Tracks
1. In walked bud
2. Monk's mood
3. Ba-lue bolivar ba-lues-are
4. Coming on the hudson
5. Played twice
6. Light blue
7. Let's cool one
8. Bye-ya
9. Ugly beauty
10. We see
11. Thelonious
As a kid, I remember listening to my dad's record, MONK in quintet with Frank FOSTER, Ray COPELAND, Art BLACKEY, and Curley RUSSELL... There were two mysteries about this album: First of all, a bit of white paint was so encrusted in the vinyl at the beginning of "we see" that each time it was played, it started in the middle of the song. I've always wondered how it began...and where that paint ever came from! Secondly, since there had only been 4 songs recorded, the record was so much smaller and so much heavier than a normal 33 ( that it looked like an old 78.) All of this seemed extremely strange to me, but curiously enough, not the music that I listened to with such pleasure. I've always felt very close to MONK's musical universe. undoubtedly, it's because of his sense of humor immediately found within his composition, and the thematic and repetitive treatment of his playing (which is similar to mine). It's also for the personal and mysterious manner that MONK has of undoing and reconstructing with such perfect use of rhythm and silence. Here is my explanation for this new CD. I've taken the liberty of arranging some of THELONIOUS' songs that I love so much in my very own special way among which is "we see."
1. Rumba para MONK- Jerry GONZALES 1988
2. PANAMONK - Danilo PEREZ 1996
3. Moods of THELONIOUS- Ronald ALPHONSE 2008
Here is a short bio
I PLAYED WITH:
Yuri BUENAVETURA, Oscar Lopez, Orlando POLEO, MAMBOMANIA, Peter King, Claude BOLLING, YVINEC, with trumpeters CHOCOLATE, Ron MEZZA, Nicolas GENEST, jean lou LONGNON, Véronika RODRIGUEZ, Florence Davis, Elvita DELGADO, John Meyer, Ralph TAMAR, Zool FLEISCHER, Cynthia SCOTT, Nancy Kelly, Cab CALLOWAY Junior, Paula WEST, Linda Lee HOPKINS, uptown jazz vocal quartet, Michel HAUSSER, Michaël CIVISTA, Claire Martin, Tony Marshall, Pikey BUTLER, Colin ROY, Ron APREA, Suleiman HAKIM, ....
Performances in many festivals (Festival MINDELO Cape Verde), Nice Jazz Festival, Marciac Festival, Vic-Fesensac, Americando Latino Festival in Italy, Norway festival ....)
I played ten years the baritone saxophone with MAMBOMANIA Band all over Europe (first part of James BROWN in Estoril in 2000 ..), radios, televisions....
I worked in Classic Harmony with Demis VISVIKIS and JAZZ arrangement and composition with Maria SCHNEIDER and Laurent CUGNY.
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