theloniousmonk – Jarrett House North

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.

Marcus Roberts, Alone With Three Giants

Roberts’ solo recital explores three distinctive jazz composers’ voices and finds his own.

Album of the Week, June 21, 2025

The challenge of mastering your influences has come up several times in this series, and it’s one that permeates the practice of jazz: how do you move beyond imitating those that came before you and shaped your thinking about music? Over the course of several records we saw Branford Marsalis arrive at a sound that is distinctively his own, particularly with The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born.

Marcus Roberts was on his own such journey, working through his compositional and performing influences in his first few solo outings. Today’s record finds him confronting those influences head on in a solo recital that performs music from three of his greatest influences: Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, and Thelonious Monk. And he comes out the other side with a sound that is distinctively Marcus Roberts.

“Jungle Blues” opens the album; one of three Jelly Roll Morton compositions here, Roberts keeps the mood placid but with an undercurrent of perpetual motion from the stride chords in the left hand. He also adds harmonic interest with his left hand, bringing in notes of gospel and blues that add complexity and interest. Also noteworthy is the way the melody migrates from the right hand to the left, so that he can add what almost seems a third voice with the right hand.

“Mood Indigo” takes a quiet path into Duke Ellington’s great composition (last heard in this column on Ellington’s 1950 recording Masterpieces by Ellington). on a theme from clarinetist Barney Bigard. The initial statement of the melody is in the high register of the piano, but just as Ellington did, Roberts takes the first verse down into the lower register of the instrument, coming back up for the chorus. He plays the choruses with a great deal of rubato and dynamic variation, sounding a bit as if the music is coming in a dream, an effect emphasized by the seventh chords in the coda.

“Solitude” starts out in the same pensive mood, but with considerably more warmth by virtue of its lower voicing. Legendarily the piece was composed in a recording studio in 20 minutes, as Ellington arrived for a recording session with 3 works and in need of one more. There’s no haste about the arrangement here, with Roberts using effects in the higher octave to add additional urgency and variety to the latter verses. Again, there’s a shift in tonality in the coda as Roberts seems to drift away into a reverie. “I Got It Bad (And That Ain’t Good)” feels a bit like the bluesier cousin of “Solitude,” but still holding the reflective move.

“Trinkle Tinkle,” the first of the Thelonious Monk compositions on the record, puts us in a different mood, more uptempo and vigorous. If you didn’t know it was Monk you’d think you were hearing more Morton, as the stride left hand technique Roberts used on the first track is also present here, albeit at a brisker tempo. Roberts’ rubato and octave-hopping improvisation keeping a thematic continuity with the Ellington tracks, and there’s some spectacular meter-shifting in the second half of the composition along with some swooping arpeggios, all while that stride left hand keeps rolling along.

“Misterioso” loses some of the mystery of the original composition but underscores Monk’s debt to Jelly Roll Morton in emphasizing the constantly moving chords in the melody. The improvisation carries us to some different places, with a combination of a high gospel improvisation and some left hand work that swings enough to feel a little shaggy. Overall there’s considerably more swing in Roberts’ interpretation than in Monk’s insistently four-square original. “Pannonica” gives us a more meditative Monk original; except for the ever-moving tonality of the melody, we might be back with Ellington. Roberts’ read of the tune has the rubato of his Ellington readings but the insistent swing of his Monk, adding up to an original synthesis of the different voices in the recording.

“New Orleans Blues” returns us to Jelly Roll Morton, where we hear a little of Monk’s conception in Roberts’ syncopated placement of the chords and the off-angle rhythmic drive. Roberts plays Morton like Bach, not in a fugueing sense but in terms of the absolute authority of the statement.

By contrast, in “Prelude to a Kiss” he continues to underscore the mystery in Ellington’s incredible ballad, lingering over the suspensions in the melodic line to call out the dissonance in the composition. Hearing it reveals the connection from Duke to Monk; both men heard harmonies differently than everyone else. The bridge gives us the connection back to Morton, as well, with the rooted stomp of the chords revealed as the harmonic language settles down. It’s a nifty Rosetta Stone for Roberts’ vision of the three composers, in just over three minutes.

