Monk’s Blues (1974)
first performance: September 12-1975
Radio Kamerkoor
Radio Kamerorkest
Maarten Bon – piano
conductor: Paul Hupperts
I am a great fan of Thelonious Monk’s piano music and American blues songs. Both loves meet in this composition. Some original blues lyrics are set to music and the piano part is clearly influenced by Thelonious Monk’s musical world.
(the piano part is nearly identical with the composition Blue Monk for clavichord)
tekst: Sitting in the house with everything on my mind, looking at the clock and can’t even tell the time. Can’t eat, can’t sleep, so weak I can’t sweep my floor. Feel like hollering ‘Murder!”and let the police-squad get me once more.
(anonymous blues-lyric)
Oh, oh, I won’t be here long; oh, oh, dark gonna catch me here.
(anonymous blues-lyric)
Well a white man gives his wife a ten-dollar bill. He thinks that’s nothing strange. But a coloured man gives his wife a one-dollar bill and beat her to death for his ninety cents change.
Well a white man lives in a fine brick house. He thinks that’s nothing strange. But we live in the county jail, but it’s a brick house just the same.
(Jim Jackson)
What I likes best, to be slave or free? Well it’s this way. In slavery I owns nothing and never owns nothing. In freedom I’s own the house and raise the family. All that cause me worriment and in slavery I has no worriment, but it takes the freedom.
(anonymous)
It’s just ain’t natural for to stay here long. I don’t know which way I’m travelling, far or near. All I know for certain is I can’t stay here.
(Sterling A. Brown)
When a woman gets the blues, she hangs her head down and cries. When a man gets the blues, he catches that train and rides.
(anonymous blues-lyric)