Marvin Gaye’s timeless, soul-stirring, intuitively brilliant opus, “What’s Going On?” is what’s happening now. From the tragically beautiful “Mercy Mercy Me” to the dark & brooding, “Save the Children” (which includes the penetrating lines, “Who really cares to save a world in despair? There’ll come a time, when the world won’t be singin’..Flowers won’t grow, bells won’t be ringin’…”), you have to agree that this classic recording is still relevant for the simple fact that we still have not learned from our mistakes. Listening to it now can be quite chilling, like an eerie warning from some soul-powered time machine. In 2003, the album was ranked # 6 on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of all time. Personally, I would rank it #2 after Bob Marley’s, “Rastaman Vibration“.
There is a moment on almost every Monty Alexander record where the jazz piano trio stops behaving like a jazz piano trio and starts behaving like a Kingston sound system. That moment is the whole point. Fifty tracks deep, this is the sound of a man who never asked permission to be two things at once. The pianist who brought Kingston to the Carnegie stage Monty Alexander was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1944, and by his teens he was already gigging around the island — close enough to the birth of ska and rocksteady to have absorbed it in his bones rather than learned it from records. He moved to the United States in 1961, and the origin story that follows is the kind that sounds invented: Frank Sinatra heard him playing in a Miami club, and Jilly Rizzo, Sinatra's friend and club owner, put him behind the piano at Jilly's in New York. From there Alexander fell in with Milt Jackson and Ray Brown, two of the most demanding rhythm partners in the music, and never really ...

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