I’ve been playing Monk all morning. Thinking quite a lot about how well the name fits the music. I don’t know enough about music to understand the difference between homophone-esque words like melodious, harmonious, mellifluous and euphonious, but it seems to me that Monk’s music is all of those things, and that Thelonious should be one of those terms. According to his wikipedia page, his middle name is Sphere, which might fit into this argument as well, in that the warmth of his music is without the sharpness of corners, but pops of a baritone saxophone and bursts of the trumpet add the sort of corners needed to create something lifelike and whole. Middle names aside, there is something wonderfully monastic about much of Monk’s music. Think “Light Blue”, the lull of the mismatched chords running under the ups and downs of the saxophone feels like an intrinsic chant. The dissonance feels real, and adds depth that recognizes the pain of humanity, but the ever-growing variations throughout each song show resilience and light.