riversiderecords – Jarrett House North

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.

Bill Evans Trio, How My Heart Sings!

Album of the Week, January 28, 2023

Producer Orrin Keepnews said in the liner notes to Bill Evans’ How My Heart Sings, “This project was the first time I had set out to record two albums by the same group at the same time,” referring to the album of ballads that came from these same sessions, Moon Beams. The theory behind this album was a set of more up-tempo songs to accompany the unusual all-ballads format of the accompanying recording. As Evans himself noted, “the selections presented here are primarily of the ‘moving’ kind, though there is in the trio’s approach to all material the desire to present a singing sound.”

Whatever you call it, this second recording from the May 1962 sessions, not issued until January 1964, is unusually buoyant. But it’s not extroverted; it rings with a quieter joy. You can hear it from the beginning, where Evans opens Earl Zindars’ “How My Heart Sings” with a gentle swing that leans against the syncopation of Chuck Israels’ bass. Drummer Paul Motian is a little more present here than on Moon Beams, underscoring the shift from 3/4 to 4/4 in the second chorus, but he still stays mostly in the background, setting the stage for the dialog between Evans and Israels.

“I Should Care” leans into the rhythm harder, with Motian swinging against Evans through several choruses before falling back behind Israels’ solo. Here the bassist underscores Evans’ point about really singing the line, as the solo is lyrical and all melody. Evans plays with the beat throughout this one, shifting emphasis to the second and fourth beats, especially in the last chorus.

We’ve heard Dave Brubeck’s great standard “In Your Own Sweet Way” before, but here Evans puts his own stamp on the tune, taking it faster and playing with the beat in the bridge, then briefly departing from the gentle swing of the original into a racing second melody, as though bursting into a second song in the middle of a first. Chuck Israels’ solo takes the melody down into the bass depths and fragments it further; when Evans steps alongside him he tosses the fragments back and forth with the bassist as they go.

“Walking Up” is an Evans original, with more than a little of the feel of John Coltrane’s “Countdown,” from Giant Steps. But when he turns the corner (or maybe reaches the landing?) we’re suddenly in a different environment. Perhaps we’ve walked to the top of a bridge and that’s a ray of sun peeking through the fog? At any rate, we’re playing with meter again, moving from straight four into a syncopated off-beat, and it’s fascinating.

If you’re going to play “Summertime” and make it your own, you’d better have some good ideas to share. The version on this record, again, shares some DNA with a Coltrane recording, in this case the version of the great Gershwin tune on My Favorite Things. Both recordings feature a rhythmic motif around the modal suspension underpinning the verse, but where Trane’s version has the beat in McCoy Tyner’s piano, here it’s given to Chuck Israels, who opens the track with the motif and never puts it down. Evans’ version swings more than Trane’s, due in large part to Motian’s skillful fills. This is probably the one track where Motian steps out of the background and you can really hear all of the things he’s got bubbling away under the others.

“34 Skidoo” is the second of three Evans originals on the album, and the jauntiest by far. Sliding in and out of different meters, Evans and Israels take turns syncopating the tune and perform some incredible handoffs between their turns at the wheel. The momentum continues through Cole Porter’s “Ev’rything I Love”; the tune leans closer toward ballad status than most of the numbers in this set, but when Evans comes out of the first chorus he takes lyrical flight.

“Show-Type Tune” brings us out with another Evans composition. A wistful opening on the piano is followed by a metaphorical “squaring of the shoulders” and a more forthright, lyrical verse. The most extroverted performance on the album, the track features Evans pulling out trick after trick in his solo, shifting chromatic scales at the end, and seemingly taking flight at the end. It is a heck of a closing number from such a deeply introverted performer.

The two albums recorded during the May 1962 sessions re-established Evans as a force to be reckoned with, and put a capstone on his time with Orrin Keepnews’ Riverside Records. The following year saw him move to Verve and producer Creed Taylor, where he would make some deeply original recordings — as well as a fair amount of dreck. We’ll hear some of the more original and less drecky work next time.

