Thelonious Monk

When I sit at my desk, I can rest my eyes from the screen and look up to my left to see a black and white photograph of the loneliest monk in profile. There are flecks of grey in his goatie and, as was his wont, he's sporting one of his madcap hats: this one, a cross between a kind of Sean O'Casey-style smoking hat and a tea cosy.

I suppose my own weakness for hats is another reason why I've loved Thelonious Monk for so long. Monk's headgear was a truly whacky and eclectic collection, but then he was one of those eccentric, obsessive artists who seem to inhabit a planet apart from mere mortals.

My first close encounter with Monk came as a young adolescent, watching the BBC2 jazz programmes from the Ronnie Scott Club with my father. Neither of us really got him then, but there was something compelling about his music. It wasn't quite avant-garde in the Cecil Taylor sense of the label, but it was definitely... different. Melodies of sorts were always kind of crooked. There was something slightly dissonant and disconcerting, something 'off minor' about his music, to use one of Monk's own playful titles.

Few would argue that Monk is one of the giants of post-war American jazz: up there with Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and Charles Mingus. He wrote some of the most elliptical tunes in the modern musical language: hum-along tunes that come back to haunt you. Some of them, like 'Little Rootie Tootie', 'Nutty' and 'Bye-ya' to name but three, could almost be nursery rhymes for Donnie Darko and other unhinged young souls. Others, like 'Ruby My Dear', 'Coming on the Hudson' and 'Round Midnight' are some of the most poignant and atmospheric melodies composed in any genre.

If you don't believe me, you could have asked the remarkable Baroness Panonnica de Koenigswarter before her death in 1988. A member of the clan Rothschild, she married a baronial French diplomat, fought for the Free French against the Nazis, and worked for General de Gaulle before, legend has it, hearing Monk's 'Round Midnight' in New York. So spellbound was she, that she decided to stay in New York, renounce her husband and leave her five children in Europe.

If I could find a producer bold – and mad – enough to pay me to write the script, you could watch the whole weird and wonderful tale unfold in a film about the 'Jazz Baroness', patron saint of New York be-boppers. While her relationship with that nice Mr. Parker ended when Bird died in her suite of rooms in 1955, her relationship with Monk endured 28 years. She even took legal responsibility for him when they were both 'detained' for possession of marijuana. He sure as hell must have had something about him.

Disinherited by her family, the baroness was adored by the jazz fraternity. There are many-a tribute tune written in her honour, such as Horace Silver's 'Nica's Dream', but none as gorgeous as Monk's 'Pannonica'. Probably suffering from manic depression or some such mental illness, the failing composer spent the final six years of his life as his patron's house guest in Weehawken, New Jersey.

Failing by then he certainly was. There are three distinct phases to Monk's career. In the beginning, there was Monk the singular be-bopper, whose two volumes of Genius of Modern Music for Blue Note and early '50s recordings for the Prestige label represent the well-spring for the final phase of his career. With his creative light on the wane, he endlessly re-cycled his best numbers for the Columbia label, mainly in a quartet format. It was a little like Claude Monet's final phase, when he painted water lilies and cathedral facades and haystacks in every different light of day. Once you've seen one haystack, you've seen 'em all. Arguably.

In between came the fruitful second half of the 1950s, recording for the Riverside label earlier songs and new material written during the three years or so when Monk's New York cabaret license was revoked on taking the rap for his friend, Bud Powell, after a marijuana bust. Within that period came the lovely set of songs he recorded with John Coltrane and a fine live solo performance that belies the misconception that Monk couldn't play.

Like Miles Davis, Monk suffered this kind of critical slur throughout his career. Both were essentially minimalists who seemed to believe that less is more. Monk's music is full of pregnant pauses when you can almost hear his thought processes working: wondering which note to play next before coming down forthrightly on his choice. His style was edgy at times, frequently funny and rarely dull.

If Monk was 'difficult', as he has sometimes been branded, the difficulty for me is in picking an individual album to capture his quintessence. The album with John Coltrane is tempting, but the material isn't necessarily his finest. Genius of Modern Music probably ticks the most boxes, but there's no 'Little Rootie Tootie' – and if ever a song could make the most depressed misanthrope beam with joy, it must be that one.

So I come back to the first collection of his I ever bought – at a market stall in Kingston-upon-Thames while visiting my parental grandparents, I believe. I certainly didn't propose playing it to the old folks. Called simply Thelonious Monk, it's one of those French-distributed two-fers that I collected in the late '70s and beyond.

It's a collection of the final flowering of the Monk Mk1 genius: the recordings he made under his own name for the Prestige label during his enforced sabbatical and before he switched to Riverside. There's no 'Round Midnight', but you can find 1,001 versions of it elsewhere (including a sumptuous version arranged for big band by Joe Jackson, no less). But there are all kinds of other reasons to love it.

