Songs We Love: Thelonious Monk, 'Pannonica (Quartet)'
Monk only lent his talents to the film world once, and the soundtrack is finally being released in time for Record Store Day. Here he paints one of his classic ballads in darker tones.
This Saturday is Record Store Day, and one of its many offerings is an unreleased film soundtrack by Thelonious Monk. We celebrate that release and Monk's centennial with one of his ballads.
Provocative, controlled, erratic, lyrical, grating — and, above all else, original. These are — both the man and his music. A pioneer of bebop in the 1940s and both a giant of hard bop and a forerunner of post-bop in the 1950s, Monk never fit neatly into existing musical vernaculars. He employed complex, chromatic harmonies that could border on atonality and melodies that sounded as if they were being twisted by pain; yet he brought those discordant elements together in compositions of sublime beauty and aching lyricism.
