It’s time for a new Exfiltration Radio, and this time out we’re going deep into the wonderfully weird world of Thelonious Monk. This show is an hour of Monk compositions, played by a variety of his bands and also covered by other artists.
We open with a portion of a story Charles Lloyd tells about Monk in the late 1960s, here excerpted from the Billy Taylor radio show ca. 1999. That leads into Monk’s ensemble playing “Well, You Needn’t,” from Monk’s Music, which I wrote about a few years ago. Still fantastic for the sound of the ensemble, which included both Coleman Hawkins and John Coltrane as well as Gigi Gryce, Art Blakey, Wilbur Ware, and Ray Copeland.
The earliest of the recordings on this set, “Bemsha Swing” dates from Monk’s first album for Prestige Records, 1954’s Thelonious Monk Trio, with Max Roach and Gary Mapp. It’s the earliest performance of this tune as well, and it’s interesting to see some of the places that Monk takes the melody, as well as to hear his joyous vocalizations as he plays. This is followed by a later live track, “Bye-Ya” from the 1963 Copenhagen live session recently issued as Mønk. This is Monk’s great swinging quartet with Charlie Rouse, John Ore and Frankie Dunlop. From “Bye-Ya” we go back to Monk’s Music for his “Ruby, My Dear,” here played with Ware, Blakey, and Hawkins, whose solo on this one is a thing of beauty.
The second half of the mix features notable performances of Monk’s music by other artists, starting with another run at “Bemsha Swing,” this time by Keith Jarrett’s great standards trio with Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette, on the live album The Cure. I love what Jarrett (as far as we know, at most a very distant relation!) does with Monk’s melody, turning the rhythm into a boogying, churning perpetual motion machine. The performance also features Jarrett’s own vocalizing, which is an acquired taste, so be forewarned.
Following this, there’s a spectacular take on Monk’s composition “Ask Me Now” by a group led by McCoy Tyner and featuring Joe Henderson on tenor, Ron Carter, and Al Foster on drums, live in performance from 1991. The extended solos by Henderson at the beginning and end of the track are worth the price of admission by themselves.
This is in turn followed by a take on “Blue Monk” with scat vocals by Kurt Elling and piano by Christian Sands. There are a number of essays of Monk’s tunes with lyrics out there, including another version of “Blue Monk” by the great Abbey Lincoln and a gorgeous “Round Midnight” by Samara Joy. But I like this version, part of a session laid down and released digitally in a single day, for the spontaneity and joy that the two players have with the work; as Elling says after one spectacular solo by Sands, “That’s the happiest that piano has been all day.” A brief tag of Monk’s “Epistrophy,” from a recently issued performance in Paris in 1966, brings the set to a close.
It’s hard to fit all the great things about a composer and performer like Monk in a single hour, so I focused on tunes that featured great playing by the entire ensemble. You can easily get lost in Monk’s world; this set provides a happy introduction.
Do not attempt to adjust your set…
“Well, every night, Monk would drink the orange juice” – Charles Lloyd (Exfiltration Radio: the bumpers)
Well, You Needn’t – Thelonious Monk (Monk’s Music)
Bemsha Swing – Thelonious Monk Trio (The Thelonious Monk Trio (Rudy Van Gelder Remaster))
Bye-Ya – Thelonious Monk (Mønk (Live, 1963))
Ruby, My Dear – Thelonious Monk (Monk’s Music)
Bemsha Swing – Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock, Jack DeJohnette (The Cure)
Ask Me Now – McCoy Tyner (New York Reunion)
Blue Monk – Kurt Elling, Christian Sands (Wildflowers Vol. 3)
Epistrophy – Thelonious Monk (Live in Paris (1966))
On taking control of an artistic career and creating an unparalleled work of genius.
Album of the Week, May 9, 2026
We come at last to Kate Bush, whom we’ve heard as a backing vocalist on Peter Gabriel 3, but whose own body of solo work was already substantial by this time. At age 27 she was already on her fifth album, and having had a reasonably high level of success with the first four was able to record it with considerable artistic freedom. What she produced has few peers in pop music history: a record with both hits and a conceptual suite, self-produced, that seamlessly blends new wave influences with progressive rock and traditional music sounds, and still manages to sound new today.
Kate Bush grew up in Kent, with both parents harboring amateur musical talents. She taught herself piano at age 11 and was writing songs in grammar school. In the early 1970s she recorded a demo tape which found its way into the hands of Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour via a mutual friend. Gilmour sponsored a more professional demo recording; this led to Kate being signed to a recording contract with EMI at age 16. EMI, fearing Bush was too young, kept her on retainer for two years during which she studied interpretive dance with David Bowie’s dance instructor and finished her secondary education.