And it segues flawlessly into “Shout ’Em Aunt Tillie,” with the opening chords feeling like an extension of the delirious chord progression in the opening of “Prelude.” Roberts takes the opening out of time and then downshifts into a vigorous 4/4. Listening to his performance, which shifts from fairly straightforward left-hand chords and right hand melody to some all-hands harmonic improvisation, is like listening to an orchestra come out of the wings. You’re reminded that Ellington didn’t only write swooners; this tune could have been repertoire for Louis Armstrong. And yet Roberts doesn’t just play it like New Orleans jazz. Listen to the rhythmic improvisation at 3:30, where he shifts the right hand half a beat behind the left, or 30 seconds later where the shifting rhythmic emphasis in the left hand gives the effect of a hemiola. It’s arresting, and one of the highlights of the record.

Roberts signs off the Ellington portion of the recording with “Black and Tan Fantasy.” The early Ellington composition on a theme provided by trumpeter Bubber Miley is a pocket symphony, and Roberts gives us the funereal march at the beginning, the rhythmic opening, and a solo that seems to float over the deeply regimented blues happening below. Again it seems like there might be more than two hands on this keyboard!

When we wander into “Monk’s Mood” it seems both casual and otherworldly. Like “Prelude to a Kiss,” the song takes us through multiple tonalities; unlike the earlier work, it doesn’t seem to resolve to any of them. But the main tune is still quotable, albeit fragmentary. There’s a broad romantic statement followed by a musical laugh in the lower piano, and just as it seems that we’re going to resolve in F major, it pivots to C, a brief dip into B and then finally back to C, using three octave arpeggios and asides to facilitate the key changes. And the whole thing feels effortless throughout.

“In Walked Bud” is more effortless Monk, with the eccentric genius’s salute to eccentric genius Bud Powell sounding positively straightforward compared to some of the other tunes—at least until Roberts gets into the first improvisation, where he shifts the rhythm, seems to linger over the phrases, all while keeping everything moving forward. In the second improvisation there’s a second where it feels like the wheels have come off, but he’s just slowing down into a swinging prelude to the final recap.

“Crepuscule With Nellie” is a composition we’ve heard a few times before—and critically, it’s a composition, as in written out from beginning to end, so if you play it right the opportunities for improvisation are limited. But Roberts finds them. Again as with “Misterioso” he swings where Monk played straight time, and—most scandalously of all!—he repeats the tag at the end of the second and third repetitions of the melody, like a private joke. The effect is to add a certain earthiness to Monk’s strange love song, which leads effectively into Morton’s “The Crave” to close us out. The last number is played on what seems to be a de-tuned piano and hearkens back to his rendition of “Shout ’Em, Aunt Tillie” with its rhythmic drive. There’s even a moment that seems to quote Scott Joplin and lean forward to Gershwin simultaneously. It’s just another great Marcus Roberts performance, effortless but ingenious all at once.

Roberts went on from this recording to do a series of albums in the 1990s, starting with my personal favorite of his albums, As Serenity Approaches, which features a combination of solo and duet performances and showcases his self-assurance as performer and composer. The recordings tailed off in the early 2000s as the industry changed and he went deeper into his teaching at Florida State University College of Music. He revisited Deep in the Shed in 2012 and has continued to record music that is steeped in traditional jazz while adding his own distinctive voice.

Next week we’ll close out this series with a sharp left turn that was both unexpected and inevitable when it was released in 1994.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS BEATS: I couldn’t resist highlighting my favorite track on When Serenity Approaches. While there doesn’t appear to be a full-album playlist of the CD-only release on YouTube, there is my favorite track, a magnum opus original that goes from a blues to a classical concerto and back within one massive seven-minute solo performance. Here’s “Blues in the Evening Time.”

Marcus Roberts, The Truth is Spoken Here

A debut album for a remarkable performer and a seriously talented ensemble, and a perfectly lovely set of straight-ahead jazz.

