Requiem for a Critic
 |
Sample clips of Thelonious Monk compositions:
Four in One, Criss-Cross |
 |
A 1999 Mike Melillo Trio album, “Bopcentric,” includes the above compositions.
“Melillo is a striking pianist, a chameleon who has a Bud Powell touch on a Charlie Parker be bop number, who evokes appropriate echoes of Thelonious Monk”.
— John S. Wilson in The New York Times
From sleeve notes by Orrin Keepnews at
For many years regarded as an awesome genius, but one whose ideas were too far-out for general consumption, Monk now seems finally to be gaining long-deserved acceptance…. some critics feel that he is becoming (as John S. Wilson has put it) “increasingly lucid.”
From The New York Times of August 28, 2002:
John S. Wilson, the first critic to write regularly about jazz and popular music in The New York Times, died yesterday at a nursing home in Princeton, N.J. He was 89 and lived in Princeton.