Monastic Chambers Recorded Media

HEAD MONK'S TOP 5

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The Head Monk's Top 5

Below are my picks for the most ground-breaking cornerstones of modern music -- not necessarily reflective of my own personal favorites, but without which modern music just wouldn't be the same.

A L B U M S

1) King of the Delta Blues Players (Robert Johnson): This album, recorded in a hotel room on a wax cylinder in 1929, contained an unheard of before style and precedent-setting licks that influenced guitar players all over the world and continues to do so still to this day. This album might be the earliest recording to which modern rock can be traced.

2) A Love Supreme (John Coltrane): This album marked a massive step in freeing music from previously held harmonic and melodic conventions in jazz, as as well as from preconceived notions of structure in all music.

3) Switched on Bach (Walter/Wendy Carlos): This work is like a catalogue of what can be done with analogue subtractive synthesis. The sounds it contained set the stage for never-before-imagined sounds that quickly became staples in modern musical vocabulary. It introduced synthesizers to the world.

4) Seargent Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Beatles): This album changed the face of pop/rock music by drawing from a broad spectrum of styles and instrumentation that had not been heard by pop audiences before (and it was all done on a four-track). It represents a change in cultural perspective. The free musical experimentation was representative of a more free-thinking attitude in our culture that has changed the world, for better and for worse.

5) Skylarking (XTC): This album represents perfection in popular music production for its time... and in fact was ahead of its time. The attention to detail that producer Todd Rundgren showed was downright compulsive and the depth of the lyrical content and craft of the songwriting by the band was truly amazing.

B A N D S

1) Beatles: They took the craft of popular songwriting to new levels. They were also responsible for many groundbreaking technological developements in recording with their experimentations and imaginations of sounds, like flanging, that had never been achieved previously, much of which we now take for granted.

2) Rolling Stones: They put the "bad-boy" into rock'n'roll for good and set a tone for all rock bands to follow.

3) Spike Jones and His City Slickers: In a time when bands were playing mostly standards in dance halls, Spike Jones took those standards and twisted them with comic genious and absolutely stunning musicianship. He did things no band had ever done, leading the way for a strange splinter group of musicians like Weird Al Yankovic, and a bunch of lunatics that came before Weird Al!

4) King Crimson: This band broke ground during the progressive era with textures and instrumentations not typically used in popular music, and then again in the 80s, taking Bartokian polyrhythms and tonalities and translating them into a pop music idiom.

5) Sex Pistols: They introduced the rest of the world to punk like no one ever had before. Bands like Green Day, Blink 182, 311, as well as the entire grunge movement, wouldn't have existed without this groundbreaker.

S O N G W R I T E R S

1) Bob Dylan: Bob rose to the top of the vanguard of angry young folk singers with "message music," while maintaining lyrical integrity. He's one of the most covered songwriters today and his lyrics continue to be vibrant and relevant in a career spanning 40 some years.

2) John Lennon/Paul McCartney: This duo perfected the craft of pop songwriting. Their hooks, melodies, and chords were innovative, but not outside of pop audiences' desire for accessible music.

3) Bert Bacharach: Bert has been writing *the* ultimately singable pop love songs since the 60s.

4) Johnny Cash: Johnny blazed the trail for songs about gritty, down-home, real, raw, edgey, nothing fake, gut-wrenching emotions.

5) Woody Guthrie: Before Bob was Woody. When tin pan alley was all pop and sap, he wrote about the working people's plight. Woody was the original songwriter with a cause.

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Monastic Chambers Recorded Media
P.O. Box 234
New Haven, IN 46774-0234
1.260.749.1981
monk@BrotherJon.com