Thursday, March 15, 2007

Making the world a better place

I was in graduate school when I was first introduced to the idea that there might be different kinds of value. (Mind you, I was not technically a philosophy major as an undergraduate.) My teacher, Connie Rosati, gave me what she clearly thought was a n easy case for kinds of value: we can distinguish aesthetic and moral value. I said I still don't get it. When I hear good music, I think the world is just a better place for the music being there. She suggested that I was just being a good consequentialist when I said that. I denied this, because I the time I had this delusion that I was a deontologist (and a continental philosopher, natch).

This video, which again making it hard for me to believe in kinds of value, is split into two parts, for some reason. Click though to youtube for the second part.

Why are his hands crossed for most of the last minute of the video? I've heard him play similar riffs a lot, especially the punctuational "dan-dan-dan", but I never realized he was crossing his hands like that.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Kalos

Anonymous said...

"Why are his hands crossed for most of the last minute of the video?"

You can see this in Straight No Chaser and '66, as well. A lot of seemingly unnecessary hand-crossing seems to have been part of Monk's "thing" along with the headwear, and the big rings, and the little shuffling circle dance when other guys were taking solos. I don't mean to say that it's purely an affectation, and it may well have felt more natural to him, as a largely self-taught player, to handle certain runs that way, but I don't think he's really playing anything that couldn't be done with hands in their usual keyboard positions. Monk himself seems to have realized it was idiosyncratic, and used it as a trademark; I think it was behind writing "Criss-Cross".