Monk’s Album, Straight, No Chaser
Heard melodies and those unheard
Spotify:
Qobuz: https://open.qobuz.com/album/5099706488620
Tidal: https://tidal.com/album/2044460
Discogs.com album master record: https://www.discogs.com/master/120742-Monk-Straight-No-Chaser
OK, now to jabber about this. If there’s another streaming service etc that you would be interested in me putting into my album posts, please comment! I use Tidal and Qobuz, and I buy from Discogs.com. I don’t have a paid subscription to Spotify, and I include its links because I think it’s a lot more popular than Tidal and Qobuz. I like to stream hi-res, regardless of what ‘the facts’ are about what a person can hear. I like listening to different formats. Maybe I’ll hear differences.
‘Straight, No Chaser’ is a song I grew up playing in high school jazz band (I played guitar). I did not listen to much jazz then. I had some Django and Stephane Grappelli (whom I saw person just before he passed away), and I had some Wes Montgomery and Blue Note Jazz Guitar Greats album. It took a looooong time for me to get into jazz in anything like the way I am into it now. So, all that is to say I did not listen to Monk play his music until recently. And I had not heard this studio album; really all I have heard by Monk are his live recordings, since I have some LPs of them, and I have heard many renditions of his songs by pianists and saxophonists (Anthony Braxton, Melissa Aldana, just to mention two of my favorites). So, preparing to go to sleep last night, I hit upon this album in Tidal, while Tidal was streaming songs based upon one song I had listened to, and the song has an extended piano solo that I found myself mesmerized by. For some time, I have held Ahmad Jamal up as my favorite jazz pianist, but now I am getting more of a feel for Monk’s god-among-pianists status and abilities, not to mention his innovativeness.
It will take me a while to digest this album. The cover alone requires some attention. Monk’s playing, and people’s renditions of his music, remind me of Lisa Simpson (of the American television show The Simpsons) telling her father, Homer, to listen to “the notes [the jazz musician they are seeing] is not playing.” There are a great deal of unplayed notes in Monk songs when they are played with any attention to their musicality. Here’s to unplayed notes! In the words of the poet John Keats (1795-1821), in ‘Ode On a Grecian Urn,’ ‘Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.’
