Thelonious was cool
30 June 2006 | Uncategorized | No Comments
The song is Thelonious. The musicians on this cut are: Bruce Fowler, Phil Teele, Tim Towler, Chester Thompson. It was recorded on Hal Willner’s That’s the Way I Feel Now tribute album of Thelonious Monk tunes that I have been ripping to mp3 and posting here occasionally. This song is the first on the album and sounds to me like a fanfare. Maybe like Copeland’s Fanfare for the Common Man (I think I’ll post that tomorrow) - but cooler, not quite so earnest.
Thelonious mp3
On a related note (at least in my head):
“ Grace or works; works or unmediated, self-revealed grace…In fact, the elevation of grace was America’s great theological contribution to the world. Publicly, ours became a country of good works, but privately, and really, America became the country of unearned, unmerited, predestined, self-proclaimed, all-you-have-to-do-is-be-you, glorious heavenly (or unheavenly) grace.
By which I mean, the country of cool. Cool is grace in secular form. Either you have grace or you don’t; the same with cool. If you have been chosen by grace, everything you do will be suffused by grace. Likewise, if you’re cool whatever you do is cool. But cool is even more rigorously exclusive than the strictest kind of grace. Those lacking grace may under some circumstances approach closer to it by sincere intentions and an abundance of good works…”
- Ian Frazier in the article Utopia, the Bronx in the New Yorker, June 26, 2006
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