#168

Album Week! Haven't written very much about music for this blog, because my last and hopefully properly dead and unfindable (haha what a fun dream) blog was supposedly about music. It was only conceptually attached to music, but I did write a lot about music, since that is something I like to do.

Well, liked to do. Eventually a disgust in myself and in what I was doing surged over me with such force that my very bone structure altered slightly.

Running around with bands and being in bands and engaging with scenes is something I walked away from very decidedly. Even playing my own music and composing and putting out my own stuff has become questionable to me and perhaps something I will walk away from as well. Shit has gotten to where I listen to less music than I ever have in  my life.

Music is one of the best thing about life, though, no question, and as I've been feeling like I've neglected music, which made me sad, I thought I'd write down some thoughts about some albums over the next seven posts.

Album Week! Fuck art, music is hateful. Strap in.

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This first album was selected by grabbing my big binder full of CD's, whapping it open on my lap, and jabbing a finger at it with my eyes closed. 

Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane. 

Clearly I am being tested.

What the fuck am I supposed to say about this record? Two dudes who play their instruments in a singular fashion they essentially invented themselves get together in the  Five Spot Club. At one point John plays the chorus of one of those marchy obnoxious folk tunes they make you learn in elementary school (or did he just like, do a reveille? I forget, he inserts something, at any rate) in the middle of one of his spattering solo runs, which he had used to hint at the fact that he might do that. Then he does it and you're like "wow, man, you actually did it". Thelonious Monk is Thelonious Monk. Dude's a mega genius and does no wrong on the keys, the way that dude interacts with the keys is a special thing. Snare drum is very pronounced in the mix. It's Art Blakey, everything with the drums is perfect.

It's fucking good. You should listen to it. Coltrane's not doing any of that shit where it seems like he's having an actual vitriolic fight with his sax but he is twisting the limits of tone. Mostly they're just having fun. An easy, smoky kind of night, complex shit is happening but it's not screaming about itself. Play it before dinner, you can dance to this one.


--JL