The studio and live recording sessions that Thelonious Monk cut during his six-year stay at the Riverside label are compiled over the 15 discs in the Complete Riverside Recordings. This middle era – between his early sides for Prestige and the final ones for Columbia – is generally considered Monk's most ingenious and creative period. The sessions are presented in chronological order, accurately charting the progression and diversions of one of the most genuinely enigmatic figures in popular music. The Complete Riverside Recordings explores Monk's genius with a certain degree of real-time analysis that simply listening to each of the individual albums from this era lacks.
Well, this is their most outlandish cinematic confection – a sexual-psychedelic comic-variation on Voltaire's CANDIDE, that transcends time and logic. Basic coherency might be at a minimum, but it's never boring! Set in some nebulous medieval time, Christopher Brown stars as Candido, a free spirit who lives in a Baron's fabulous castle and prances about like Richard Simmons with a hamster up his ass. Taught that this is "the best of all possible worlds," Candido's gleeful routine is shattered when the Baron spots him face down in his chaste daughter Cunegonda's crotch and banishes the lad from his castle.