Month: July 2025

Thelonious Monk, Mønk

A recently discovered live recording of Monk’s greatest quartet in their prime.

Album of the Week, July 26, 2025

Thelonious Monk recorded his final record for Columbia, Underground, in 1968, following several live albums and Solo Monk. While the record featured a number of new compositions, it marked an end rather than a revitalization. By the early 1970s, Monk was done, having made a handful of recordings on smaller labels. He retired for health reasons, having been diagnosed with psychiatric disorders and prescribed medications that made him uncommunicative.1 He spent the last six years of his life as a guest of the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, dying of a stroke in 1982. So his would seem an unlikely wellspring in which to find a source of new recordings.

But, just as new Coltrane tapes have been turning up in odd places, so a few significant Monk recordings have surfaced in the last few years. An improbable session booked by a 16-year-old high school student and taped by the high school’s janitor, Palo Alto captured the final known performance of Monk’s last quartet with Charlie Rouse, Larry Gales and Ben Riley. And a 1963 live recording from the Odd Fellows Palaeet in Copenhagen surfaced on tapes rescued from a dumpster yields today’s album, a rare live document of his greatest quartet with Rouse, bassist John Ore, and drummer Frankie Dunlop. Together they had recorded two great sessions for Columbia; they were in the middle of sessions for Criss-Cross at the time of this concert, but Monk’s Dream had just been released, so three of the tracks come from those sessions.

“Bye-Ya,” one of the Monk’s Dream tracks, had a long simmer in Monk’s book of compositions, having been recorded for Prestige on Thelonious Monk Trio in 1952. The tune is a 32-bar Latin tune, originally titled “Go”; when producer Bob Weinstock wanted a name with more of a Latin feel, Monk literally translated it, called it “Vaya,” which became “Bye-Ya” in his inimitable dialect. The performance here starts out with a syncopated explosion from Dunlop, who had previously recorded with Sonny Stitt, Sonny Rollins, and Duke Ellington, among others. Monk enters on a two note pattern while Rouse states the melody, and then we’re off to the races with a brilliant contrafact from the saxophonist over two verses. Despite his reputation for eccentricity, Monk is tight here with the rhythm section, the whole unit performing with a snap and flair. There’s no sense of the mountain-climbing hard labor that characterized Brilliant Corners; Rouse, Dunlop and Ore knew this material like the backs of their hands, so they provide a sense of ease and delight as they stretch out through the material. Monk’s own soloing is similarly relaxed and joyous, at one point embracing an off-the-beat series of staccato exclamations that fit naturally with the rest of the tune.

“Nutty” also originated on Thelonious Monk Trio and had last been recorded on Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane in 1957, but was a staple of Monk’s live sets. Monk opens with a jaunty statement of the melody, and then Rouse is off to the races, playing brisk double-time runs over bursts of chords from Monk and a constant support from Ore and Dunlop. The bassist, who would go on to play with Sun Ra, gives a dry walking bass that touches the corners of Monk’s unusual chords and then walks off into other neighboring dimensions, all while keeping things tightly anchored. Monk’s solo breaks apart the bits of the tune; he finds a five-note pattern and holds onto it, repeating it four times against the changing chords. The last of his solo is sketched in bare chords that leave most of each measure open, allowing Ore’s bass and the pops and booms of Dunlop’s drums to show through.

While his own tunes show little of the stride piano that tinges his playing of Ellington and his later performance on Solo Monk, it raises its head on “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You”; presumably he reserved the technique for the compositions of others, like this 1932 tune written for Tommy Dorsey by George Bassman and Ned Washington. There’s very little sentimentality in Rouse’s solo, which takes off at high speed and gives us a briskly virtuosic tour through the corners of the tune. Monk’s solo eases off on the Fats Waller influence, giving a more modern be-bop take on the tune, complete with a descending line that sounds rather like someone coming down the stairs sideways.

The great classic “Body and Soul,” also appearing on Monk’s Dream, here gets a rubato solo take by Monk that plays some chordal adjacencies and re-voicings, as well as some of the chromatic vamps that make for some of the most distinctive Monk sounds in his own compositions. The subsequent verses are done in strict time, though some of Monk’s improvisations play against the beat in a way that threaten to unravel the momentum. Just as one begins to fear that we’re stuck in the offbeat eternally, Monk clicks the melody back into time, rewarding the listener with a breathtaking glissando. It’s a fine performance that would have shone on Solo Monk.

