Summary: All this week on Soundcheck, we've been taking getting nostalgic for New York music in collaboration with New York magazine, which presented its annual "yesteryear" issue focused on New York City music. So far, we've had Jody Rosen on the songwriters of the 1920's, and Lane Brown on the '60s and Jennifer Vineyard on the 1970's. Today we wrap up with New York magazine's Mark Jacobson, who shares his love for a particularly important transitional era of New York music, the jazz of the 1940's. In a conversation with Soundcheck host John Schaefer, Jacobson says he believes the iconic pianist Thelonious Monk is not only one of greatest American composers and the greatest jazz composer, but his ideal musician. "There's something about the way he rearranges sonic geometry every time he puts his fingers on the keyboard that I just can never get enough of," explains Jacobson. "He's the best." Jacobson points to Monk's song "Episotrophy" as the epitome of jazz's emerging modernism -- because it sits on the edge between two eras, swing and bop. "If you know the song, it's this sort of dark comedy," Jacobson says. "And it comes right out of the swing stuff, which you don't really get too much of in the later Monk stuff when he gets more angular. He maybe more depressed, who knows. And it has this kind of low-slung bounce to it -- you always get a bounce in Monk. It was written in 1941 and I think you really can't envision all that stuff that's gonna happen. So he's on this cusp." Jacobson also highlights the music of Sonny Rollins, and "St. Thomas," one of the jazz saxophone titan's lighter and more playful works.