There are two sides of trio music, arguably the format that suited him best, with versions of 'Rootie Tootie', 'Nutty' and 'Trinkle Trinkle', along with re-imaginings of standards like 'Sweet and Lovely', 'These Foolish Things' and the song that he would come back to over and over, like a dog at a particularly savoury bone, 'Just a Gigolo'.

And there are two sides of music with a quintet – one of which features the inspired combination of Sonny Rollins on tenor sax and Julius Watkins on French horn. It's a weird sonic palette that colours the angular melodies of 'Let's Call This', 'Think Of One' and 'Friday the 13^th' with a sense of mystery.

His playing is every bit as inspired throughout as his compositions. At times, you hear vestiges of the old stride tradition that he inherited from Fats Waller and James P. Johnson. More often, though, you hear the restless experimenter whose sound – as one commentator perceptibly observed – is 'the sound of a composer thinking out loud at the piano'. The result is music that is rhythmic, angular, daring, unsettling and humorous. Like his hats, it never fails to surprise and delight me.

Paris 1919

I was staying at my father's the night they broadcast the David Bowie Prom live from the Albert Hall. My dad watches the annual Glastonbury concerts and anything that features the Stones or the Who, but he was tired on this occasion and was never a fan of Bowie, so he left me to it. I converted his sofa into a bed – a fatal mistake, because I wanted to stay awake, especially for the John Cale slots.

Well... I managed to wake up long enough to glimpse John Cale on stage. Grey hair, white goatie-beard these days, but always edgy and always interesting. Which particular Bowie song would he be interpreting? I couldn't keep my eyes open long enough to find out. Booggah! At least I managed to catch Paul Buchanan of The Blue Nile.

Long after Nico had dragged her harmonium off stage and departed for some new drug-addled landscape, long after Lou Reed had transformed himself into a rock and roll animal, long after Mo Tucker had retired and Sterling Morrison had died prematurely, Cale remained the most interesting, the most infinitely varied of the Velvet Underground members. I'd always thought that 'Venus in Furs' emanated from the dark side of John Cale's mind, until I discovered that it was Lou Reed's masterpiece. Nevertheless, it was certainly the Welshman's deranged viola that helped to make it the Velvets' most memorable song.

'Shiny, shiny, shiny boots of leather/Whiplash girlchild in the dark...' There were always two sides to John Cale. However, I knew of only the lighter melodic side of Cale's musical psyche when I bought Paris 1919 on the recommendation of a friend with whom I would travel back from Exeter University to my parents' home in Bath.

I bought it as a memento of being judged runner-up at the university's rag week drag-queen disco in 1975. With my hair swept back off my face, someone told me I looked too like Sylvia Kristel of the erotic Emmanuelle films to ignore. I won myself a bottle of whiskey, but couldn't stand the stuff, so I gave it away to a boozy friend and invested in the album to mark my near-triumph.

Apart from the personal recommendation, what attracted me to the LP was the fact that it was produced by Chris Thomas, who also produced the clutch of classic albums by a favourite band of mine, Procol Harum. Indeed, there are several similarities, not least of which are beautiful melodies built around interesting if somewhat impenetrable lyrics.

Apart from the boisterous 'Macbeth', the final track on the first side, Paris 1919 is sheer mid-tempo loveliness from start to finish. There is none of the discordant cacophony that marks out songs like 'Leaving It Up to You' from his Island years. As someone who recognised Nick Drake's song-writing genius before he had to commit suicide to be appreciated, Cale has always managed to conjure up melodic delights throughout his career – songs like 'The Man Who Couldn't Afford to Orgy', 'Cable Hogue' and 'I Keep a Close Watch' spring readily to mind – but he never managed before or after Paris to do it quite so uniformly.

Nor did he ever manage to sound quite so Welsh – as he does on a track like 'Graham Greene'. Since it's a cod-reggae song, maybe he was trying to sound Caribbean, only to end up sounding more like a regular chap from the Valleys. But if the mere title of 'Child's Christmas in Wales' suggests an album that looks back fondly on his childhood and his native land, the opaque lyrics seem to scotch any such sentimental notion. 'A belt to hold/Columbus too, perimeters of nails/Perceived the Mamma's golden touch' could defy many a seminar of earnest literary students.

It's beautifully played, too. Unfortunately, there are no details to be had on the album cover of the musicians involved. Normally I run a mile from strings, but there are – as befits a man who had already dabbled in classical music in The Academy at Peril – some tasteful Cale orchestrations throughout, particularly the string quartet featured in the title track. Conversely, though, it's the album's minimalist closer, 'Antarctica Starts Here', with its whispered vocals and subliminal instrumentation, that vies with the bigger productions for the stand-out song nomination.