Album of the Week, May 10, 2025

Some young artists get their start playing with other young artists, and their eventual first record captures them coming up together as a unit. That’s usually the way it goes with rock and pop artists; jazz has often been another story. The first recordings of artists like Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and others put the young lions in combination with older, more experienced players. You can especially see this on Blue Note Records. Alfred Lion’s trick accomplished a few things: it provided the young player with backup from players who had more experience recording and playing, who could challenge them improvisationally; but it also ensured that there was a certain continuity of sound between the new player’s album and the others on the label—or more generally in that generation of sound.

I don’t know if the Blue Note model was on the mind of Delfeayo Marsalis, who produced Marcus Roberts’ debut session as a leader, The Truth is Spoken Here. But the band assembled for the session followed the model, combining some new players with the proponents of the “house sound”—the Wynton Marsalis combo—and a few veterans. Alongside Roberts were his erstwhile bandleader Wynton (on three tracks), bassist Reginald Veal and tenor saxophonist Todd Williams (on two tracks) who were both to begin performing with Wynton’s band, Charlie Rouse (appearing on three tracks, best known for his long collaboration with Thelonious Monk), and Elvin Jones, who had spent the years since his collaborations with John Coltrane leading his own combos. The choice of veterans must have been a deliberate choice; Roberts wore his indebtedness to Monk on his sleeve, and the influence of Trane’s pianist McCoy Tyner cast a long shadow over his playing as well.

The first track, “The Arrival,” demands close listening to get the exciting bits; I recommend headphones because Jones is an extremely vocal player, and hearing his grunts as the band plays through Roberts’ composition makes it come alive in a way that the playing (sadly) doesn’t. We’re hearing Wynton in his Miles phase, playing through a Harman mute, and while the tone is impeccable the whole solo feels like it happens all on one level, with little variation in intensity. Roberts gives the other players a lot of space, primarily letting Wynton, Elvin, and Reginald Veal drive the development of the track during Wynton’s solo. Veal is eye-opening here; his bass lines are acrobatic, but he’s not content just to walk them; we get rhythmic variation and counter-melody from him as well as some suspensions that build tension. When Roberts takes his own solo we start to hear a little more flash. There’s some stride in his playing in the way the left hand shifts the beat, and some Liszt around the edges of his chord voicings. You can hear the debt to Tyner in the harmonic vocabulary, but the touch (particularly when Wynton plays) is lighter. The outro for Elvin Jones is a shot of adrenaline even without the great drummer’s grunts signaling the beats.

If the opening showed what Roberts could do in a group context, “Blue Monk” is pure solo, and offers him the chance to really show off. He takes the Monk standard to church: while the opening is pure Monk, once he gets past the head we get some gospel around the edges, and more than a hint of the blues and ragtime that are always just under the corners of any Monk composition—especially what those left hand chords do to the time as he shifts freely from 4/4 to 6/4. It’s way more interesting than what he played on the first track; one wants more of it.

“Maurella” is another Roberts original, and it has the marks of the compositional direction he brought to his time in the Wynton Marsalis group on albums like J Mood: a series of suspended chords, taken so slowly in the head that it almost feels out of time, that ultimately fail to resolve. Roberts loved these chord suspensions so much that you can hear traces of them in other tracks, including the title track on the second side. In this setting, the progression seems to open up melancholy vistas behind the melodic trail blazed by Todd Williams, a tenor player from St. Louis who would spend about ten years in Wynton’s band and related projects before withdrawing from jazz performance to take the music director role at the Times Square Church. His tone is well suited for this work; he sells the odd chord progressions but doesn’t do much showy improvisation. There’s sensitive accompaniment from Jones and Veal throughout.

“Single Petal of a Rose” is the second solo number by Roberts, this time paying homage to Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. He plays the Strayhorn composition with delicacy and nuance, but with a power in the left hand that gives the work a deep dynamic range. When he gets to the bridge, you can almost get swept away on the wave of impassioned music making that pours out of the piano. Like “Blue Monk,” this one also leaves you wanting more of his solo work.