Her first album, The Kick Inside, was recorded when she was 19 years old and yielded a Number One UK single, “Wuthering Heights.”1 She set a Guinness World Record as the first woman artist to have written every track on a million-selling debut album. But she wanted more artistic control than she was able to exercise on The Kick Inside or her second album Lionheart. Starting with her third album, Never for Ever, she began co-producing her work, bringing a diversity of sounds to the songs and featuring heavy use of synthesizers for the first time, in particular the Fairlight CMI to which she had been introduced while working with Gabriel. This album and the follow-up, The Dreaming, were much more experimental, and the fourth album in particular was received with puzzlement. Undeterred, but noting the high price of studio time, she built her own private studio, allowing her to work at her own pace.
Much of the fifth album was written and performed by Kate on the Fairlight, the Linn drum machine, and piano, but there were a small host of other musicians present, including her longtime bass player and then-partner Del Palmer, bassist Eberhard Weber, percussionist Morris Pert (also on PG3), session guitarist Alan Murphy (Level 42, Mike and the Mechanics), bouzouki and bodhran player Dónal Lunny (Planxty, The Bothy Band), whistle and fiddle player John Sheahan (the Dubliners), Uillean piper Liam O’Flynn (Planxty), the Richard Hickox Singers, and her brother Paddy, who had played on all her prior albums, on balalaika, didgeridoo, violins, and vocals.
“Running Up That Hill” is by this point the best known song on the album, after its second life in Stranger Things. But it’s still a mesmerizing track, with the rhythmic drums (session player Steve Elliott and a healthy dose of Linn) underpinning Del Palmer’s bass and that synth vocal line playing the hook, all before Kate even sings her first lyric. But it is precisely the lyrics and Kate’s voice that are the heart of the song as she sings about the failure to communicate and the desperate wish for empathy: “If I only could, I’d make a deal with God/and I’d get him to swap our places.” Kate’s early albums had her vocals in her high soprano, which was mesmerizing but which could also be harsh depending on her choice of vowel production; here she embraces her lower register as a grounding and a dramatic accent (as on the famous “Yeah, yeah, yo” backing vocals, themselves an iconic hook).2
“Hounds of Love” is a more joyous song, somehow, as Kate sings about being afraid to fall in love over a woofing chorus: “I’ve always been a coward / And I don’t know what’s good for me / Oh here I go… Take my shoes off and throw them in the lake / And I’ll be / Two steps on the water.” The song is almost entirely Kate’s, with only the two drummers (Elliott and Charlie Morgan, who appeared on Wham!’s On the Edge of Heaven and Paul McCartney’s Flowers In the Dirt and who later played with Elton John for thirteen years—and a single cellist credited as joining her on the track. The melody is in a major key but relentlessly descends in thirds and fourths, giving a feeling of giddy instability. It’s a blast.
“The Big Sky” is another disorientingly happy song, with an edge on it, as Kate’s ragged vocal expresses her excitement at the clouds in the big sky while simultaneously accusing her past lover: “You never understood me/ You never really tried.” A chorus rises behind her as she proclaims, “This cloud/Says ‘Noah / Come on, build me an Ark / And if you’re coming, jump / ’Cause we’re leaving with the big sky.’” The ending chorus—“Rolling over like a great big cloud / Walking out in the big sky”—is as close to a gospel moment as Kate’s songs come, and her ecstatic melisma over it is one of her biggest highs.
“Cloudbusting” seems to flow out of “Mother” naturally, but it’s an entirely different song, closer to “Running Up That Hill” in concept and writing. Indeed, the chorus “Every time it rains you’re here in my head/Like the Sun coming out” could be a continuation of the “Running Up That Hill” chorus, only here powered by a churning string section instead of the synthesizer. The song itself carries immense longing in the chorus, “I just know that something good is going to happen,” with only the chugging low strings hinting that there’s tragedy ahead. The song is based on the memoir of Peter Reich about his father Wilhelm’s experiments with attempting to tap “orgone energy” to create rain, but you don’t need to know that story3 to feel the hopeless sadness mixed with the sense that this time it just might work.
