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Pulitzer Prize for Music gets the "Once-Over" by Fred Kaplan (and other musings about Monk).
April 20, 2006 12:51 AM

Over at Slate, Fred Kaplan has some inciteful comments regarding the naming, posthumously, of Thelonious Monk for the Pulitzer Prize in music.

Among them:

It's great news that Thelonious Monk won a Pulitzer Prize. Too bad he's been dead for 24 years. When are they going to start giving Pulitzers to jazz musicians—or serious pop musicians or musical-theater composers—who are still around to enjoy the applause and spend the prize money?

Good point, Fred.

He goes on to propose two revisions to this prize:

1) Next year, issue "special citations" to every dead jazz composer that they're sorry never won a Pulitzer—Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Louis Armstrong, Gerry Mulligan, John Lewis, Count Basie, Gil Evans, Bill Evans, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, and Bud Powell, to name a few—and be done with it. Throw in the Tin Pan Alley giants that should join Gershwin: Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, Rodgers and Hart.

and

2) Broaden your range of serious, enduring music. Where's the Pulitzer for Ornette Coleman, whose concept of "harmolodics"—the equal positioning of harmony, melody, and rhythm—revolutionized jazz and whose music remains thrilling today? What about George Russell, also still active, whose "Lydian chromatic concept of tonal organization" led to Miles Davis' "modal" music and liberated jazz from the harmonic dead-end of the '40s and '50s? Or, to skip genres, what living composer is more deserving than Stephen Sondheim, whose meldings of entrancing melody and sophisticated harmony have fluttered and riveted more hearts and minds than any 12-tone academic could dream of?

Now he's talking! Good points Fred, although the second is a little more relevant, don't you think?

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