Not too long after I bought Paris 1919, the university's ambitious and talented social secretary managed to book Cale for a concert in the great hall. He appeared with a travelling band of the time that featured Chris Spedding on guitar. Cale played throughout with an ice-hockey mask on his face, which made it all a slightly disturbing affair, not helped by a repertoire that focused more on some of his more troubling songs – like 'Fear' and 'Guts'. Hoping for and expecting something more like Paris, I was a tad disappointed.

The years, of course, have dispelled any such qualms. Just to have seen a musician like John Cale, even if he was for whatever reason displaying only his darker side, is an experience to be treasured. The man is, after all, a legend in more than just his lunchtime. I've come to love less obviously appealing songs, such as 'Helen of Troy' and 'William Wilson', but it's still Paris 1919 that never fails to touch the soft spot in my heart.

Soro

Sometime in spring this year, I drove to our old stamping ground of Tulle, the unlovely prefecture of the Corrèze, to visit a genuine record shop. They're few and far between these days – and just as well because there aren't too many bargains to be had since vinyl's resurgence. I'd been to check out a little shop in Limoges, packed to the rafters with treasures, and come away with yet more records that I didn't need, so restraint this time was a pre-requisite.

The Rev is a tiny little shop on one of the quaies or embankments of the Corrèze river, which flows through the centre of Tulle. Since it opens half way through the customary two-hour lunch break, I had the shelves to myself while the owner picked out tracks at the counter from a pile of new second-hand stock. I found a couple more of the Prestige, Milestone and Riverside label jazz doubles that I've been casually collecting since they came out in the mid '70s. But my heart really missed a beat when I pulled out a mint copy of Salif Keita's Soro.

It's been a part of this household since we moved to Sheffield in the late '80s and embarked on the adventure of married life – but in cassette form. And therein lay a bone of contention, since it was my ex-wife who had sent it to me as a kind of listen-to-what-you're-missing type of goodbye gift. There was probably a subtle dig, too, since it was recorded on a humble D90. If you think you're getting an AD90 from me, moosh, you've got another thing coming. And don't even think of a high-fidelity SA90.

But I mustn't be ungracious. Even on a lo-fi tape, both of us could tell that this man was someone truly special. I might have had one or two records by African artists at this point – I seem to remember picking up something by King Sunny Adé and by Sonny Okosuns, both worthy Nigerian artists, in Cheapo Cheapo Records, the shop in Soho that I would haunt with my friend and work colleague, Pedro, during the couple of years when I worked in the centre of London – but nothing like this. The extraordinary voice of the albino griot from Mali opened my ears to a whole new continent of music.

A year or so later, the Good Wife and I went to see Salif Keita with band, chorus and dancers at some squalid dive in a suburb of Manchester. We slipped an urchin a couple of quid supposedly to keep an eye on her beautiful convertible bottle-green Beetle, in which we would toured this part of France and espied our first future home. It was a fabulous concert, but the music couldn't quite dispel the image in my head of the VW Beetle in the car park with all its tyres slashed. Fortunately, it and we got back to Sheffield intact.

We saw him a second time under very different circumstances some 20 or so years later, playing in the now annual Brive Plage festival (where they dump a lot of sand in a central park and turn it into a kind of pre-fab tropical island). Keita still sang like an angel, but the youthful frisson of that Manchester gig was no longer there. Perhaps we'd grown progressively more blasé with each new edition of our friend Pete's Africa series of tapes and, later, CDs. We met him not long after that first gig and have benefited ever since from an apparent mission in life to promote the music he felt so passionate about.

Finding that gatefold album on the Sterns label in The Rev gave me an injection of youthful excitement. Hearing it back home on the record player in living, breathing stereo was akin to re-discovery. The African nobleman who had been cast out of his community due to a pigment disorder had gone three-dimensional in Cinemascope with Sensaround Sound. Now, that extraordinary heavenly voice just soared up skywards from the speakers.

Our friend Pete will certainly disagree with this choice, because electronic keyboards and modern production techniques do not go with the singer he would have first heard as vocalist for the Super Rail Band de Bamako or Les Ambassadeurs. Soro came out in 1987, by which time Salif Keita had moved to Paris to seek international fame. Inevitably, the production is more sophisticated – even slick, as detractors have suggested – but my God!, the power and the glory. The horn section alone is like Earth Wind & Fire's Phenix horns on steroids.

Apart from blowing my mind, what Soro did do was to send me figuratively scuttling back to West Africa in search of those earlier recordings. And very fine they are, too. Came the current century, this direct descendant of the warrior king who founded the empire of Mali back in the 13^th century went back to live and record in Bamako.

In 2002, he delivered unto us Moffou, which in some ways combines his older, traditional music with that which emanated from the French capital. There are many who cite it as his finest recording, and I for one wouldn't argue. By then, though, I knew more of what to expect. Soro, I suppose, was more like my first love. Nothing thereafter will ever quite be the same.