When we flip to the second side, we have shifted gears again and are in a straight-ahead post-bop number. “Country by Choice” features Charlie Rouse. Rouse played as Monk’s sideman from 1959 through 1969, including on some of the most famous Columbia Records recordings (Criss Cross, Monk’s Dream, It’s Monk’s Time, Straight, No Chaser). Here on more straightforward harmonic material he tempers some of his more eccentric harmonic tendencies, but he still brings a big tenor sound to the party. Roberts’ solo feels a little tentative through bits of the middle; he’s on firmer ground when he shifts the meter to something more syncopated and shouting, and Veal and Jones follow him the whole way. We get a shouting, snarling solo from Jones to bring us through into the recap, and Veal and Jones bring us out into a coda.

“The Truth is Spoken Here” brings the chord progressions first heard on “Maurella” to a quintet voicing with the addition of Wynton’s trumpet. Wynton takes a good deal more rubato than was present in the earlier iteration of the tune, and plays off Todd Williams’ high tenor notes with aplomb. This time Roberts takes the first solo, and his anticipatory downbeats combined with Jones’ growl lighten up the proceedings considerably compared to the earlier song. The trio cooks its way through the end of the solo and into the reprise. It’s a great performance, lessened only by the puzzling near-repetition on the first side of the record.

“In a Mellow Tone” brings back Rouse for a seriously swinging run at the Ellington classic, and the combination of Rouse’s tenor and Jones’ vocalizing recall nothing so much as the collaboration between Ellington and Coleman Hawkins that produced “Limbo Jazz” (particularly the echo of Aaron Bell’s spontaneous vocals on the latter tune). Veal stays particularly tight in the pocket, letting Roberts unspool melodic lines and shifts of rhythmic emphasis against an always-solid metrical backbone.

“Nothin’ but the Blues” gives us a staggering blues, with a tricky triple meter laid over the traditional twelve bar form. This track is the only time that I’m aware that Rouse and Wynton collaborated (Rouse would pass away only five months after this session, his last, was completed), and their off-kilter harmonic imaginations light up sparks on the head. Roberts may have called this “nothing but the blues,” but there’s more than a little Monk in it too, particularly in his solo, which gets more interestingly ornery the longer it goes. Wynton’s solo straightens out some of the brilliant corners, but it’s a more committed improvisational gesture than on the rest of the record, and it pairs well with Rouse’s sly around-the-corner elaboration of the chords. The outro gives each of the players a plausible claim to having gotten the last word.

As a debut album, The Truth is Spoken Here does a good job of showcasing Roberts as a performer, particularly in the two solo numbers and “In a Mellow Tone.” It’s less good at showcasing his compositional skills, but does a great job of highlighting his influences and demonstrating how his gospel, soul and classical background helped his perfoming conception transcend those influences. Like a good Blue Note album, the end result is a great listen, if not groundbreaking. As for his composition, the follow-up album would show a much broader range of his talents. We’ll hear that one in a bit; next time we’ll hear a different musician tackle traditional repertoire alongside a storied collaborator.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: With Wynton guesting on the album and given their close working relationship in his small group, it was only natural that some of Roberts’ originals would end up on a Wynton album. The title track appeared on Wynton’s 1991 album Uptown Ruler in a quintet performance:

Herbie Hancock, Herbie Hancock Quartet

Album of the Week, November 9, 2024

In 1981, Herbie Hancock was still touring with the V.S.O.P. band—well, most of them. For a tour of Japan in July 1981, neither Freddie Hubbard nor Wayne Shorter were available. So for this record Herbie, Ron Carter and Tony Williams were joined by Herbie’s labelmate, a rising star of a trumpeter named Wynton Marsalis.

Wynton was born in New Orleans into a musical family. His father, Ellis Marsalis, was a pianist and music teacher who named Wynton after Miles’ former pianist Wynton Kelly. There was something in the water at the Marsalis household; Wynton’s older brother Branford became a jazz saxophonist (from whom we’ll hear more later), and his younger brothers Delfeayo and Jason played trombone and drums respectively. Supposedly, a six-year-old Wynton was at a table together with Clark Terry, Al Hirt and Miles Davis, when his father joked that the boy should have a trumpet too. Wynton went to school in New Orleans, became one of the youngest musicians admitted to the Tanglewood Music Center at age 17, and attended Juilliard.