“Monk’s Dream” headlines the album of the same name, but its origins also go back to Thelonious Monk Trio. The chord progression threatens to make the listener’s ears cross-eyed, as it were, but the quartet makes it sound easy, with brisk rolls from Dunlop punctuating each phrase of the song. Monk plays a series of leading tones under Rouse, leading to a feeling of instability in the tune and a feeling that Rouse is about to come unmoored and play away into some other song. But as they continue to play the connection reiterates itself and the wooziness is revealed to be deliberate. Rouse plays the last verse of his solo without Monk; without the chords it’s easier to hear Rouse’s conception of the melody. When Monk returns, he brings back the leading tone patterns and then slowly builds a solo around them, exploring outward chromatically, anchoring one entire verse of the solo a defiant tone away from the tonic. Indeed, the performance might serve as a sort of Rosetta Stone to his overall conception of melody, as he digs into everything but the tonic, finding joy in the adjacencies of tone.

Mønk is part of a wave of newly discovered jazz tapes that threaten to swamp the listener in an embarrassment of riches—and might seem to threaten the efforts of newer players. After all, why seek out the recordings of a Tyshawn Sorey or Linda May Han Oh when another lost recording from Coltrane, Monk or Bill Evans beckons? The answer, of course, is “¿Porque no los dos?” And there’s some truly fantastic material being recorded today (though not often being released on vinyl, which limits how much of it I’ll write about in this series). Next week we’ll start listening to different performers on the same (groovy) instrument in recordings that stretch from

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: 1963 was busy for Monk and his quartet. A less pristine tape capturing a performance in Stockholm by the group was released as the bootleg Live in Stockholm 1963, and it’s worth a listen as well.

  1. This may have contributed to some of Monk’s reputation for eccentricity. Or it could just have been his style. The saxophonist Charles Lloyd, who was up and coming in the late 1960s, tells a story about being on tour with Monk in which the great man danced around Lloyd’s dressing room between sets and, despite a plea from Pannonica, drank an entire pitcher of orange juice because Lloyd told him it was “tainted.” ↩︎

Thelonious Monk, Solo Monk

Monk alone is Monk distilled to a deceptively simple sounding essence.

Album of the Week, July 19, 2025

The mid- to late-1950s were a good time, compositionally, for Thelonious Monk. Following the critical success of Brilliant Corners, he released a series of additional albums, including the 1957 Monk’s Music with John Coltrane and Coleman Hawkins, that documented his growing list of original compositions. At the same time, his works were being covered, and celebrated, by a growing list of jazz luminaries, including Miles Davis on his ‘Round About Midnight, the first Columbia recording of his first great quintet and made at the same time as Workin’, Cookin’, Steamin’, and Relaxin’.

But not everything was idyllic. In 1958, Monk and the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter were detained by police in Delaware en route to a gig, who beat him with a blackjack when he refused to answer questions. And in 1960, his relationship with Riverside Records soured over royalties, which would ultimately declare bankruptcy in 1963 following cofounder Bill Grauer Jr’s sudden death. Monk ended up signing to Columbia Records in 1962. It was a great move commercially for Monk, as the larger label could devote more resources to promoting the genius. (He was to have appeared on the cover of Time Magazine in November 1963, but the story was delayed due to the assassination of John F. Kennedy; it ultimately ran in February 1964, at which point he became one of the only modern jazz musicians to ever be featured on the cover.) But his well of new compositions dried up, and many of the records featured re-recordings of earlier compositions with his new band, featuring Charlie Rouse on tenor, John Ore on bass, and Frankie Dunlop on drums.