You can listen to the album here:

The Bill Evans Trio, Moon Beams

Album of the Week, January 21, 2023

Jazz musicians are often inspired by playing with particular colleagues. Arguably neither Dave Brubeck nor Paul Desmond ever excelled individually the records that they made together. And Miles’ great quintets were defined by the partnership the trumpeter made with saxophonists John Coltrane, then Wayne Shorter. But Bill Evans was inspired by his bassists—first and most famously Scott LaFaro, then following his death with Chuck Israels. It is that collaboration that brings this, the first proper record of the new trio with Israels and drummer Paul Motian, to life.

Evans and his trio entered the Sound Makers Studio in New York on Thursday, May 17, 1962, three days after his second and final session with Jim Hall for Undercurrent was recorded in the same studio. They cut four tunes that day, of which “If You Could See Me Now” appeared on this record. They returned on May 29, June 2, and June 5. The bulk of today’s record was recorded in the June 2 session, along with the more balladic material recorded across the other three dates.

“Re: Person I Knew” is an opening statement that is shrouded in modal mystery. Displaying several Evans hallmarks off the bat, including the out of time entrance, the yearning of the modal pivot between the G minor and D minor, and even the cryptic title (an anagram of the name of the producer who had spurred him to reform his trio, Riverside Records founder Orrin Keepnews). And then there’s the playing of the trio. After the solo statement in the first eight bars by Evans, Israels makes his presence known with a bass line that keeps time while sketching out the space around the open fifth and octaves. Motian’s understated but complex drum fills keep the whole thing moving forward as Evans and Israels breathe, listen to each other, make statements. It’s a powerful performance.

“Polka Dots and Moonbeams,” which lends the album its title, returns to a more normal and less modal tonality, but Evans and Israels continue their duet. Following the first statement of the chorus, Israels begins a complex countermelody that underpins the entire remainder of the song. The conclusion has him bring the tune to an unusually irresolute finish, descending to a relative minor.

“I Fall In Love Too Easily,” the great dark Sammy Cahn/Jule Styne ballad, here drives headlong into the darkness and comes out blinking into the light of a major key. The transition is so gradual that you hardly notice it’s happened until the end, where the pianist underscores the major with a few bars that seem almost like a dance before resolving to the final major chord.

“Stairway to the Stars” is lights down, swaying to the music after midnight, with only Motian’s insistent drum pattern nudging things on away from slumber. Thus roused, Evans plays a rhapsodic variation on the theme over a high obligato in Israels’ bass. The coda, which returns to the feeling of out of time, brings the first side to a close.

Tadd Dameron’s “If You Could See Me Now” opens the second side, with Evans treating the tune as a more straightforward ballad for the initial chorus, then gently swinging into a syncopated restatement of the theme. The interplay between Israels and Evans here is striking and almost telepathic, with the pianist taking a breath as the bassist enters with a chord change or plays the first note of the next verse.

“It Might As Well Be Spring” begins as a yearning statement then seems to take flight, as Evans brings the melody through two choruses and then into a third that almost seems like it’s in double time. Throughout Israels maintains a sort of running commentary that turns outright sly at the end, where after the final chord he seems as though he is playing the beginning of “The Christmas Song” (“Chestnuts roasting on an open fire”) before continuing the downward run one more note.

Jerome Kern’s “In Love In Vain” carries the melancholy burden of being from the last show he worked on before his 1946 death, the musical film Centennial Summer, which also featured “Up with the Lark,” another perennial Evans favorite. Again the dialog between Israels and Evans borders on the telepathic, with the heroic final chorus in particular a stunning example of their collaboration.

The last track, “Very Early,” is the second Evans original on the album, and one that was destined to appear in his setlists for the rest of his life. The tune is in playful Evans mode, as it circles the tone center while keeping things major throughout. Israels’ solo is worth a second listen, as he does some harmonic things that lend an unexpected depth to the musical structure while keeping up a dancing rhythm throughout.

Where some of Evans’ earlier work could be so delicate as to seem tentative, there is joy that rings from these sessions, a feeling of surety and confidence. The album seems to announce that Evans is back, and better than ever; the partnership with Israels was off to a good start.

One interesting side note: another memorable album cover here, with a beautiful model in a provocatively romantic pose. The model is none other than Nico, some five years before her Andy Warhol inspired turn as chanteuse on the Velvet Underground’s debut. Like Evans, there’s more than a hint of sadness behind her smile here.

