WIN - Jazz FM's Album of the Week
The new album from eight-time Grammy and Academy Award winning singer, songwriter, and composer Jon Batiste : “Monk Meditations”
Multi-Grammy, Emmy, and Oscar winner Jon Batiste today announces his next three studio albums, Black Mozart (Batiste Piano Series, Vol. 2, released June 19th), Batiste Piano Series Volumes 3 and 4, focusing on Thelonious Monk: Monk Meditations and Monk Movements, released on Verve Records on August 14. Batiste’s intent with the three albums was to “curate a musical conversation between Monk and Mozart with me at the piano, honoring them and contributing to their kindred legacies.” He continues:
“Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, a pioneer who created his own musical language yet honored his predecessors, a master of symmetry and refiner of structure and form, seamlessly combined extreme melodic simplicity with intense complexity that challenged the conventions of his time but still had a universal appeal. … Like Thelonious Monk, for me a latter-day example of all the same qualities, Mozart was a meticulous metaphysician who created a special blend of logical mastery that still somehow defies explanation.”
Volumes 3 and 4 of the Batiste Piano Series – two volumes, he declares, because “one wasn’t enough” – are devoted to Monk, not only illustrating Batiste’s view of him as a latter-day parallel to Mozart but to honor a towering figure who has been immeasurably influential on Batiste himself. In his liner notes for the album, written out in rhythmic lines to musicalize his words about the music, the pianist says:
“Even before I knew who he was, I started to have some of the same musical thoughts that he had. About how to catch the ictus of the swing. About super-syncopation and the humor of harmony. About melodic rhyme and drama. About the piano being 88 tuned drums. … Monk music makes my brain and my soul feel aligned in a very special way. He is my favorite pianist of all time – not just jazz pianist, any style pianist.The way he hears the harmony and the sound he produces on piano is something that should be applied to all styles of playing.”
Though both albums are inspired by the same artist, the complexity of Monk’s music lends itself to many different approaches, and Batiste’s two albums are on different paths: Monk Meditations is likely the first ever new-age meditation album inspired by Thelonious Monk, while Monk Movements reimagines his straight-ahead jazz composition
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