WTJU Feb 23rd, 2021 | By Russell Perry
Frank Kimbrough
Although he has been gone now 39 years, and it has been much longer since he stopped writing, no composer of modern jazz has garnered more attention from his fellow musicians than Thelonious Monk, whose work is the subject of a continuous stream of tribute recordings. Groups as diverse as the Bobby Broom Trio, the Microscopic Septet and John Beasley and MONK’estra have assembled releases from their favorite compositions, but Miles Okazaki, in a solo set, and the Frank Kimbrough Quartet have gone all in with releases of every known Monk composition – the ultimate homage. Tributes to the composer Thelonious Monk in this hour and the next of Jazz at 100 Today!
Born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina,
Thelonious Monk is undoubtedly one of the most important – and controversial – figures in the history of jazz. Although he was a trailblazer who pioneered a uniquely percussive approach to the piano and developed a peculiar musical language that some found difficult to understand, his greatest achievement was writing over 70 memorable songs, several of which became jazz standards.
Monk initially rose to fame alongside alto saxophonist
Charlie Parker and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie in the vanguard of the bebop movement in New York during the mid 1940s. In the main, bebop was a high-octane music driven by Parker and Gillespie’s virtuosic athleticism but Monk, who was the eldest of bop’s holy trinity, created his own distinctive musical universe that was defined by quirky chromatic choruses, disquieting dissonant notes, and, on the whole, much slower tempi. Given the radical yet highly stylized characteristics of his music – which he blu