So we come to Solo Monk, recorded in 1964 and 1965, in the middle of his eight-album run for Columbia, and featuring Monk on solo piano on a program of his own compositions and a set of unusual standards. The program kicks off with “Dinah,” a popular song from 1925 by Harry Akst with lyrics by Sam M. Lewis and Joe Young, and which was more associated with Louis Armstrong and Cab Calloway than with the bebop intelligentsia. The anonymous liner notes for Solo Monk sound a note of surprise at the stride flavor of Monk’s interpretation, which should be no surprise to us after our the last few weeks. The piece as a whole is a light-hearted romp that does prove that Monk has a sense of humor, but it’s more than just a joke. Though the first part of the work has the propulsive drive and left-hand block chords of the old stride piano style, giving the feel of a 1930s show tune, the end suddenly shifts to a freer style and we see through Monk’s eyes the title character, no longer a caricature but someone fully modern and distinctive—complete with a closing trill on the highest notes of the piano. As the liner notes say, Monk had a sense of humor, but that’s not all that’s shown here.

“I Surrender, Dear” is familiar to us, having appeared on Brilliant Corners. This version has fewer of the outer eccentricities that appeared on that album. We don’t get anything like stride until Monk gets to the B section, and it isn’t until the second repetition that he starts to elaborate the melody, complete with some of the flat-finger seconds and clusters—and some brilliant tossed-off runs. He takes the last chorus with a good deal of rubato and an octave-long run down the keyboard.

“Sweet and Lovely” (by Gus Arnheim, Charles N. Daniels and Harry Tobias) is one of those tunes that seems to lurk in the collective memory; I couldn’t have told you the tune from the name, but it’s instantly recognizable (probably from old “Tom and Jerry” cartoons). Monk’s rendition follows the same pattern as “I Surrender, Dear,” with the first verse played straight (albeit with stride left hand, a tremolo in the right hand, and the melody in octaves). The improvisation on the third chorus, however, turns the song into a new composition, with a single phrase repeated in rhythm across the whole verse. For the final run through, Monk returns to the tremolo effect, but again brings us into a deeper emotional moment in the final rubato section.

“North of the Sunset,” only recorded on this album, is a Monk blues with a syncopated opening theme, full of pauses. The B section takes the melody and elaborates it into a fuller sound. Monk only gives us two repetitions of the whole thing; the track ends at 1:50 with the sound of the pedal dropping back into place. He saves his energy for a solo version of “Ruby, My Dear,” which immediately follows. Written in 1945, it’s one of his oldest compositions and one that he returned to often; we previously heard it on Monk’s Music. Here the improvisation is limited: some alternate rhythms in the B section, a few accelerated and double time sections in the final repetition, and a dip into a new key at the very end. Otherwise we are left to soak in the ballad.

“I’m Confessin’ (That I Love You),” a jazz standard with origins in a tune recorded by Fats Waller, gets a similar treatment. Here Monk’s exuberance peeks through a bit more in the hard-swinging syncopation, the spontaneous arpeggios in the B section as it turns into the chord change, and the extended bridge linking the first and second repetitions. Monk’s improvisation on the second repetition seems to take flight with two voices, while still anchored by the steady chords of the left hand. Again, a brief pause and a rubato run down to a final chord, followed by a high, far-off twinkle.

Ray Noble’s “I Hadn’t Anyone Till You” takes a freer initial approach to the late 1930s popular song, at least until the B section when the steady stride chords make their return. The end, with a pause for effect before a final declaration that swoops up the entire keyboard, lands in a key of joyous wonder.

We’ve heard “Everything Happens to Me” before, on Wynton Marsalis’s Standard Time Vol. 3. This version is briskly unsentimental by comparison, but still retains the loveliness of Tom Adair and Matt Dennis’s melody, even as it swings into something a little more dancelike, if one can imagine Monk’s eccentric shuffle as a dance. And as he steps away from the strict rhythm into a free moment for a while, suddenly it is a dance that ends with that same high note of wonder.

“Monk’s Point” is another Monk blues, this one featuring a repeated “bent note” (as bent as notes played on a keyboard can get). It’s a spirited tune that seamlessly flows from the theme into a sort of hybrid ragtime reel; as with “North of the Sunset,” it’s in and out in less than two minutes, but sees far more development in those two minutes.

“I Should Care,” the standard from Axel Stordahl and Paul Weston with Sammy Cahn, has been covered by everyone from Bill Evans to Johnny Hartman to Frank Sinatra, and the interpretations usually skew to the sentimental or the jaunty. Monk steers away from both interpretations. His approach is less jaunty, more defiant; you can hear the determination to give the impression that the narrator is just sleeping fine, that he doesn’t go around weeping. But that twist ending—“And I do”—is present from the beginning of Monk’s interpretation, especially in the end as the moving parts fall away and we’re left with an aching suspended chord before the final resolution. All in two minutes.

