Title: Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall
Abstract: Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall. By Gabriel Solis. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 183pp (softcover). Notes, References, Index. ISBN 978-0-19-974436-7 Monographs on single albums have been written before. Ashley Kahn is the most notable practitioner, having produced books on Miles Davis's Kind Of and John Coltrane's A Love Supreme. Both volumes probed the context, history, and reception of those recordings. Kahn's subjects were iconic that had achieved legendary status over the course of decades of listening, discussion, and accumulation of cultural associations and references. Musical analyses of the performances they held, however, were necessarily limited by the fact that Kahn is not a musician or a musicologist, and also because he was writing for a general audience. Gabriel Solis, a professor of musicology and anthropology at the University of Illinois, has different aims, but he also has a rather different subject. The previously-unheard recording of a November 1957 performance by the Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall, a tape unearthed in 2005 at the Library of Congress in the course of routine processing of the Voice of America collection, achieved legendary status immediately upon its release later that year. Solis states in the introduction that in addition to examining the historical context of the recording and analyzing its performances, he aims to critique the reception of the resulting CD in 2005 and explore what that reception says about in the early 21st century. Most ambitiously, he states his intention to use the Monk Quartet's performance to help understand musical repetition of many sorts as it relates to conceptualizations of improvisation, composition, and the making of musical works. The introduction explores the idea of repetition on all levels in performance: individual compositions played and replayed over the course of weeks, months, or years; the cyclic repetition of song forms; the statement and restatement of themes within songs; the use of repetition in improvisation; and the production of swing by the interaction of regular musical events in a rhythm section. Most importantly, Solis wishes to explore the relationship between improvisation and composition, a fluid border in which is especially molten in the case of Monk, and to examine the question of how works in compare to the concept of works in European music. Following the introduction, Solis devotes two chapters to background: quick summations of Monk's and Coltrane's careers prior to joining forces in 1957, and an examination of the jazz concert and its evolution up to that time. The heart of the book is essentially a tour-de-force of musical analysis (out of a main text of 161 pages, 91 are devoted to the music). If ever a styles and analysis class had a model professor, Solis is it. He examines and breaks down in minute detail the compositions performed (Monk's Mood, Evidence, Crepuscule with Nellie, Nutty, Epistrophy, Bye-Ya, Sweet and Lovely, and Blue Monk), their arrangements, the nature of the rhythm section interactions, Monk's piano backgrounds, and, of course, Monk's and Coltrane's solos. …
Publication Year: 2014
Publication Date: 2014-09-22
Language: en
Type: article
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