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Show 7"je Rhythm Section. : T h e 1 on ii y s Momiks ; 'Sfriil A Delight 'A -by Ralph J. Gleason back again this year . . . violinist Mike White has rejoined the John Handy Ensemble . . . bassist Red Mitchell has decided to stay at h;me in Los Angeles and work in the studios and has turned down an offer from Dizzy Gillespie to go out on the road with him. Mitchell Mit-chell recently worked eight weeks with Gillespie in clubs in Los Angeles An-geles and San Francisco . . . British Brit-ish tenor saxophonist Ronnie Scott is featured on the next single disc by The Beatles due out in mid-March. mid-March. Scott has a solo on "Lady Madonna," a Lennon- McCartney composition . . . Lucky Roberts, one of the old, original ragtime pianists, died in New York recently. Copyright 1967 Chronicle Features Syndicate j Thelonious Monk in his middle years he's 48 now has turned out to be one of the eternal verities j of jazz. j When he plays on record or in person he is never a disappointment. disappoint-ment. True, he is a quixotic personality per-sonality and sometimes he doesn't play at all. But that lies more in the past than the present and today "Felonious Thunk," (cq) as his wife has been known to affectionately affection-ately call him, takes care of business busi-ness in night clubs and on the concert con-cert stage like any other performer. per-former. And he is a delight. I heard him recently and all the mysterious combination of humor, lyricism, quaintness and melancholy that has marked his work from the beginning begin-ning was present. turns they take and the characteristic charac-teristic dips and swirls of phrases which give them the individual sound of certain kinds of speech. But once learned they serve as a marvelous guide to the performance perform-ance since, more than any other ' player in jazz, I suppose, Monk improvises on the melody in the classic sense of Jelly Roll Morton's admonition to "always keep the melody goin' some kind of way." Monk's melodies require the deep bite of the tenor, not the slurring, soft tone, and even in the lovely ballads, the gentleness must be the gentleness of strength in restraint. Charlie Rouse does this admirably and it is just as with Duke Ellington El-lington a tribute to the music of Monk that Rouse can play for the thousandth time the Monk melodies mel-odies and make them sound as if His repertoire in clubs and concert con-cert almost always consists of his own compositions. Occasionally he will take something such as "Sweet 1 and Lovely" with which he's been associated over the years and drop it in. But basically, it is the familiar famil-iar Monkish angular melodic lines, the brooding harmonies and the marvelously swinging feeling. Charlie Rouse, who has been the tenor solosit with Monk for almost a decade, now has developed, it seems to me, into the most underrated under-rated tenor in the jazz world. He is really a fine player. Monk appears ap-pears to have done for Rouse what Ellington has done for several of his soloists, such as Hodges and Carney and Gonsalves ; he has given Rouse a context in which to live and to create while growing into a fuller and deeper voice for the composer's own purposes. The Monk Quartet is not like other quartets, as I hear it. Monk weaves the sounds the four instruments instru-ments into one, long linear composition compo-sition rather than blending them together into a group sound. On almost every piece (perhaps it is every) the solos are always present pre-sent and most of the time Monk lays out during the others' solos. But occasionally he 'comps and when he does, it is to flesh out the line the soloist is playing and enhance en-hance it. Monk's melodies are not easy to learn. They always sound fresh because of the unusual twists and they still were new to him. I find that I laugh a great deal when Monk is playing and it is a nice kind of laughter. It makes me feel good and it is a compliment to the music, just as the same kind of laughter is a compliment to an old friend. You know what he is and how he is and yet there is delight de-light in the way in which he turns out to surprise you by being deeper or smarter or cuter in some way than you had thought. And just when you have the conviction you've figured him out altogether, he totally surprises you. That's Monk all the way. Jazz, as keeps being remarked here and elsewhere, is going through a rite of middle passage, it seems. The great artists such as Thelonious Monk obviously are going to survive it because the mine of creativity they possess gives such a reward to them and to the audience, that it can survive anything, any-thing, even death. For long after his audience of today and Monk himself are gone, that music will live on, giving other people in other times and other places a chance to find themselves them-selves in it and to work out their own interpretations of what it means. Liner Notes: Tenor saxophonist Charles Lloyd goes to Japan for a concert tour this spring . . . Woody Herman's recent tour of England was so successful that he's going |