The Retrographer, Issue 64 (March, 2 0 2 0)

April 05, 2020

Pat Kelly, Empty Country, Allegra Krieger, Ian Wayne, HAIM, Christine and the Queens, Dua Lipa, Jay Electronica, Lil Uzi Vert, Bad Bunny, Thelonious Monk

The Retrographer, Issue 64

Bulletins

Ten Songs for March, 2 0 2 0 | Listen to these songs on Spotify and YouTube

“Creatures”, Pat Kelly (Spotify / YouTube) – “There’s no telling who is who, no friendly smiles in the black lagoon. It’s hard to picture leaving anytime soon.” Pat is funny and wistful; mysterious and familiar. Ambiguity is in the dreamlike instrumentation: “We are walking on a beam, we are nothing like we seem.” 

“Marian”, Empty Country (Spotify / YouTube) – Joseph D'Agostino could break your heart any which way with Cymbals Eat Guitars; now he’s off on his own in Empty Country. Written for a grandmother he never met killed by a drunk driver, here he conjures size and space, intimacy and loss.

“The Push and the Pull”, Allegra Krieger (Spotify / YouTube) – This song’s verse and chorus are like two different worlds, breaking from the prosaic into old wisdom at each turn: “The sad simple truth, no matter what you do, some things always remain / The sad thing to know, no matter where you go, you will still feel the same.” 

“Annapurna”, Ian Wayne (Spotify / YouTube) – All the shining, brilliant moments here fit tightly in like strands in a weaving: The syncopated rhythm guitar, the long image starting the second verse, the way the notes of “Annapurna is a mountain’s name” form the shape their subject.

“The Steps”, HAIM (Spotify / YouTube) – The sisters Haim made it clear that their first album’s dalliances in Jacksonian pop would be dispensed with for the stomp of 70’s rock, as big, beefy, and male as the cover of their forthcoming album.

“Cool”, Dua Lipa (Spotify / YouTube) – Dua’s voice is low and powerful, reaching reedy depths on this Tove Lo-assisted, stadium-made banger. Deprived of a tour for now, but try to imagine the speakers in Madison Square Garden carrying this up to the jerseys in the rafters.

“Pero Ya No”, Bad Bunny (Spotify / YouTube) – “You don't catch me anymore, I'm not a Pokémon”, Benito is saying. But look: It’s a long-known rule that if you can’t feel good, you can at least try to look (or sound) good (even if you’re fully fronting).

“People, I’ve been sad”, Christine and the Queens (Spotify / YouTube) – The arc of this song is long, but even as it bends asymptotically to the sky, it makes its message clear from its first, staccato words, later restated in French: A candid release, stuck a moment – “you know the feeling”.

“Ghost of Soulja Slim”, Jay Electronica (Spotify / YouTube) – So Jay Electronica made a Jay-Z album; or Jay-Z made a Jay Electronica album. The enigmatic rapper emerged from a decade of hints and indications of greatness with a record with too many glinting appurtenances to lose.

“Homecoming”, Lil Uzi Vert (Spotify / YouTube) – Easily one of the best living rappers by (or in) any dimension: Fluidity, character, weird concepts, unique sound, sense of humor. “Ass so fat that I got to hit beside that”, and, at his height, you believe him.

One Album for March, 2 0 2 0 

Thelonious Monk, “Solo Monk” (Columbia, 1965) (Spotify / YouTube) 

This document has been floating around for years: A scanned piece of paper full of advice, transcribed by the sax player Steve Lacy, from Thelonious Monk, for musicians.

The suggestions are a mix of mundane and mystical: 

“Stop playing all those wierd[sic] notes, play the melody!”

“Discrimination is important.”

“You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?”

“Don’t play the piano part, I’m playing that. Don’t listen to me, I’m supposed to be accompanying you!”

“A note can be small as a pin or as big as the world, it depends on your imagination.”

And so on. Knowing Monk’s music, all these tips seem undeniable; they’re as much pointers to growing musicians as they are descriptions of his own playing. They could be the titles of chapters in his biography. Especially this one:

“A genius is the one most like himself.”

A common misunderstanding of Thelonious Monk’s playing – which could sound erratic, imprecise, irregular – is that he was some sort of unvarnished, spontaneous talent. There’s a perhaps-apocryphal story about a young musician, who either stumbled in on him in a rehearsal room or challenged his chops – the specifics don’t matter. On command, Monk dispensed with his idiosyncrasies and revealed a perfect impression of the great pianist Bud Powell. And anyway, according to Monk, the ability to sound like anyone else was definitionally irrelevant to what made someone – him – great.

Solo Monk isn’t the only album where Monk plays alone; Thelonious Alone in San Francisco is a live album, for example, where Monk plays with no band and no audience either at San Francisco’s Fugazi Hall. He was a surrealist. He had been cutting albums for decades by the time the record came out in 1965: he was interviewed on French TV, wandered many a stage in the middle of a song, sung along with his playing so loudly that it came through his piano mics. He was music’s best-known eccentric. He had been iconic for so long, a fixture of Harlem’s jazz scene since the 1930s, that he was taken for granted.

The Thelonious Monk of Solo Monk has no concerns for the critical vagaries of the moment it was created. He seems to know he, and the largely-classic songbook he pulls from, draw permanence from singularity – being most like himself.

“Dinah”, which opens the album, was published in 1925 and made a standard by the generation that brought jazz to American popular culture: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Ethel Waters, Bing Crosby, Fats Waller. Monk approaches it with a fitting, period stride piano style, playing both bassline and chords with his left hand, and melody with his right. It’s bright and quick, but him already: A minute in, you can hear his guttural humming accompanying, and his heavy breath. Then, just as it approaches its final chorus, it slows, like a horseback rider who has run suddenly upon a moonlit beach, the sustain pedal activated. 

In the Bible, Dinah was the daughter of Jacob who was kidnapped and raped by Shechem. During the Civil War, Union soldiers gave black men and women the universal names “Sambo” and “Dinah”, names that came to represent stereotypes and distortions of black humanity. After the war, Sojourner Truth repurposed Dinah to represent black womanhood, saying, “Dinah was well posted up on the rights of woman, and with something of the ardor and the odor of her native Africa, she contended for her right to vote, to hold office, to practice medicine and the law, and to wear the breeches with the best white man that walks upon God's earth.” In the song, Dinah is marked for her “Dixie eyes blazin’”. All of that is wrapped up in Monk’s final, legato chords, sustain hanging over them like the legacy of history.

Solo Monk sets markers through jazz’s first generation: Jack Strachey and Eric Maschwitz’s "These Foolish Things (Remind Me of You)"; Harry Barris and Gordon Clifford’s “I Surrender, Dear”; Axel Stordahl and Paul Weston’s “I Should Care”. He brings his compositions, too, like the timeless “Ruby, My Dear” and “Monk’s Point”. His performance throughout is beautiful precisely when needed, dissonant and angular elsewhere. The beauty of the songs is never compromised.

Monk’s performances here end, oddly, in similar ways here and again: Long, sustained slowdowns, legato notes stretching, and then a fast, humorously starry twinkle of notes high on the piano. “Dinah”, “Ruby, My Dear”, “I’m Confessin’ (That I Love You)”. He often hits the keys with force that tears a song’s melody out of the soft, sweet palettes songs like “Everything Happens To Me” and “I Should Care” had long been wrought in. Ardor and order.

That advice Monk shared to his band, oddly, all applies to an album with no band. Notes as small as a pin and as big as the world; Melodies never weirded; And, perhaps most importantly, a genius only like himself.

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