The Pop Story

Thelonious Monk - Genius of Modern Music, Vol. 2 (1951)

Thelonious Monk via last.fm

So in between the last album and this I was supposed to write about Lenne Tristano’s ‘Crosscurrents’, but it wasn’t available to stream anywhere online. Plus - who the hell is Lenne Tristano? Well, he’s very respected in ‘jazz circles’, something of an unsung hero in fact. Why is he so underrated? I’ll tell you why (drawing on my deep knowledge of jazz here): he didn’t have a hat and groovy facial hair.

Seriously, jazz fans might think their heroes were above the kind of gimmicks we usually associate with desperate pop wannabes, but it’s a truism throughout all popular music that - ignoring the actual music they make - you can usually boil a bona fide star down to one thing, e.g. Dylan (shades), Bowie (dress), Jagger (lips), Rotten (swearing), Winehouse (beehive - or drugs, I guess). Like Badly Drawn Boy, Thelonious Monk was all about the hat. What did Tristano have? Blindness, you say? Okay, that worked for Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder, but come on - Monk had a weird hat!

Or maybe Monk was just better, I don’t know. It’s difficult to tell from this album because, as I’ve stated, and will no doubt reiterate again and again over the coming weeks, I know bugger all about jazz.

Genius of Modern Music, Vol. 2 on Spotify