Tag Archives: Jessica Williams

EVIDENCE

    Steve Lacy & Don Cherry-Evidence
    Jessica Williams-You Don’t Know What Love Is
    Thelonious Monk-Epistrophy
    Medeski, Martin & Wood-Bemsha Swing-Lively Up Yourself

Steve Lacy on Thelonious Monk

MONK LEFT US: rhythmic messages, song, quality dreams, games, things to say, things to play: pictures dates lines structures licks, insides outsides points details surfaces, parallels rhymes jokes silences, spaces blocks locks melodies, bits harmonies joints corners, edges wedges hedges, bounds rebounds sounds, shocks shapes places faces, traces shadows lights darkness, fun sadness beauty, ugly duty booty, bounty rich reward, dense intense, research dance trance, spell dwellings bell tellings, smells shells swells, pearls diamonds silver gold rubies ice, hot and cold and old, new time bold schemes, geometry and precision, concision division revision decision, mission, accomplishment, goal, death, redemption, indoctrination, fullfilment.

Jessica Williams is a wonderful person and stellar jazz pianist. She’s not terribly well known in the scheme of things yet she’s worked very hard to get her music out there and she makes it very easy. Her web siteis among the best entrepreneurial, skip-the-middle-shyster, music stores on the web. And, she offers lots of taste tests of her playing. (Tip: if you sign up for her email bulletins, you’ll learn of free mp3 downloads.) Her playing is stirring. What I enjoy most about her music is that she’s aimed her musical voice at the entire range of human expressiveness, so she can be a very witty, very deep, very bittersweet, mainstream, experimental–on and on–player.

Like Steve Lacy, she’s made Monk a cornerstone and she is among the handful of greatest contemporary players of Monk music.

On my abandoned old web site there’s a programmed journey, (God One Note!), through some thoughts about and on Thelonious Sphere Monk.

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