- #THELONIOUS MONK WELL YOU NEEDN T HOW TO#
- #THELONIOUS MONK WELL YOU NEEDN T FULL#
- #THELONIOUS MONK WELL YOU NEEDN T PROFESSIONAL#
“For us jazz musicians, if you’re working steady, that’s when your thing really comes together,” he said. “He was feeling real, real good, and you could hear it in his playing,” T.S. The Palo Alto performance energized the pianist, then 51. Indebted to his label, he hit the road early to handle financial obligations that arose during his illness. Earlier that year, he’d suffered a seizure and ended up in a coma, which caused him to miss scheduled recording sessions. Monk spent much of 1968 struggling with health challenges that slowed his output and ultimately led to his isolation. Kelley, who wrote the definitive 2009 biography “Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original,” the live recording catches the Monk quartet at a final creative high. On the surface, it would seem there’s nothing exceptional about “Palo Alto,” on which Monk plays his older music, including stately renditions of “Ruby, My Dear,” “Well, You Needn’t” and “Don’t Blame Me,” along with a piano cover of Rudy Vallee’s “I Love You Sweetheart of All of My Dreams.” But according to Robin D.G. “I remember the bass sticking out of the window,” Mr.
#THELONIOUS MONK WELL YOU NEEDN T FULL#
The show didn’t sell out until Les drove through the parking lot, which was full of East Palo Alto residents, with Monk and his band. “And Monk said, ‘OK.’ So I didn’t think anything of it.” “I said, ‘Well, my brother’s old enough to drive to the city so he can come get you,’” Mr. “He said, ‘What are you talking about?’” The student explained there was a contract, and tickets had been sold. “I said, ‘We’re really looking forward to seeing you at my school,’” Mr. Scher called Monk at the Jazz Workshop to make sure it was still on. Aside from the thick racial friction, many people didn’t think an artist as prominent as Monk would actually show up to play at a high school.
#THELONIOUS MONK WELL YOU NEEDN T PROFESSIONAL#
Digitally restored and widely available for the first time on Friday, “Palo Alto” captures a band hitting a high note, even as Monk battled personal and professional turmoil. Scher’s family home until he contacted Monk’s son - the jazz drummer and bandleader T.S. The “Palo Alto” recording had collected dust in the attic of Mr. Now, 52 years later, Impulse! Records and Legacy Recordings are releasing it as an album called “Palo Alto” that captures the 47-minute concert in full. Scher whether he could record the show if he tuned the piano. There were no plans to preserve the one-off concert, but a school janitor asked Mr. Scher had his older brother Les drive there and pick up the pianist and his band. He was already scheduled to be in the area for a three-week stint at the Jazz Workshop, a club in San Francisco, so Mr. The jazz titan agreed to perform at the school on Sunday, Oct. Monk, a pianist, was more than a decade past his most famous recordings and near the end of an unfruitful run at Columbia Records when his manager got the request from Mr. Then he turned his attention to his idol, Thelonious Monk. He convinced the vibraphonist Cal Tjader, the singer Jon Hendricks and the pianist Vince Guaraldi (of “Peanuts” fame) to play separate gigs in the school’s spacious auditorium. Scher, who grew up playing in jazz bands, wanted jazz musicians to perform at the school, too. His duties included organizing dances and assemblies, but Mr. I demonstrate both these approaches in this short video.In the late 1960s, a precocious student named Danny Scher was the elected social commissioner at Palo Alto High School in Northern California. You can either repeat it exactly of with some variation. You simply play a short phrase on the F7 chord, and then repeat it up a half step on the G7 chord in the next measure. The idea is simple, and as I said, you can hear Monk himself and his sidemen, like tenor saxophonist Charlie Rouse, do this all the time. After all, Monk and his contemporaries did this all the time, so why not take a page from their playbook and do the same?
#THELONIOUS MONK WELL YOU NEEDN T HOW TO#
I've since learned how to do this too, but on a tune that uses chromatic motion like Monk did here, it's easier, and very effective, to embrace the obvious: the tune's chromatic, so why not highlight that in your solo. I basically spent years disliking my own playing on "Well, You Needn't," because I mistakenly thought that I had to always sound like Herbie Hancock, who generally disguises the chord changes when he improvises. I'd like to share a surprisingly easy way to improvise over the tune's chord changes in this quick jazz piano video lesson. If you've ever tried improvising on Thelonious Monk's classic jazz composition "Well, You Needn't," you know first-hand what a challenge it can be.