Grave Error

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.