Old Technology That Works: Clearing off the stereo so I Can Play Solo Monk on LP

from the back of the album cover: Solo Monk by Thelonious Monk. Photo by Wayne Stratz

I stopped for some fresh coffee and a bit of conversation with a new friend on my way to the Lansdale Farmers Market. At one point we talked about old technology. I did not mention the 8-Tracks I had of Zappa Live and Pink Floyd's The Wall, but I did speak of Bruce Cockburn and Dar William cassettes; and a floppy disk that has my life list of birds. Things go out of favor, grow old, and new devices look at them with curiosity.

My new iMac is too thin to have a CD slot. Really?

But before any of these things there were LP's, a recorded moment in time. One source tells me that in February of 1965, Thelonious Monk sat alone with a piano. Twenty years later I bought the LP.  Thirty years later, I removed the stacks of CDs on top of my stereo in the studio and gently plopped the needle down on Dinah...

Play Yourself: Bonaventure meets Thelonious Monk

Between work and meeting up with folk at Holy Trinity in Lansdale last night, maybe it would have been better to do what I did when I got home from the church. I finished Robin D. G. Kelley's biography of Monk.

Saturday night I took a break from that book to read the next chapter in Bonaventure, and as often has been the case, I am initially at a loss at where Bonaventure is taking me and why I wanted to travel with him. But now I think I know.

Monday driving home from work... "don't worry about where it took Bonaventure, be concerned with where it will take you." The message to me was what Thelonious Monk told musicians who asked to see the music. "Play yourself"

God doesn't want us to make Bonaventure's journey, but just may want us to play ourselves to the melody that took Bonaventure to God. So I plan to sit and contemplate the words we have come to associate with God...

When Bonaventure played...

within all things, but not enclosed
outside all things, but not excluded
above all things, but not aloof
below all things, but not debased...

as was said to Moses:
I will show you all good.

and when Monk played a beautiful melody by himself...

It is a good thing to have a room waiting for us

The other day I blogged about the gospel tune, We'll Understand It Better By and By. It was a hymn recorded by Thelonious Monk. The biography I am reading stressed these lyrics...

We are often destitute
of the things that life demands,
Want of food and want of shelter,
thirsty hills and barren lands.

The point being made was to reference the history Monk had emerged from. I emerged from some suffering in my youth, but I have never experienced a want for food. Mosaic Woman and I did go through a year in Oregon when we were both graduate students. I look at what our earnings were that year and I wonder how we did not want... loans, part-time jobs, and frugality.

Monk did not record any of his music until he was 30. And at that time he still lived at home, or at least had a room in his mother's house. It was in that room where he crammed a piano and then a sextet, which prepared for that first recording. If it wasn't for that room, Monk would not have been able to stick to his dream to be himself first and foremost when he played piano.

My parents have always had a room for me. They have in the past in good times and in bad like when my first attempt at college was not quite a success. Years later, Mosaic Woman and I would return to Pennsylvania after 8 years of roaming about the US, and that return was made a lot easier by the room provided us. The other night, I searched and searched for an unknown version of We'll Understand It Better By and By. Nothing met what I wanted. One of the first I found was a bluegrass version. They skip the verse mentioned above, then skip some others, and add one not found in the lyrics I had found. But this guy made it into my grandparent's LP collection and then into mine...
...

10 things I learned in four days of TV

In my last post I mentioned that I picked up a book. I had made it known that I had been wiped out to the point of watching TV this past weekend, a habit I had kicked for the most part. It took something like the Phillies playing in the World Series. A friend who knew I had been sucked into TV sent her husband to the rescue.

So there I was watching TV when the doorbell rang. I peered out a window and saw a friend standing there, so I opened my door. He handed me a biography of one of my favorite jazz musicians, then walked away wishing me good health and some time away from the TV.

but in four days I had learned some things.

1. I still dig Jim Rockford
2. I might have liked the A-Team had I given it a chance.
3. I Spy has amazingly cool jazz playing in the background.
4. There was a TV show called The Bold Ones.
5. I still prefer NCAA Basketball over the professionals
6. The jazz standard Peter Gunn was a theme song to Peter Gunn of course.
7. I still have no desire, no matter how sick I may be at the time, to watch people shout Jerry as people attack each other on a stage.
8. That Law and Order is still on the air. How cool is that.
9. One can watch hours of TV without watching reality TV.
10. I still cringe when skiers and bobsleds loose their equilibrium.

so an interest in what jazz musician could drive me away from all that...