HarmoniMonk Volume 11, by Randy Weinstein and the Freed Reed HarmOrchestra

HarmoniMonk Volume 11

by Randy Weinstein and the Freed Reed HarmOrchestra

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mrchromatonic Randy is on the Bleeding Edge of musical innovation on harmonica!

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Full Digital Discography

11

releases

Get all 11 Randy Weinstein releases available on Bandcamp and save 35%.

Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of Friday the 13th, I Mean You, Ugly Beauty, 5 and 3 Blues, ’Round Midnight, Let's Cool One, Locomotive, Misterioso, and 3 more. , and , .

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1.	Blue (Harmoni) Monk 06:09	info	buy track
2.	Bemsha Swing 05:21		buy track
3.	Jackie-ing 08:18		buy track
4.	Well, You Needn’t 05:46		buy track
5.	Criss Cross 06:50		buy track
6.	Felonious Thox Chase 05:15		buy track

about

The HarmoniMonk project crept up on me through a recurrent fever dream germinated by something I read in Robin D. G. Kelley’s superb Thelonious Monk bio. Kelley recounts that Monk’s father played harmonica. So imagine, if you will, an impressionable young Thelonious entranced by his father re-creating the sounds of a fox chase on his harmonica.

This phantasm enters adolescence sucking and blowing strident, precision (dis)chords on a harp mounted on a neck rack while pounding out polyrhythmic angular gospel comps on a warped backwoods piano in a sweltering Alabama revival tent.

A few years later, the boss at Minton’s threatens to fire him from the house band that birthed bebop if he doesn’t throw that “damn tin noisemaker” away. Though publicly discarded, young Monk’s trusty mouth organ has made its indelible mark.

Recently, this maturing chimera got fed by long sleepless gazes at Max Ernst collage stories, and watered by daybreak ruminations on the manifold possible permutations of the first six letters of the Hebrew Bible as revealed by some of its old weird exegetes. And how these symbiotic letter arrangements obliquely, but definitively, confirmed the existential necessity of polyrhythm.

It didn’t hurt that I was woodshedding and listening to nothing but Monk and his stride mentor “The Lion” before and during the grim early months of the Gotham lockdown. I was also obsessively experimenting with applications of the charmingly fractured chordal possibilities of the chromatic harmonica so deftly realized by the great Bill Barrett. And then out of nowhere came an interest in ambient trance musics trembling with droning, revenant tonalities and rhythms.

I was sufficiently spooked. Sure, things were falling apart but some stuff was landing in place. So I committed to rendering grooving tone collages based on Thelonious Monk classics, using multi-tracked harmonicas wedded with mongrel canned sound beds summoned from cheap digital technologies. Everybody’s got some kinda dream, I reckon.

So I commenced to laying down inchoate tracks on my iPhone, kneading these murky lumps of virtual doughs into rays of provisional completeness. I figured as long as I held on for dear life to Monk’s melodies, and kept Little Walter on my right side, I’d have some fun getting through this tricky labyrinth that had accreted along my ear canals. Sure beat cold-sweat pacing in the cramped bedroom of the shadow of death.

I was fortunately able to include a new harmoni-comrade, Eugene Ryan, in this foray. Featured on “Jackie-ing,” his free-reed mayhem brilliantly goes places this tune has not gone before. All the other harmonicas are, regrettably, lonely old me--fitfully attempting to split an already splintered musical persona.

All this got tossed into a woodshed alembic where these harmonica-centric refractions of a few Thelonious Monk standards got distilled, now documented here, to share with you.

credits

released January 3, 2021

Freed Reed Harmorchestra is:
Randy Weinstein -- chromatic and diatonic harmonicas, jaw harps, digital noisemakers
Eugene Ryan -- lead chromatic harmonica on Jackie-ing
Arfie Arfowitz and the Harmolodic Houndog Arftette on Felonious Thox Chase ( n.b. fox got away )