Music department features jazz and French Baroque repertoire

British harpsichordist Sophie Yates presents an evening of French Baroque repertoire Friday, April 6, at 8 p.m. in Barnes Hall. The program includes the music of composers François Couperin, Jean-Philippe Rameau, Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Forqueray, Jacques Duphly and Joseph-Nicholas-Pancrace Royer.

Yates began her career by winning the international Erwin Bodky competition at the Boston Early Music Festival. As a result, she was invited to tour and broadcast throughout the eastern United States. Now she performs regularly around Europe and in London but also has worked in some other parts of the world, including Syria, Morocco and Western Australia. Last year saw her first visit to Japan.

Yates is probably best known for her affinity with the French Baroque, music of the Iberian Peninsula and English virginal music. She has performed on most of the playable virginals surviving in Britain and is working on a long-term project to collect a book of contemporary English pieces for this instrument. In addition to her work as a soloist and ensemble player, she teaches at the Royal College of Music.

On Monday, April 9, an eclectic exploration of Thelonius Monk's music will be presented in Barnes Hall by the Cornell Jazz All-Stars, Los Pinieros and the Cornell Low Brass Ensemble.

Monk was the pianist in the house band at Minton's Playhouse, along with Kenny Clarke and Nick Fenton, during the period (1941-42) that saw the birth of what came to be known as modern jazz or bebop. It was largely at Minton's that the loose conglomeration of wildly inventive soloists, prominently including Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, would gather after hours and off-nights to blow, show off, eat free food and, in the process, revolutionize jazz.

Monk's compositions were often radical reworkings of familiar popular tunes or blues, a hallmark of bebop, yet his playing style eschewed the hornlike flowing lines of the other great bebop pianist, Bud Powell. As a performer, Monk's improvisations often were agonizingly spare, dissonant in the extreme and his note attacks were highly percussive -- a technique that was facilitated by his unconventional, splay-fingered playing style.

The Cornell Jazz All-Stars is a loose collective of faculty, graduate students, undergraduates and members of the community. Los Pinieros is an Ithaca-based percussion ensemble highlighting Afro-Cuban musics. The Cornell Low Brass Ensemble, under the leadership of Mark Davis Scatterday, is devoted to the exploration of repertoire for low brass choir and other groupings.