“Ask Me Now” is the last Monk composition on the album, and the only one to get more than two minutes’ running time. It keeps good company with “I Should Care,” sounding like a more conventional ballad than “Ruby, My Dear,” but the constantly shifting tonality reminds us that Monk’s simplicity is usually complex even as his complexity often is in the service of something very simple. In this case, the melody is eminently singable, even as the tonality seems to shift like the facets of a crystal in sunlight. Monk takes some rubato into the final verse, and a splash of a high cluster chord together with a Woody Woodpeckeresque final run let us know the narrator’s demands ultimately grow increasingly insistent.

We last heard “These Foolish Things (Remind Me of You)” performed by Johnny Hartman, but again Monk takes a different interpretive path, shedding Hartman’s overt emotion for a more abstract interpretation. You can hear his tonal imagination at work in the chord sequence that ends the first chorus, the run that takes us into the bridge, the progression that seems to take us off a chromatic cliff into the final verse. The final bridge is taken freely in not-quite-double time for a moment, until it settles down for the final chorus, and one last surprise: a lingering chromatic chord that never resolves, fading into silence and the runout groove.

Monk would record three more studio albums for Columbia, but only the last one, Underground, would feature a significant amount of new works. Arguably, the most rewarding recordings from this period are the live recordings that document the band with Rouse, of which one (Misterioso Live on Tour ) was released while Monk was signed to the label. But he toured extensively during this time, and there have been other live recordings from this period, surfacing as recently as the last few years, that have been exceptional. We’ll close this series with one of those next week.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: “Monk’s Point” received new life on the 1968 album Monk’s Blues in a big band arrangement by the inimitable Oliver Nelson. Here’s that arrangement:

Thelonious Monk, Brilliant Corners

The genius of Monk is in full flower here in his third recording for Riverside Records in 1956.

Album of the Week, July 12, 2025

Thelonious Monk followed up the 1955 pair of standards albums (recorded as his first for Riverside Records) with a bang. Brilliant Corners consists of five Monk originals, of which only “Bemsha Swing” was previously recorded, and with a title track so complicated that producer and Riverside founder Orrin Keepnews had to assemble it from multiple takes. But unlike previous Monk outings that were doomed to obscurity, Corners was a critical smash hit, with Nat Hentoff calling it “Riverside’s most important modern jazz LP to date.”

The album was recorded in a trio of late 1956 sessions, with slightly different personnel. The October 9 and 15 sessions featured a quintet with Sonny Rollins and Ernie Henry on saxophone, Oscar Pettiford on bass, and mighty bebop drummer Max Roach. A follow-up session on December 7 saw trumpeter Clark Terry replacing Henry and bass giant Paul Chambers replacing Pettiford.

“Brilliant Corners” begins slowly, as if the band is learning the melody by rote, following Monk’s initial solo statement, and then taking it through a series of key changes until it gets back to the beginning. But once that initial statement is underway, they restate the theme in double-time, demonstrating the band’s virtuosity as well as the difficulty of the composition. Rollins takes the first solo, playing ahead of and behind the beat in the single time section and unleashing a series of blisteringly fast improvisations in the double-time. Monk’s solo plays through the melody and demonstrates an unconventional solo technique on the fast passage: he plays a few bars, drops out, then reenters a few bars later with a blistering attack. Ernie Henry’s solo is fat, soulful, and not nearly as facile with the material as Rollins; the story goes that Monk dropped out under his solo to keep from distracting the alto player. He was not the only one to explore silence in the complex tune; the story goes that Orrin Keepnews had to check the microphones on Pettiford’s bass after one take, only to find that the otherwise highly skilled bassist was actually miming. The magnificent Max Roach seems fully at ease here, unleashing a blistering, melodically rich solo before the last chorus. Notoriously, the group never finished a complete take of the number; Keepnews assembled the version on the record from several fragmentary takes of the number. That may be so, but it’s a brilliant (no pun intended) assemblage.