You can listen to the album here:

Thelonious Monk, Monk’s Music

Album of the Week, March 19, 2022.

Today’s #albumoftheweek may seem like a detour from our exploration of Miles Davis’s recording career (via my record collection), and it is, a bit. But in other ways it picks up where we left off last week, with Miles’ band mostly leaving as they fell prey to their addictions. Today we explore what happened next to the most famous of those sidemen.

What happened to John Coltrane was that he found God.

This is not an inference or an exaggeration. In 1964, Trane wrote in the liner notes to A Love Supreme that “During the year 1957, I experienced, by the grace of God, a spiritual awakening which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life.” The newfound spirituality enabled Trane to quit heroin, though not before it irrevocably marked him; there is good reason to suppose that the drug, along with the alcoholism that accompanied his addiction, contributed to the liver cancer that was to kill him just ten years later.

Trane also found Monk, or vice versa, in 1957, and their collaboration made a substantial difference to their respective careers. Thelonious Sphere Monk himself had been struggling for years, after the discovery of narcotics (likely belonging to his friend Bud Powell) in his car led to the revocation of his cabaret card. His ability to perform in public limited and his eccentric composition style granting his music an unfair reputation for difficulty, his record sales for Prestige were relatively meager. In fact, when he sought to go to Riverside, the latter label was able to buy out Monk’s contract with Prestige for only $108.24.

But somehow Trane and Monk found each other in mid-1957 and began performing together at the Five Spot Cafe. Because Trane was still under contract to Prestige Records, he was not able to record widely in the studio with Monk’s group, but somehow the label managed to secure the rights to include him in this recording, which featured exclusively Monk’s compositions—plus, in a note of irony, a horns-only performance of the hymn “Abide with Me,” written by William Henry Monk (no relation).

The inclusion of the hymn takes us back to the evolution of Trane during this period, and spotlights the substantial and lasting difference that his spiritual conversion made in Trane’s music, almost from the very beginning. The single verse of the hymn is played solemnly and straight, with harmonies straight from the hymnbook. Structurally it serves as a prelude to the next track, “Well, You Needn’t,” which features an astonishing solo from Coltrane in full on pentecostal mode.

In fact, “Well, You Needn’t” is an astonishing track from start to finish. Monk’s piano opens by itself, swinging the rhythm and stretching it into something like 6/4, before being joined by the full band. Monk remains gnomic in his solo, approaching the chords of the melody obliquely rather than playing into it, before calling for his tenor saxophonist: “Coltrane! Coltrane!” And Trane enters, blowing leaps of fifths and sevenths across two choruses in something like a holy shout. He then yields the floor to Ray Copeland for a turn at the melody on trumpet, before Wilbur Ware and Art Blakey pick it up. Ware’s exploration of the melody evolves it into a pattern of descending fifths that is then picked up by the redoutable Blakey, who then takes the pattern across all the elements of his drum kit. Coleman Hawkins and Gigi Gryce take the last solos, with more conventional but no less fierce approaches to the melody, before the full band comes back in to close the track. It is nothing short of a master class in jazz improvisation.

The third track, “Ruby, My Dear,” is the one track on which Coltrane doesn’t play, but that is not a reason to skip it. It’s a remarkably tender ballad and on any other record would be the romantic highlight. But not here. On Monk’s Music the second side goes through some gnarly territory with the one-two punch of “Off Minor” and “Epistrophy” before it lands on a new composition, “Crepuscule with Nellie.”

The tune, dedicated to Monk’s wife, was originally to be titled “Twilight with Nellie,” before the countess Pannonica de Koenigswarter, a staunch advocate of American bebop musicians, suggested the use of the French word. The performance is through-composed, meaning that Monk wrote out the entire track rather than sketching the melody and chords as a basis of improvisation. It also means that what we hear in the recording is an unusually true representation of Monk’s original intentions—notable since this version, unlike most covers of the work, keep the rhythm straight rather than ”swinging” the eighth notes in the original melody. Indeed, throughout the album Monk plays with expectations of rhythm, often turning them on their heads, such as the off-center chordal interjections that run through “Well, You Needn’t.” However it happens, “Crepuscule” stands as a romantic highlight, not just of the recording but perhaps of all of 1950s jazz.