The seven songs on Side Two form a complete song cycle which is titled “The Ninth Wave” in the liner notes. “And Dream of Sheep” opens the cycle with Kate’s character in the water, kept afloat by a life vest, “Little light will guide them to me / My face is all lit up.” She tries to keep herself awake, to keep from drowning in the ocean, but she fails to keep her eyes open and enters a dream state, pulled under by her hallucinations.
We get those dreams in “Under Ice,” and they’re frozen; she skates over a frozen body of water, only to see “There’s something moving under/Under the ice… Something / Someone help them / It’s me…” With the realization that the narrator is watching herself drown she comes to herself, and the track hard cuts to “Waking the Witch,” where the narrator hallucinates voices telling her to wake up, alternating with an accusatory judge accusing her of witchcraft, fragmented voices spinning past in a vortex of sound, and even the sound of rescuers: “Can you not see that little light over there?” followed later by the sound of helicopters arriving and a voice yelling at her to “get out of the water.” There are layers upon layers in the sound; it replicates the disorientation of near-death convincingly.
She’s out of the water but not out of the woods. “Watching You Without Me” finds her at her house watching her lover but unable to interact with him; meanwhile he seems utterly unaware of anything that’s happened to her. The track is a ballad tempo, an ordinary major key loop that seems frozen in time, with only a prominent bass melody pushing at the edges to signal the narrator’s distress. There’s a section that appears to have been recorded backwards and played forward; the sound of seagulls drifts in, cutting through the hallucination, as “Jig Of Life” confronts the narrator with her future self, who insists that she bring herself back to life for the sake of her future and her children. As the emotional energy peaks, suddenly we’re in a jig, led by the violin and accompanied by the skirling of the Uillean pipes. Coming out of the jig, the narrator tries to unfragment her memory: “I put this moment here/I put this moment over here.” The song ends with Kate’s older brother John Carder Bush reciting a dramatic poem about her being one with the water.
The hallucinating victim seems in danger of losing all contact with life in “Hello Earth,” which seems to reprise the melodies of “And Dream of Sheep,” “Running Up That Hill” and “Cloudbusting” all at once. A men’s chorus anchored by deep bass voices (possibly pitch shifted) makes us wonder: has she died? The full chorus accuses her of being the “murderer” from “Waking the Witch” as Kate’s character asks “Why did I go?” The bass chorus returns again; is she being sung to rest? But there’s a beep as of a hospital machine, and through the whooshing sounds we hear a German voice: “Deeper, deeper… Somewhere there is a light.”
“The Morning Fog” returns to the “Hounds of Love” melody, this time tempered by gentle guitar melodies and played down a step, as the drowning victim gratefully regains her life: “Do you know/I love you better now/…I’ll kiss the ground/I’ll tell my mother/I’ll tell my father/I’ll tell my loved ones/I’ll tell my brothers/How much I love them.” At the end of the cycle, we’ve come full circle, only instead of seeking to bring empathy to her lover, she is filled with a desire to live and love in the present instead, changed by her near-death experience.
Hounds of Love is like that, a circular, endlessly self-referential album, full of depths and supporting many interpretations. (There are Kate fans who argue that “The Ninth Wave”’s drowning victim dies and is reborn, or that the drowning is symbolic of ego death and investigating the subconscious, or that Kate is the Ophelia to her own Hamlet).4 However you interpret it, the album is first rate, with a philosophically deep second side, a first side full of absolute killer songs, and an everything-goes approach to production. The album hit Number 1 in the UK in 1986, and when “Running Up That Hill” soundtracked an episode of the fourth season of Stranger Things in 2022, it rocketed up the UK charts, giving Kate her second career Number One and going all the way to Number Three in the US. There’s hope for the world still.
And speaking of Number Ones, we’re going to be talking about a few of them next time.
You can listen to this week’s album here:
BONUS: Here’s Kate performing “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” at The Secret Policeman’s Third Ball, with none other than David Gilmour backing her up:
BONUS BONUS: Here’s Kate performing “Hounds of Love” at the 1986 Brit Awards:
BONUS BONUS BONUS: Here’s a 1985 interview with Kate on the BBC’s “Old Grey Whistle Test.” She talks about the building of her new studio and the making of the album.
BONUS X4: Kate didn’t tour behind this album; she famously played very few live shows, and most of the “live” performances I’ve linked to (except the Secret Policeman show) have her lip-syncing. But as a performer she was still electric even when lip-syncing. This appearance on Wogan from 1985 was the first time anyone had ever heard the music from the album, and the whole thing is completely electrifying.
