Category Archives: Jazz

In my previous post, I reference the traces of Phineas Newborn Jr. in Kenny Drew Jr.’s piano. Here is a video of Phineas playing Oleo, showing his gift of speed and precision. I think William will appreciate it. Nevertheless, sometimes I prefer the same story to be told with fewer notes.

And don’t worry, I will be back to my usual digressions as soon as I have a little free time away from drafting contracts.

John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things” (shown here with a 22 year old McCoy Tyner on piano) was one of the first pieces of Jazz that really turned me onto the genre. I think that listening to a standard or a popular song interpreted by a Jazz musician gives the listener a good idea of what the musicans are trying to express through their art form. For example, here one can see how Coltrane is trying to recreate the tune “My Favorite Things” through his own vision of music and the world in an entirely new way.

Last night after seeing Martirio with the Kenny Drew Jr. Trio, William and I had a long conversation about Jazz. Here are some of my impressions:

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Tomorrow evening (inshala), I am going to see Martirio accompanied by the Kenny Drew Jr. Trio at the Festival de Jazz de Madrid. When I tell people that I am a Martirio fan here in Spain, everyone looks at me as if I were a total freak. Apparently, Martirio has a reputation in Spain as being exactly that, a freak. She always wears dark sunglasses and her hair in crazy styles. Nevertheless, she has a remarkable voice, and in the past ten years or so, she has made great albums such as “Coplas de Madrugada” and “Flor de Piel” fusing Jazz, flamenco and traditional coplas and boleros. Kenny Drew Jr. is the son of the famous pianist Kenny Drew who played on John Coltrane’s “Blue Trane“.

This is my favortie clip of Thelonious Monk playing. Not only does it display Monk’s music at his coolest, it also portrays the fullness of Monk’s piano in the trio setting. Direcly in front of Monk watching with a grin (that supposedly annoyed him) is Count Basie. Notice the white guy in the background has no idea of how to react to what he is experiencing.

I have already brought up the comforting and empathetic quality of Billie Holiday’s voice in an earlier post on gestures. This video is from the December 8, 1957, CBS television special, “The Sound of Jazz.” In this performance alongside some of the best Jazz musicians of her time, Lady Day (in her early 40s) is reunited with Lester Young with whom a riff had separated them for some time. In less than two years, Lester Young was to die, and then Billlie four months later. “Love is like a faucet, it turns off and on,” Billie sings here in “Fine and Mellow” which can be described as exactly that: fine and mellow.