Trane’s time in Monk’s group would be brief, yielding this one studio recording and a handful of live appearances that have since popped up on record. He would soon reenter the studio as a leader, recording Blue Trane later in 1957 for Blue Note Records, and an immense amount of material—some 37 sides, released over many albums—for Prestige Records in 1958. In fact, 1958 was a pivotal year for Trane, who rejoined Miles in the January of that year. By that time the quintet had become a sextet, with the addition of another saxophonist who we’ll meet next week.

I first found Monk’s Music at Plan 9 Records in Charlottesville, Virginia. It was a happy accident brought on by my habit of rifling through all the Original Jazz Classics CD reissues and buying the ones that had the most interesting liner notes (a habit I wrote about some years ago). The copy shown in the photograph above was a reissue on translucent red vinyl courtesy of Newbury Comics some years ago. Listen and enjoy.

Review: This Here is Bobby Timmons

For every jazzman who has a long, illustrious career (think Dexter Gordon), or who blazes bright only to burn out too quickly (Charlie Parker or John Coltrane), there is a Bobby Timmons—an artist with a few frustrating flashes of brilliance followed by a long descent into alcoholism. By the time This Here is Bobby Timmons, Timmons’ first record as a leader, was recorded in 1960, he had already written three seminal original tunes while working with Art Blakey and Cannonball Adderly: “Moanin’,” “This Here,” and “Dat Dere.” 1960 was the peak year in Timmons’ career; he appeared or led on over 20 recordings with Blakey, both Adderly brothers, Lee Morgan, and Buddy Rich, among others. Thereafter his output as a performer and composer diminished until at the end of the decade he was appearing on only one or two sessions a year, and those live rather than studio appearances.

What happened to Timmons? Ironically, his very success may have been his undoing. Some writers have suggested that he was stereotyped as a simple soul player after his originals, which were very much in the “soul jazz” tradition of the early sixties and incorporated simple soul, blues and gospel licks into jazz’s compositional repertoire, became big hits. In fact, some writers go so far as to credit “Moanin’” and “This Here” with making Art Blakey and Cannonball Adderly (respectively) commercial successes.

That Timmons had higher ambitions than the soul-jazz crown can be glimpsed from the set list of this release, which tackles such classics of the repertoire as Ellington’s “Prelude to a Kiss,” “My Funny Valentine,” and Strayhorn’s “Lush Life”—the last as a solo number. The arrangements of all of these numbers are as straightforward jazz covers with little of the stride or gospel influences that Timmons was more famous for. Unfortunately, these numbers occasionally fall flat as a result. It’s on Timmons’ originals that the set really comes alive—though his “Lush Life” hints at the possibility of some deeper artistry, the other cuts either stay resolutely in the same soul-jazz groove or become facile and timid.

This reissue from Fantasy is part of a new line of SACD rereleases of seminal Riverside, Prestige and Contemporary recordings. The sound on the standard CD layer of the hybrid disc is clean and balanced, with the low end gamely holding its own against the cymbal-heavy sound of Jimmy Cobb’s drums—in fact, in a few places the bass seems a little too much in the mix, for instance on the second chorus of “Dat Dere” and on “My Funny Valentine.” A tape wobble partway through “The Party’s Over,” apparently present in the original master, slightly mars the sound, but otherwise the recording is clean and transparent, allowing the listener to hear Timmons’ grunts (like a quieter Keith Jarrett) as well as the music.

Ultimately, This Here is Bobby Timmons is a document from one of the major jazz movements of the fifties and sixties, and should be appreciated in that spirit. This release provides the most transparent glimpse yet into Timmons’ soulful playing and his studio sessions. Also recommended for a fuller vision of Timmons as a performer are his key sessions with Cannonball and with the Jazz Messengers. As a sideman, he was hard to beat; as a composer, he added new sounds and rhythms to the rich griot of jazz; as a leader, his tragically short career denied him the time to grow and mature.

Originally published on BlogCritics.