Join us for the next edition of All This Jazz, which gets underway at 10pm Central on Saturday the 19th, right here on Public Radio 89.5-1. (We'll also gladly offer, as ever, a 7pm re-airing of ATJ on Sunday the 20th on Jazz 89.5-2, which is our station's all-jazz HD Radio channel.)
Each and every week, our show spins modern jazz, both recent and classic, from Metheny and Mingus to Brubeck and Baker to Armstrong and Adderley. Also, the second half of our two-hour program always carries a "theme."
This time around, that theme will be Monk's Tunes. Thelonious Sphere Monk, the legendary jazz pianist, band leader, and composer, would have turned 96 last week --- he was born October 10, 1917, and died in the early 1980s --- and his compositions basically become more and more fundamental (indeed, more and more crucial) to the standard jazz "songbook" with each passing year. Indeed, as Monk's Wiki entry points out: "Monk is the second-most recorded jazz composer after Duke Ellington, which is particularly remarkable as Ellington composed over 1,000 songs while Monk wrote about 70."
And so the forthcoming installment of ATJ will present such classic Monk themes as "'Round Midnight" and "Brilliant Corners" and "Think of One" --- as rendered by the likes of Carmen McRae, Fred Hersch, Bill Holman, Charlie Rouse, and several others.
Tune in, good people! Monk (pictured herewith) lives!