pianoless trio that feels like a pure jaunt, complete with high trumpet flourishes and low buzzy growls. The album closes out with two woozy ballads, “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning” and Burton Lane’s “It’s Too Late Now.” Throughout, true to the brand promise implied in the cover art, everything stays on the polite side of jazz: pretty, even keeled, and by the book.

So we’ve heard Wynton’s approach to the standards album. And while there might not be a lot in the way of original improvisation here, it’s still a beautiful listen. I should be clear—I actually really like this album for quiet listening. It’s just that sometimes I wonder what would have happened if Kenny Kirkland or Marcus Roberts had played a few of the numbers. There’s sometimes such a thing as too reverent. Turns out that won’t be an issue on next week’s record.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

  1. I think I remember hearing, back when this album was released in 1990, that they pushed out Volume 3 before Volume 2 because they thought the “father and son” angle would sell better. It’s pretty clear that Wynton, like Miles, was recording faster than Columbia could put records on the market. In the years following J Mood, the Marsalis band went from The Majesty of the Blues to his three volume Soul Gestures in Southern Blue series, which were all pretty great but which weren’t released until 1991-1992. ↩︎