The whole mélange is given a relaxed, live and down-home feel with Hunter's playing even sparer than usual. A mess? A contrived

This kind of 'disco jazz funk', as it's called in the booklet, would have no doubt served the argument that the

Monk wasn't an album artist per se. Monk's Music [...] is contradictory: strident, reassuring, fractured, centered. It isn't perfect, whatever

This unusual set was one of the most successful uses of a gospel choir in a jazz context. Trumpeter Donald Byrd and a septet that

81-year-old Ethio-jazz Godfather Mulatu Astatke's self-covers album Mulatu Plays Mulatu could easily have been an exercise in ego, a