“Ba-Lu Bolivar Ba-Lues-Are” (Monk’s phonetic rendering of the “Blue Bolivar Blues”) is named after the Bolivar Hotel, the Manhattan home ground of his patroness, the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter. The tune starts as a simple enough blues, but Ernie Henry’s smeary bebop improvisation over Roach’s precise stumble of a drum accompaniment quickly shifts it into something more. Monk’s imaginative and complex solo illustrates both his genius and his flat-fingered playing style, which often resulted in his hitting seconds and famously led to his assertion that “there are no wrong notes on the piano.” As if to underscore the genius of his approach, there are also virtuosic passages that introduce completely new melodies, one of which Sonny Rollins takes as a point of departure for his own solo. As before, Roach unleashes fusillades of snare sound under Rollins’ flights of improvisational fancy. Pettiford demonstrates his usual aplomb in an extended solo that leans into the blue notes of the tune.

“Pannonica” is an example of that most underappreciated of compositional categories: the Monk ballad. Played on the celeste rather than the piano by the composer, Monk introduces the melody dedicated to his patroness before the full ensemble joins and states the theme. Monk plays it more or less straight, with a few flourishes around the edges and the sliding chromaticism of the tune the only clues that we are in his genius realm. Sonny Rollins takes the first solo, seemingly at double tempo, though in reality the chords of the tune move at the same tempo as of the introduction; it’s just that he switches from quarter to eighth notes, as it were. Underneath him, Monk switches to the piano more or less undetected; one wonders whether this magic was accomplished with a swiveling chair or by the keen editorial hand of Keepnews. That it’s all live is eventually given away (and described in the liner notes) as Monk plays the second 16 bars of his solo with left hand on the piano keyboard and right hand on the celeste, before returning to all-piano to close out his solo. He moves back and forth between the two instruments in the final reprise, throwing high accents on the celeste and closing out with a repeated high arpeggio on a suspension, as we end the side.

“I Surrender Dear” is a pure Monk solo, recorded during the December recording session. Written by Harry Barris with lyrics by Gordon Clifford, the song appears to have struck a spark in Monk’s imagination, as he covered it several times in his recording career. We get all the Monk highlights here: the shift from stride into an almost hesitating rubrato that occurs even during the first statement of the theme; the introduction of an out-of-time series of arpeggios to accent the dramatic shape of the melodic line; and of course the Monkian splatted seconds that add so much to the color of the playing. At the end, Monk seems to drift away into a reverie of a different song altogether. For a cover song, it’s as pure a statement of Monk’s method on record as I know.

“Bemsha Swing,” the other song from the second session, brings Terry’s brilliant trumpet to the group. Terry had previously played for Charlie Barnet and Count Basie, but he was in Duke Ellington’s band at the time of this recording. (He would later be in the Tonight Show band for ten years and play with Oscar Peterson for an astonishing 32 years; he’d outlive most of the players on this session, dying in 2015.) This is the only of Monk’s compositions from this record to have appeared previously, recorded for his Thelonious Monk Trio record for Prestige in 1952. Monk essays the melody as a series of rising fourths in a sort of stumbling fanfare, then firmly states it in the opening proper. There’s both stumbling (virtually, via some impressive syncopation) and firmness in what follows, particularly from Roach, who seems to be playing cymbals and snare with one hand and foot and tympani with the other hand throughout. Chambers is completely unfazed by the melodic complexity, sliding through the changes without breaking a sweat. Likewise, Rollins appears completely at home here, essaying a series of improvised double-timed thoughts that unroll as a continuous melody over the chords. Terry follows Rollins’ lead but switches it up with some longer held notes and some judicious rhythmic pauses between phrases. Monk’s solo occasions both some out-there high improvisation and some of Roach’s finest work on the record, as he alternates some fine snare work with emphatic pronouncements on the timpani, both in time and in hemiola. Chambers takes a solo that alternates walking the changes with statements of the melody, and Rollins picks things up in media res. Monk joins Rollins for the second verse of his solo with his own improv, and Terry comes in seamlessly to single the final chorus. There are many fine examples of collective improvisation in recorded jazz history, but I’m fairly certain there are no finer moments in Monk’s recordings to this point.