There was a memorable karaoke outing in San Francisco while I was there for the RSA Security Conference one year, where a young man sang “Running Up That Hill” in the original key, and the entire bar sang along on the “yeah, yeah, yo”s, about five years before the song made its Stranger Things comeback. This song is wired into GenX’s brain. ↩︎
Gathered posts from rec.arts.gaffa, the Kate Bush USENET newsgroup. This is what discourse on the Internet really used to be like, in the days before memes and shitposting. ↩︎
Or, what to do with that quinquina in your liquor cabinet.
The Tanglewood Festival Chorus just finished a run of John Adams’ “Harmonium” (alongside the Beethoven 9th Symphony), for the first time in thirty-five years. I wasn’t a member the only previous time the chorus performed Adams’ early masterwork (under the direction of Sir Simon Rattle, no less!), but there were nine choristers who did perform the piece back then with us this time.
“Harmonium” is a massive piece, one of the true masterworks of minimalism. But tagging it with that undersells the harmonic and melodic attractions of the piece. True, it does open with two hundred or so measures of chanted “no no no”s1 and other syllables of negation, demonstrating with the human voice the same approach to building with rhythm previously done with marimbas, keyboards, or other instruments in works by Philip Glass and Steve Reich. But then the text of Donne’s poem breaks through like a ray of light—“I never stooped so low”—and you’re in a completely different world. The work is full of surprises and earworms; I found myself saying “rowing, rowing, rowing” under my breath as I walked, in rhythm, down the sidewalk to my car after one rehearsal, and a number of us have half-jokingly agreed that we’ll work on a carol arrangement that uses the melody of the second movement, “Because I could not stop for Death,” to set “O Little Town of Bethlehem” and see if Keith Lockhart will do it for Holiday Pops.
But I digress. Back to “rowing”; as I tried to decide on a cocktail for this run, that rhythm and its ultimate culmination “rowing in Eden” kept going through my head, and so I decided the cocktail had to be “Cointreauing in Eden.” I rifled through some of my old cocktail lists for inspiration and found a jumping off point, the Ante Cocktail. It’s a classic, included by Harry Craddock in his seminal 1930 Savoy Cocktail Book, but it calls for an apertif wine called Hercules.
How obscure is Hercules? Obscure enough that my source app starts the write-up with “Here’s what we know about Hercules…”, which perhaps explains enough to make me curious about this attempt to recreate it from a few years back. But the app helpfully suggested that I could substitute Byrrh, which I for some reason have in my inventory. Both Hercules and Byrrh are quinquinas, sweetened fortified apertif wines containing quinine (for bittering and presumably for health reasons) and spices; the family also contains Lillet and Dubonnet. Byrrh in particular is a French quinquina, made with red wine, mistelle (a mixture of ethanol and partially fermented grape juice), and quinine, that was originally sold as a health drink to avoid competition from neighboring apertif makers in the Pyrenees. Some day I’ll write about the intersection of cocktails and patent medicines… Anyway, the flavor is a tad sweet and deeply bitter in a pleasant way.
Cointreau is of course the legendary triple sec formulation produced in Saint-Barthélmy-d’Anjou. I suppose one could use other orange liqueurs, but I don’t recommend a substitution of Grand Marnier; I grabbed the wrong bottle by mistake last night to make this and the orange flavor was far too subdued. Regarding the apple brandy, you can substitute Calvados; I used Laird’s Old Apple Brandy, an aged 80 proof liqueur. Be careful with other substitutions; Laird’s Applejack contains neutral spirits and lacks the punch of real apple flavor.
As always, you can use the recipe card with Highball. Enjoy!
A recently released archival recording documenting the moment when the great qawwali burst onto the world stage.
Album of the Week, May 2, 2026
A traditional religious singer from Pakistan who performed with a harmonium player, percussionists, and a group of singers that included two students, one of whom was his nephew, would seem an unlikely choice for a superstar. The rise of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, about whom Jeff Buckley once famously remarked “Nusrat, he’s my Elvis,” is the story of a musician who was already acknowledged to be the greatest artist in his field before most Western listeners ever heard of him. And that journey to worldwide fame began with a midnight concert 41 years ago this year, at Peter Gabriel’s 1985 WOMAD festival, on a bill that also featured New Order, the Pogues, Toots and the Maytals, and The Fall.
Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (“Ustad” means “master” or “craftsman” in Urdu, Persian and a host of other languages) was born in 1948 in western Pakistan. His family were practitioners of the art of qawwali, or Sufi devotional music, with their musical heritage going back at least 600 years. Nusrat’s father Fateh Ali Khan wanted Nusrat to follow a more reputable profession like engineering or medicine, but the young musician’s playing on the tabla earned praise from master qawwali artists and convinced his father to let his son follow in his footsteps. At age 16, following the death of his father, Nusrat became the lead singer of his father’s party alongside his uncle Mubarik Ali Khan; in 1971 his uncle died and he rose to leadership of the party at age 23.
A qawwali party is a band optimized for traveling performances. The instrumentation is light—tabla or other percussion instruments and a harmonium—and is primarily there to support the singers. In Nusrat’s party this included Mujarad Mubarik Ali Khan (son of Nusrat’s uncle), Farrukh Fateh Ali Khan (younger brother), two pupils, Kaukab Ali and Rahat Fateh Ali Khan (Nusrat’s nephew) and a five-voice chorus. This group of musicians crowded onto a stage on Mersea Island in Essex for an audience that at first sat politely, but by the end of the first song were on their feet, clapping and chanting along.
“Allah Hoo, Allah Hoo” begins with a several-minutes long instrumental solo with the harmonium and the tabla as the group settles in, then Nusrat intones the initial verse melody in something like a plainchant style, alternating with the other vocalists of the party in higher and higher vocal lines, and finally segueing into the chorus with its repeated exhortations of “Allah Hoo, Allah Hoo” after over six minutes of introductory material. From this point forward the party improvises over several main melodic lines: the “Allah Hoo” melody, the verse melody “Ye zamee’n jab na thi, ye jahaa’n jab na tha,” and a stretch of free improvisation in which each of the singers takes turns ascending and descending octaves, a practice called sargam. This section is particularly notable for the interchanges between Nusrat and his young nephew Rahat (now Ustad Rahat Fateh Ali Khan), who was young enough in this record that his voice had not yet attained his adult range. The overall song is a hymn of praise: “O God, O God… When the earth was not, when this world was not / When the moon and the sun had not been created / When even the secret of Truth was hidden from all / There was nothing here / But still, You alone existed.” The overall performance runs for more than twenty minutes.
Nusrat introduces the next song for the festival audience after the instrumental introduction, saying “This is very famous tune—very famous tune ‘Shahbaaz Qalandar laalmeri pat rakhiyo bal’.” The tune, a hymn to the Sufi mystic “Hazrat Lal Shahbaz Qalendar” (literally “Prophet of God, Red-Robed, Falcon King, Sufi Saint”) who sought to bring peace between the Hindi and Muslim populations in Pakistan and who was regarded by the Hindi people as as an incarnation of God. He was also known as “Jhulelal,” and both the Shahbaaz and Jhulelal names recur in many of Nusrat’s songs of praise. The song itself features a strong melodic pattern that circles between the fifth and tenth tones of the scale. There are fewer sangam passages in this performance, but an extended instrumental break on harmonium and tabla brings cheers and whistles from the crowd. By the end the singers of the party are singing the chorus in overlapping waves, ultimately stopping only as one of the singers suffers an audible coughing fit.
“Biba Sada Dil Mor De” is the sole non-religious song on the album, a ghazal, or love song, that can be translated as “Darling, give me my heart back” or, in the liner notes to one of Nusrat’s later albums, “If you cannot remain before my eyes please give me back my heart.” For the most part the party repeats the refrain over and over again, but after about six minutes they start a series of vocal improvisations, ranging from high obbligato to highly rhythmic sangam utterances from Nusrat. The record ends in a fade out on the cheers of the crowd.
This performance was legendary but not broadly circulated until 2025, when improvements in digital technology made it possible to adjust the levels in a way that permitted the vocals to be appropriately prominent; on the original tapes the sound of the handclaps of the chorus dominated the sound. The release reopens an old question: would Nusrat have found his way to world prominence without the 1985 WOMAD appearance? We will never know, but this first experience led to many later collaborations with Peter Gabriel and a bigger platform for his solo works. We’ll listen to some of those later, but next week we’ll hear from a different Peter Gabriel collaborator on an album that was itself a breakthrough.
You can listen to this week’s album here, including a bonus performance of Nusrat’s famous “Haq Ali Ali”:
BONUS: The recording, amazing though it is, doesn’t fully convey what this band could do. This crowd video of “Shahbaaz Qalandar” shows it all: the polite listening, then the rhythm starts to grab them, then everyone is on their feet. That’s more or less exactly how it happened to me when I saw Nusrat in the mid-1990s in Washington, DC:
