Posts Tagged ‘Thelonious Monk’

Zin Monk

February 17, 2012

As today is the day the world mourns the anniversary of the passing of the great Thelonious Monk, I want to talk about Monk.

And because I work for, and write for, Ridge Vineyards, I want to talk about zinfandel.

There was, some months back, the temporary electrification of the interwebosphere over the question of zinfandel’s identity.

Was it — as the low-brow funky, populist sweaty, good-timin’ egalitarian, country mouse side would have it — the people’s grape? Approachable, affable, not puttin’ on airs? Good for a laugh, great to have at a party, a friend to everyone?

Or is it — as the high-brow uptown, austere elitist , uptight classist, city mouse side would have it — a noble grape? Serious, important, elusive, complex? Not for everyone?

The debate was, in all honesty, surprisingly intense; each side battling for the soul of the grape.

To which I say, Thelonious Monk!

Why? Because you can be deadly serious about creating that which is, at heart, fun.

There is, in jazz, no musician, no composer, no performer, more mysterious, elusive, intense, and noble than Thelonious Monk. Nor are there melodies more playful, more delightful, more perfect.

Monk was deadly serious about creating that which is, at heart, fun. His songs swing, they bounce, they prance about light as air, then collapse in the grass, laughing their little heads off.

And this is Ridge. Forgive me my bias, but to my mind, there is no producer more devoted, more meditative, more intense, more serious, about the production of zinfandel than Ridge.

And again forgive me my bias, but to my mind, there are also no zinfandels more buoyant, more lively, more playful, more magic, more fun, than the zinfandels Ridge produces.

Ridge is the Monk of Zin. Zin is the Monk of Ridge.

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Posted in Varietals & Blends, Wine & Music, Zinfandel | 7 Comments »

It’s The End Of The Year As We Know It, And I Feel WINE

December 30, 2011

Two truths:

1. The convention of the End-Of-Year list is most decidedly a media trope that is long overdue to be retired.

2. It is impossible to effectively summarize, in one go, an entire year.

So, that said, here are some End-Of-Year lists, and a summary of 2011!

First, the lists. Specifically, blog lists.

Top 5 blog posts on 4488: A Ridge Blog for 2011? (in terms of total viewerage)

1. Turn Black Friday Red

2. The Oak Wars

3. Zoot!

4. Robert Parker Scores Ridge

5. Julia Child and Paul Draper

Top 5 Search Engine Terms that led people to 4488: A Ridge Blog in 2011?

1. Nadia G

2. Fugazi

3. Barrel

4. Black Friday

5. Thelonious Monk

Top 3 commentors on 4488: A Ridge Blog in 2011? (Thank you!)

1. Tom Wise

2. Robert Seaney

3. Dave Tong

Top 3 Videos viewed on 4488: A Ridge Blog in 2011?

1. Harvest 2011: Picking Lytton West

2. Harvest 2011: Dusi Ranch

3. Harvest 2011: Jimsomare Chardonnay

Ok, enough lists. Onto our 2011 summary. We begin …

With January.

Seems so long ago. What on earth was happening in January of 2011? Well, it was a bit of the good and the bad. On the one hand, beloved actress Zsa Zsa Gabor had to have her leg amputated, and Roger Federer lost in the semis of the 2011 Australian Open, but on the other hand, I was auctioned by Nadia G!

How about February 2011? Well, another month of the good and the bad. One one hand, Tiger Woods was fined for spitting on a golf course. But conversely, The Ramones won a Lifetime Achievement Grammy. So, all’s well that ends well. And at Ridge? Well, February 2011 saw the Monte Bello Hospitality Team go pruning, and of course, it was ZAP! And that was all good.

Which brings us to March. The month in which I enjoyed the greatest tasting experience of my entire life. The Monte Bello Assemblage Tasting. Did I care that Hillary Clinton was in Egypt? That Space Shuttle Discovery was making its final landing? That Coptic Christians and Muslims were at each other’s throats in Cairo? That Phil Collins retired? That the Superintendent of the Chicago Police Force was stepping down? Nah, didn’t even notice. I was making Monte Bello!

Which means I almost didn’t even wake up for April. But good thing I did! Otherwise, I would have missed Penelope Cruz getting her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame! And I wouldn’t have known that Dennis Rodman was getting inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame! And heaven forfend if I wasn’t present and accounted for when they announced the guestlist for the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton! And on top of all that, I wouldn’t have been there to celebrate the anniversary of The Judgement of Paris!!!

Things finally calmed down a bit in May. Not much going on. Osama Bin Laden was killed, and we hosted the Final Assemblage Tasting for the 2010 Monte Bello. But that was about it.

June was a whole different animal. Very emotional. There was some loss. I’m not gonna lie about it. We lost Peter Falk AND Clarence Clemons. That was hard to take.  But there were new beginnings as well. We saw bloom on the mountain. That was beautiful. Samsara. The circle.

By July, we’d gotten our heads on straight again, and we were ready to rock. Everybody was ready. To rock, and to swing. The Arab Spring was rocking. The Queensland Reds of Australia were rocking (they defeated the Canterbury Crusaders of New Zealand 18-13 to win the Super Rugby championship). Jane Austen was rocking (A rare manuscript of an unfinished novel sold for 1.6 million dollars at auction!). Even Jürgen Klinsmann was rocking. He was named head coach of the United States men’s national soccer team. And Ridge Vineyards was rocking too.  We rocked probably the hardest at Zinbo #1. That was some serious rocking. Zinfandel and BBQ. Yeah, that’s the rock. Let it rock, let it rock, let it rock. I want to rock. Rock and roll hootchie koo. I love rock n’ roll. For those about to rock. Rock you like a hurricane.

August is a funny month. You never can tell with August. Sometimes it’s groovy, sometimes it’s funky. It can have the funk, but it can also get in the groove. The 2011 rendition of August was mostly kind of funky. I mean, after all, dig this synchronicity. In the same month, Tim Pawlenty announced the end of his campaign for the Republican Party presidential nomination, and Jhala Nath Khanal resigned as the Prime Minister of Nepal! Crazy! And that’s not all! It only gets weirder! Dig this: Nick Ashford of Ashford & Simpson dies in the same month that Jerry Leiber of Leiber & Stoller dies! Crazy!!!!! And if that weren’t enough, both Lady Gaga and Katy Perry got banned by The Ministry of Culture of the People’s Republic of China. Crazy!!!!!!!!!! Fortunately, things were pretty stable at Ridge Vineyards. In order to combat all that CRAZINESS out there, we relied on the consistency of a series; in this case, our Ten Questions with Paul Draper series. Something about checking in with Paul on a regular basis, all month long, felt soothing. He comforted us. He got us through.

By September, we were back in control. We knew what was going on, we were in the saddle. Sonya Thomas won the United States Chicken Wing Eating Championship without batting an eyelid. That New Zealand Emperor Penguin was back in the ocean. And Google+ hit the ground running. And as to us? Solid. We started the month with Fall Release Tastings at Monte Bello and Lytton Springs, and just kept on rocking in the free world after that. Rocking in the free world.

October was pretty crazy. There’s just no gettin’ around it. Things were nuts. The NBA went on lockout. Steve Jobs passed. Sarah Palin declined to throw her hat in the presidential ring. A swede won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Paul McCartney got married again. Wootton Bassett became Royal Wootton Bassett. And the St. Louis Cardinals won the World Series. S#*t was crazy. Here too. Harvest began on the mountain. Which was crazy.

November is recent enough that I feel I still remember it. I remember China launching the unmanned Shenzhou 8 spacecraft. I remember the 5.6 magnitude earthquake NNE of Shawnee, Oklahoma. I remember the resignation of Silvio Belusconi. And the sentencing of Dr. Conrad Murray. And most of all, I remember what I was thankful for.

Which brings us to December. The end of the year as we know it. And I feel wine.

And I hope that you do too!

On behalf of all of us at Ridge Vineyards, we thank you for an extraordinary 2011.

May you all have a safe, happy, and healthy 2012!

Cheers!

I mean, CHEERS!

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Posted in Events & Photographs, History, Paul Draper, Ridge Memorabilia, Viticultural Salmagundi, Wine & Art, Wine & Health, Wine & Music, Wine & Poetry, Wine and Jazz, Wine Blogs, Wine Quotes, Wine Tales | Leave a Comment »

Don’t Tickle Me Elmo, Just Play Piano To The Sounds Of Me Drinking Wine!

June 27, 2011

Which is likely to go down as one of the weirder blog post titles in the 4488 history …

But, there is in fact a point.

Which is this; I was very recently scrolling & strolling through the search engine referral metrics that WordPress very kindly provides (please click here for compendiums of some of the rather more strange and wonderful items that have appeared in past queues), and I couldn’t help but notice the almost laughable omnipresence of The Muppet’s saxophone player, Zoot. I quite literally referenced him once, in a long ago post (found here), and ever since, he’s proven to be an unlikely evangelical inadvertantly proselytizing the gospel of Ridge. Blowing our tune, as it were …

So I was sitting here thinking about Zoot, and The Muppets. Which inevitably led me to thinking about Elmo. Which reminded me that today is Elmo Hope’s birthday! June 27, 1923!

I have great affection for people like Elmo Hope. Not only because he was a great artist, player, performer, and composer, but because he’s a tad unsung; he labored years under the shadows of giants like Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk, and I am not sure he’s that well-known outside of — to borrow a quote from Bob Dylan — a small circle of friends.

Which leads me to think about Ridge. It’s a funny thing; amongst a small but admirably devoted cadre of loyalists, I think Ridge is fortunate to enjoy a rather exalted reputation. But conversely, I could probably stand up on our knoll and throw rocks at Cupertino for weeks on end, and probably not hit more than 5-6 folks who have any idea who we are, where we are, or what we do.

(disclaimer: i don’t actually throw rocks off the knoll.)

Which is kind of like being Elmo Hope. He could have probably thrown rocks at Manhattan all day, every day, and not have hit more than a few folks who knew just what a great player he really was.

So today, I am celebrating lives under the radar; the unsung artists of our times, those whose talents and contributions far exceed their recognitions. Do I include Ridge in these categories? Hard to say. On one hand, I certainly don’t wish to disparage those who do know us, and I certainly wouldn’t wish to sound ungrateful for whatever awarenesses and praises we’ve accrued over the years. But on the other hand, being on the “public” side of the Ridge enterprise, I am also acutely aware of just how short our shadow is often cast.

And speaking of shadows, I believe it was the very astonishingly great Michelangelo who is credited with stating that, “The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.”

And it was the very great poet Li-Po who wrote the following (translation by David Hinton):

Among the blossoms, a single jar of wine.

No one else here, I ladle it out myself.

Raising my cup, I toast the bright moon,

and facing my shadow makes friends three,

though moon has never understood wine,

and shadow only trails along behind me.

Kindred a moment with moon and shadow,

I’ve found a joy that must infuse spring:

I sing, and moon rocks back and forth;

I dance, and shadow tumbles into pieces.

Sober, we’re together and happy. Drunk,

we scatter away into our own directions:

intimates forever, we’ll wander carefree

and meet again in Milky Way distances.

And it is me who says, here’s to you Elmo, or should I say Hope, and to you, shadows, and to all who wander carefree amongst ye … I raise you a toast; a Syrah dark as a shadow …

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Posted in Wine and Jazz | Leave a Comment »

Thelonious Monk!

October 10, 2010

On this day in history, one of the true heroes of my life was born; the inimitable Thelonious Sphere Monk. There is simply no sound on earth like the sound of his piano playing; no groove more perfectly, elegantly swinging; no melody more eccentrically soothing; no harmony more angularly, insightfully compelling; no music more idiosyncratically brilliant; Monk.  

  

    

“There ain’t no wrong notes on the piano.” As good a mantra for life as any.  

Listen, if you haven’t already, to Monk’s solo piano reinvention of “Between The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea.” I defy you to come away unconverted.  

Monk is, for me, the archetype of everything I adore in life. My Grandfather Gene Logan, after careers running the gamut from USC football trainer and author of texts on anatomic kinesiology, to Navy man and bluegrass musician, ended up making his money in life as a sculptor; one of his great inspirations was a quote from Francis Bacon (the 16th century English philosopher, not the painter of, among other masterpieces, Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, though the quote could certainly apply to Mr. Bacon’s work):  

Francis Bacon By Francis Bacon

  

By Francis Bacon

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.  

Which is the sound of Monk. It is also your lover’s face, and your child’s tummy; it is a perfectly imperfect haiku, and Bukka White performing Shake ‘Em On Down; it is a hand-harvested, wild-yeast-fermented, unfiltered, well-matured, gently and perfectly decanted bottle of wine, and it is the friends you share it with; your glorious, imperfect, strange, and wonderful friends.  

You and everything around you is imperfect, and beautiful. Drinking wine and listening to Thelonious Monk is a meditation on this, an awareness ritual of the profoundest sort.  

That oh-so-equally profound, and perhaps most spiritually intense of jazz musicians John Coltrane, once said of Monk, “When you learn one of Monk’s pieces, you can’t learn just the melody and chord symbols. You have to learn the inner voicings and rhythms exactly. Everything is so carefully related.”  

John Coltrane

 

Everything is so carefully related. The Buddhist cosmology.  

Complexity for complexity is nothing, just noise in the air. And simplicity for simplicity is just that; simple. But multi-tiered sheets of complexities upon complexities upon complexities; seamless integrated, and inter-related; am I talking Jazz? Or Wine? Or Life itself?  

And speaking of mantras, the Monk quote I probably dig the most, because it’s an instruction for anyone engaged in the creative act; musician or poet, winemaker or chef, architect or engineer, painter or photographer, any and all of us for whom an act of any kind is an exercise in creativity, to us all, Monk’s reminder:  

Everyone is influenced by everybody, but you bring it down home the way you feel it.  

Bless you Thelonious Sphere Monk, on this, the anniversary of your birth on this earth, for bringing it down home the way you felt it.  

 

 

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Posted in Wine and Jazz | Leave a Comment »

10.10.10, Thelonious Monk, and You!

October 9, 2010

To all you numerologists, cosmologists, fatalists, virusists, marathoners, protesters, documentarians, and whomever else may be celebrating the singular synchronicity of tomorrow being 10.10.10, my apologies to all, for to me, tomorrow is nothing other than the birthday of Thelonious Monk, that great and eccentric compositional genius of the jazz piano. And that’s what I’ll be celebrating.

Look for a special post tomorrow all about Jazz , Wine, and Monk, and if you happen to be in the vicinity of our Monte Bello Tasting Room, please join us for a great day of great wine, and nothing but Thelonious Monk coming through the speakers!

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Posted in Monte Bello, Special Offerings, Tasting Rooms, Wine and Jazz | Leave a Comment »

Wine and Jazz: Abstract Of A Manifesto

May 22, 2009

Save for very few exceptions, we play jazz in the Monte Bello Tasting Room. From early New Orleans polyphonics and big band swing, through bop, post-bop, hard-bop, to cool, orchestral, and beyond, it’s pretty much jazz all the time. From Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, and Count Basie, through Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and Bill Evans, to Thelonious Monk and Lee Morgan and beyond, it’s jazz, jazz, The Jazz. Why?

I suppose the answer is fundamentally two-fold; there are practical reasons, and there are aesthetic ones. On the practical side, jazz is usually “up” enough to match the energy of a tasting room on a weekend, yet restrained enough to not be obtrusive; rhythmic enough to be felt below the head, cerebral enough to be heard between the ears; hip enough to not be stodgy, familiar enough to soothe. And at least in terms of what I select, it’s instrumental, meaning no vocals to invade the vocal space I prefer occupied by our staff and our guests. Jazz is also both classy, and funky; uptown and downtown; sophisticated yet slightly seedy.

This takes us to the aesthetic side of the equation. I fiercely believe that great art emerges from the holy mojo intersection of spontaneity and craft; the idea that you have to train an entire lifetime to act, at the moment of truth, as if you’ve never learned a thing at all. Craft without spontaneity is a dullard’s game, and spontaneity without craft is self-indulgence and sloppiness. It’s when the two cross that the hoodoo hits. This is what makes jazz magic, and this is what makes wine magic. Sure you can make wine as a technician, even very good wine. But you can’t make wine that transcends explanation, moves into the realm of the inexpressible, conjures and foments both spiritual and sensual excitement, without a little bit of that funky untrained wisdom of the ages; the knowledge that can’t be taught, the lessons that can’t be laid out, the truth that can’t be told. A great vineyard manager, a great winemaker, is part scientist, part shaman; part farmer, part painter; part concrete, part mist; part laborer part conjurer; part oenologist, part philosopher. 

John Coltrane was legendary for the rigor of his practice, his obsessional devotion to his craft, the meticulousness of his technique. But he played like a gentle man possessed by an insane spirit; twisted, pulled, and pushed to seek just one more secret, one more truth, to make the soul’s inexplicability cogent.

The great figures in wine have similar reputations; hard-working, diligent, devoted men and women driven by an unnameable passion to weld the human world and the natural world in the service of aesthetic pleasure, artisan singularity; the both metaphoric and tangible creative act as expression of solidarity with the forces of sun, moon, soil, water, nature.

This is why, when you enter the Monte Bello Tasting Room, you may hear Thelonious Monk strike adjacent keys simultaneously to find the music in between. Because that’s what wine is. The music in-between. What you taste is what doesn’t truly exist. Except it does.

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Posted in Tasting Rooms, Viticultural Salmagundi, Wine and Jazz | 5 Comments »

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