Having survived, fool that I am, for far too long with the flattened peaks of a basic cassette tape, I find myself in idle moments lowering the stylus on 'Wamba', the funked-up first track, and boosting the volume just to re-experience that spine-tingling first moment when Keita's voice leaps forth above the female chorus like an antelope being flushed out of its shelter by a lion. Words can't really describe a voice like Salif Keita's; you simply have to pin back your lugholes and experience it for yourself.

The man is in his mid-'60s now. Maybe unsurprisingly, he's gone back to his roots and is currently touring with an acoustic line-up. My friend Pete met the man when he was writing for a music magazine and by all accounts he's a charming individual. His 2009 release, La Différence, won an international award and pleads for tolerance and compassion towards albinos. Difference, the singer argues, is not a bad thing. I second that emotion. It's more than just a physiological difference that sets Salif Keita apart from the crowd.

Abbey Road

I somehow seem to have acquired two copies of this album over the years, which suggests how much I value The Beatles' artistic swansong. I think I snapped up my second copy in Cash Converters in the days just before vinyl had its second coming. It was going for a song and I rather fancied the idea of an Apple album made in France by Pathé Marconi.

My sister and brother-in-law have two copies of Sergeant Pepper hidden away in a trunk full of Cat Stevens and Rod Stewart albums that never see the light of day. Being an acquisitive collector, I am of course jealous, but it was actually Abbey Road and not its more lauded iconic predecessor that re-kindled my love affair with the Fab Four.

Earlier in my life, after a period of my childhood when my siblings and I would divide up our meals into four portions, one for each Beatle (and the best bits for our particular faves), over-exposure and perhaps an innate rebelliousness led me to jump the yellow submarine for a few years' close allegiance to the Rolling Stones. That lasted up to and including Let It Bleed, whereupon I became far too caught up in the progressive-music underground bandwagon.

Emerging, though, from a darkened bedroom where I would listen to the questionable glories of Yes, King Crimson and Van der Graaf Generator, spread-eagled on my bed between the two tinny speakers of my first very own stereo system, I bought my first copy of Abbey Road to see what all the fuss was about. My decision was no doubt assisted by that simple but evocative cover of the now shaggy-headed foursome striding across that famous North London zebra crossing.

It's all part of the album's mystique: from all those absurd rumours about Paul's barefoot death to the various homages that have appeared over the years (and what initial indignation I felt when I first saw Booker T. & the MGs' McLemore Avenue, before remembering that imitation was the sincerest form of flattery). And how appropriate it is that their last sojourn in the Abbey Road studios was to produce this their final masterpiece, so they could bow out with a creative bang rather than the desultory whimper that was Let It Be. Giving it this simple title was a nice way to acknowledge the importance of George Martin and his recording domain over the course of their career.

There's also something appropriate in the way that George's contributions finally equalled and even perhaps trumped those of Lennon and McCartney after all those begrudging allocations of a little space on each album for his song-writing efforts. Right at the last, George asserts that he was quite competent after all, thank you very much – only for Frank Sinatra (was it?) to go and spoil it all by saying something stoopid like 'Something' was his favourite Lennon and McCartney number.

While George graduates summa cum laude, it's Ringo's turn to provide some padding, although 'Octupus's Garden' is certainly rather charming and every bit as worthwhile as, say, Paul's 'Maxwell's Silver Hammer', which pales into insignificance beside the first two tracks on Side 1: John's 'Come Together' with its memorable cryptic lyrics, followed by 'Something'. 'Oh Darlin' is notable for Paul's superb singing and the side ends with the long and winding and ultimately somewhat tedious 'I Want You'.

In truth, it's not their finest half hour, but the second side makes up for it with knobs on and transforms Abbey Road into a truly great album. When I first heard it, I was a little mystified. I'd never heard anything quite like the suite of song snippets that follows George's lovely 'Here Comes The Sun'. They all segued into each other, 'Sun King' seemed a curiously close echo of George's song, themes fade out only to reappear a little later and to drop the arm on an individual track demanded guesswork and a lot of luck.

Once I got used to it, though, it would become my single-most played and beloved side of a Beatles' album. It's audacious, creative, dramatic and chock full of such tuneful delights as 'She Came In Through The Bathroom Window', 'Mean Mr. Mustard', 'You Never Give Me Your Money' and 'Carry That Weight'. My wife and I would sing 'Golden Slumbers' to our daughter at bed time and she grew up to love this album as much as we do. Or more accurately, she grew up – as many of her generation have done – to love The Beatles as much as we do.

It has been with me for longer than I care to think, followed me on all my travels – from Northern Ireland to England and then on to France – and I shall give that second copy to my daughter when finally she's ready to flee the parental home. It's a testimony to an album's creative endurance when it can be handed down from one generation to the next without any kind of condescension.