Happy 100th to Thelonious Monk!

Although we're the ones who get the gifts...



One of the (many) crimes of the Trump era is that the steady stream of idiocies coming through the media from the media manipulator in D.C. today almost made me miss the fact that Thelonious Monk was born on October 10, 1917. There's more of what Makes America Great in any single note from Monk's fingers than in all the words ever tweeted by you know who.


Happy Birthday Mr. Monk.

Happy 99th Birthday to Thelonious Monk!

"Round Midnight" from the Thelonious Monk Quartet (with Charlie Rouse, tenor sax; Larry Gales, bass; and Ben Riley, drums) live in Norway in 1966.


Familiarity with Monk should be part of every American's education. This is what makes America great in the eyes of the world.

Happy Birthday to John Coltrane

He would have been turning 90 today.

Happy 90th Birthday to Miles Davis

The following video from 1959 speaks for itself:


If we're going to have a national conversation about what "Makes America Great" in this surrealistic political year, then let's put the two guys who celebrated birthdays this week, Bob Dylan and Miles Davis, at the center of that conversation.

Ornette Coleman - March 9, 1930--June 11, 2015

This news hurts this morning.

Here is Ornette in 2008 playing 'Lonely Woman' from 1959's The Shape of Jazz to Come.




Here's Ben Ratliff's New York Times review of the one time I was lucky enough to see him play at Carnegie Hall in 2006.

And here's the late Charlie Haden talking to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! about being present at the revolution in the 1950s.

Turning 70 Today

Not only is it one of my major yearly observances, #PynchonInPublic Day, for which I'm re-reading Gravity's Rainbow on the MetroNorth train to and from work in honor of Thomas Pynchon's 78th birthday, but it's the 70th anniversary of VE Day -- May 8, 1945 -- the day on which Keith Jarrett was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania. I'll listen toThe Köln Concert to celebrate later tonight, but here he is with Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette playing "Autumn Leaves."



Happy Birthday Keith!

"Giuliani Über Alles" by Hasidic New Wave

With Rudy Giuliani in the news again this week for his political commentary about our current President who doesn't love America in quite the same way Rudy does, we've had this little ditty from the late nineties stuck in our head:

There's a more polished version of this song at the end of Kabalogy (which is also worth it for 'The Frank Zappa Memorial Bris'), but this first public performance of  'Giuliani Über Alles' has a great energy:



If more recent memories of the man who has made a career out of being "Mayor 9/11" have driven any thoughts of his earlier association with police brutality and killings out of your memory, and if you don't know what the line about a "plunger up your ass" is about, then you need to read again about the torture of Abner Louima in 1997 followed by the police shootings of Amadou Diallo in 1999 and Patrick Dorismond in 2000 in Rudy Giuliani's NYC. Without his ability to form a new reputation on the wreckage of the World Trade Center, unrestrained NYPD abuse, brutality, and killings would be his only legacy.

Charlie Haden 1937-2014

The great bass player Charlie Haden just passed away today. His new album with Keith Jarrett just came out a couple of weeks ago, but here's a video of the two of them from their earlier home-studio collaboration four years ago.

And here they are from much earlier in their long collaboration, in a trio with the late Paul Motian on drums in 1972.

Can you find a better way to spend 65 dollars? ... a two-day course of enlightenment for less than the price of an SUV's tank of gasoline

I hate to brag, but here's the visual proof that my Sunday and Monday made up for the fact that I couldn't make it to Washington DC on Saturday.
What can you say about a football stadium, "The Birthplace of College Football" at Rutgers, being sold out and silent as the Dalai Lama talked informally and with great humor and seriousness about war, peace, compassion, attachment, and reconciliation to 36,000 new friends? It was a Sunday morning I'll never forget.
And Monday night? I expect that in a year or two ECM will release a record by Keith Jarrett called "Keith Jarrett Solo at Carnegie Hall" or, more likely, "The New York Concert" (to fit neatly with the solo improvisational concerts that made Köln, Vienna, and Paris famous) and you'll wish you were there in the sold-out hall too for his only US solo concert in the past decade, from the first note through the five encores. I've been to a lot of concerts since I first saw the Allman Brothers and Johnny Winter at the Spectrum in Philadelphia in 1971, and this one ... one man alone at an unamplified piano in Carnegie Hall for two and a half hours ... beat them all. Or maybe it was just that seeing the Dalai Lama the day before had opened my mind to fully accept this music on this night.
(Sorry if this post seems insufficiently engagé, but Bush and Cheney and Brownie and the rest of our gang in DC just seem so small and insignificant after brushes with spiritual and artistic greatness over the past two days. Some atrocity will get TBL back on the case of these petty greedy thin-skinned "men" soon, but right now I'm listening to Radiance, so excuse me if I don't give a shit.)