With Brilliant Corners, Monk had finally tipped the balance on the critical appraisal of his works, and his compositions and recordings began attracting more favorable notice. This affected not only his freedom to record but also the players he attracted. It was two short months after the April 1957 release of the record that he recorded Monk’s Music with John Coltrane and Coleman Hawkins. There followed a series of studio and live recordings for Riverside that ended in a royalty dispute. But Monk wasn’t done yet; his biggest selling recordings were ahead of him. We’ll hear one of those next week.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Thanks to the archival work done to assemble various biopics of Monk, we have a recording of Monk playing “Pannonica” for his patroness shortly after he wrote it, including his spoken introduction. There’s so little of Monk’s spoken voice out there that this is a rare treat indeed.

Thelonious Monk, Plays Duke Ellington

How do you convince a reluctant public to buy into a great genius’s work? In this landmark 1955 album, by allowing them to hear him play—and transform—music they already knew.

Album of the Week, July 5, 2025

We’ve written about a lot of musicians in this series. There have been heroes, back room figures, producers, composers, soloists and sidemen. There’s one whose work has been touched on a few times, but who has only appeared in these virtual pages one time as the leader of his own group—and in that write up, I was mostly focused on his sideman. That man is Thelonious Sphere Monk.

When I reviewed Monk’s Music, I started in the middle of his story, so let’s step back to the beginning. Born in 1917 in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, a city east of Raleigh known for cotton, tobacco, racial segregation, the civil rights movement and the original headquarters of Hardees, Monk and his family relocated to the Phipps Houses in the San Juan Hill neighborhood of Manhattan when he was five. He learned piano from a neighbor, Alberta Simmons, beginning at age nine. Simmons taught him the stride piano style of Fats Waller and James P. Johnson, as well as learning to play hymns from his mother. He attended Stuyvesant High School but left to focus on the piano. He put his first band together at age sixteen and honed his chops in “cutting contests” at Minton’s Playhouse, where the new jazz form of bebop took shape in jam sessions that included Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Kenny Clarke and Charlie Christian. (Minton’s is, improbably, still around today.)

Monk was a psychiatric reject from the US Army and was not inducted into the armed services during World War II. He played with Coleman Hawkins, who promoted the young pianist, and made the acquaintance of Lorraine Gordon, the first wife of Blue Note Records founder Alfred Lion. Gordon became the first of many to champion Monk’s work to an initially resistant public. She recounted trying to convince Harlem record store owners to carry Monk’s records, only to be told, “He can’t play, lady, what are you doing up here? That guy has two left hands.” Gordon helped Monk secure his first headlining gig at the Village Vanguard, a weeklong engagement to which, reportedly, not a single person came.

The bottom came, as previously recounted, when Monk’s car was searched and police found Bud Powell’s drugs; Monk refused to testify against his friend and lost his cabaret license, costing him the ability to play in any licensed nightclub that served liquor. He got by playing guerilla shows at Black-owned illegal clubs, but the loss of venues hurt his already struggling recording career even more. In 1952, he began recording for Prestige Records, cutting several pivotal but underselling records, including a 1954 Christmas Eve session with Miles Davis that produced Bags Groove.

By 1955, Monk was highly regarded but broke, and the turning point came when Orrin Keepnews’ Riverside Records bought out Monk’s contract from Prestige for a mere $108.24. Keepnews took the challenge of marketing the eccentric Monk head-on. Reasoning that listeners stayed away from Monk due to his reputation for difficult music, Keepnews convinced him to record an album of Ellington tunes; as the producer recounts in the liner notes, “he retired briefly with a small mountain of Ellington sheet music; in due course he reported himself ready for action; and thus this LP was born.” Monk was accompanied by bebop giants Kenny Clarke on drums and Oscar Pettiford on bass. The album’s initial 1955 release featured photos of the three players; the 1958 reissue shown above has a portion of the Henri Rousseau painting The Repast of the Lion.

Monk begins with the well-known “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing),” opening with the scatted tag-line from the refrain. He leans forward into the syncopation until it’s almost but not entirely straightened out; plays fistfuls of cluster chords under the chorus; but otherwise plays the tune pretty straight. There’s a nifty countermelody that comes out in the second verse, riding in on the back of a triplet flourish, and a burst of stride in the last chorus. In other words, it’s pure Monk.

“Sophisticated Lady” is a tougher challenge for the album concept, as Ellington’s melody has to keep its sophistication and its savoire-faire even with Monk’s unusual approach to the keys. Monk nails the assignment, albeit with some unusual rhythmic approaches. The sequence of downward glissandi in the B section, the trills and slightly off accent notes that read a little like stride piano heard through a skipping record player, all add to the general Monk flavor while honoring Ellington’s basic melodic sensibility.

“I Got It Bad (And That Ain’t Good)” calls to mind Marcus Roberts’ later homage to Ellington (surely Roberts listened to this recording). Here Monk begins alone, playing the Ellington classic as though it were a sonata, with an unexpected tenderness despite the clusters of chords under the melody. When Pettiford and Clarke join in, the tempo picks up and Monk begins to explore the contours of the verse. His final essay climbs the octave chromatically, sounding a wistful note.

“Black and Tan Fantasy” opens in an unusual place, exploring the funeral march quote that Ellington ends the piece with. Where forty years later Marcus Roberts played this tune with a heavy debt to the stride tradition, Monk’s version is considerably more subtle, exploring the chromaticism and major-to-minor flourishes in Ellington’s tune.

Monk begins “Mood Indigo” with an imaginative vamp on the I – dim VI – VI portion of the tune’s famous chorus, underpinned with a syncopated running pattern. He takes the tune more or less straight, but with embellishments at the turns that could have come straight out of Erroll Garner were it not for the unusually crunchy chord voicings. A word must be said about Pettiford’s playing here; he not only keeps up with Monk’s imaginative chordal gymnastics but also picks up on his rhythmic variations, all the while sounding completely unflappable.

“I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart” borrows the same trick that Monk used to begin “Mood Indigo,” a little riff on the closing triplet bit of the chorus. Here Monk uses the brisker tempo of the standard to keep the triplet meter running as a commentary throughout, and we get some real moments of virtuosity (“two left hands,” indeed!). This piece is also a showcase for Pettiford, as he not only plays the melody but gets a few verses of improvisation. Monk picks up the running triplet meter again into the back of the tune, and ultimately lands it with a series of chords up to a resolution. This is as close to jolly as I’ve heard Monk on material other than his own. It’s a blast.

“Solitude” is more exploratory and more introspective, as Monk takes the tune more or less directly, albeit with some rhythmic commentary from the left hand in the beginning. He takes this one completely solo, and takes advantage of the opportunity to slow into the end of the last chorus and finish with some delicious rubato.

“Caravan” is Kenny Clarke’s moment to shine, with a polyrhythmic energy driving the classic tune from the first beat. Monk gives him room in the wide expanses of the chorus for his rhythmic explorations, and takes his turn in the verse. In the second chorus, Pettiford takes a forthright solo on the higher strings and shows how his imagination and virtuosity contributed to the bebop movement. Finally, Monk takes the lead once more and gives us a whirling-dervish finale. It’s as though the camels stepped onto the dance floor for one last boogie before the groove ran out on the record.

Keepnews’ instincts as a producer were sound. By subtracting one element from the rich and strange brew of Monk’s overall conception, he found a way to allow Monk the pianist to put his distinctiveness forward in material with which the general listening public was familiar. A second album of standards followed later in 1955, and by the time the third album came along in late 1956 the listening public was primed to hear Monk’s full artistic direction. We’ll hear that album next week.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Monk continued to play some of the tunes on this album throughout his career, albeit in different conceptions. Here’s a great concert video of him performing “Caravan” solo, live in Berlin in 1969.

“The flames kindled”

In Congress, July 4, 1776, A Declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress Assembled.

I wrote the paragraphs below 22 years ago, and sadly they still seems relevant.

A fleuron is a typographical symbol that looks like a flower.

Thomas Jefferson is on my mind, as he is every July 4th (I wouldn’t be a good Wahoo otherwise, I suppose). I wonder whether today, looking out at the world, and at his own United States, he would still feel the same as he did in 1821, when he penned the following to John Adams:

The flames kindled on the Fourth of July, 1776, have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism; on the contrary, they will consume these engines and all who work them.

And there’s another optimistic note that seems to speak directly to today’s nation:

The spirit of 1776 is not dead. It has only been slumbering. The body of the American people is substantially republican. But their virtuous feelings have been played on by some fact with more fiction; they have been the dupes of artful maneuvers, and made for a moment to be willing instruments in forging chains for themselves. But times and truth dissipated the delusion, and opened their eyes.