From the beginning, Wynton’s technique was pristine; he could execute the crisp runs required for Baroque trumpet music as well as the post-bop jazz concepts that were part of his heritage from his father. This led to an interesting beginning to his career, where Sony marketed him as both a jazz and a classical artist. (We had a record featuring his performance of a Haydn trumpet concert in my house when I was growing up.)

Wynton’s technique is on full display on the opening track, a cover of Thelonious Monk’s “Well, You Needn’t.” (The blend of standards and Hancock compositions on the record leads me to imagine the musicians in the studio, trying to work out what Wynton could play from Herbie’s repertoire.) The arrangement is the one Miles’ first quintet played; the tempo is accelerated beyond even the faster tempos that he favored with the second quintet; and Wynton is on fire throughout, tossing off pristine runs and playing a series of sixth and seventh jumps precisely and almost casually. It sounds as though the band takes Wynton’s prowess as a challenge, with Williams especially laying down some fiery fills. Herbie responds to Wynton’s improvisations, but by the end the two musicians seem almost to be contending as Herbie goes into something of a Latin riff and Wynton throws off high descending glissandi. At the end Wynton stops time for a moment with a cadenza that, surprisingly, resolves into a blues ending.

“Round Midnight” is also given in the Miles arrangement (which leverages Dizzy Gillespie’s introduction to the tune), and Wynton channels the elder trumpeter, playing with a Harmon mute and generally playing it cool, except for a few tossed off glissandi. Herbie plays some abstract runs, and seems to try to move things along, but Wynton returns for a second run at the intro. His high trumpet part soars above Williams’ thunderous drums, though it lacks some of the urgency of Miles’ version. Herbie takes the solo, keeping it firmly in the second quartet’s idiom, with chromatic sweeps of chords driving through.

Tony Williams’ “Clear Ways” opens with a duet between Wynton and Carter, with the rest of the quartet joining soon thereafter. It’s a brisk number that wouldn’t have been out of place on E.S.P., with the opening Herbie solo featuring some Keith Jarrett-esque vocalizing in the background. Wynton’s solo is quick, crisp and pointed, and displays one of his limitations at this early stage of his career: while he is precise and fast in his improvised runs, he is innovating melodically but not improvising rhythmically. Carter’s solo, opening and closing with bold glissandos from the lowest string, similarly moves along with a sense of rhythmic inevitability without being at all predicable melodically.

“A Quick Sketch” is one of two Ron Carter compositions on the album, and is a completely different mood and color. More of a blues-flavored tune until Herbie and Wynton enter with descending chromatic scales, the tune is the longest one on the album and begins with an extended melodic introduction, followed by Wynton’s solo. Here he stretches out more, displaying greater rhythmic fluidity as Carter improvises on the repeated ground of the tune. Carter takes a solo on his own tune, and Wynton wraps up with a series of suspended notes that circle the tonic without ever landing there, at one point breaking into a quotation from Ted Grouya’s “Flamingo.”

“The Eye of the Hurricane” is the one Herbie Hancock work to repeat between the V.S.O.P. albums and Quartet. Wynton leads with another accelerated series of runs, but this time interrupts the string of sixteenth notes with other rhythmic patterns. The solo is oddly static, in that, while it is very busy, it ultimately seems to do nothing so much as circle around the central chord. Herbie’s solo builds in menace as it accelerates up until the “eye,” Tony Williams’ drum break, is upon the band.

“Parade” is the other Carter composition, and is restrained by contrast, opening with Herbie playing the tune as a free ballad. At about 2:30, the group enters, swinging into a gentle samba. Wynton plays a fiery solo atop the groove, urging the group forward, only to have it return to a reverie until the very end, where Williams and Carter pick up the double-time melody that Wynton began.

Herbie’s “The Sorcerer,” from the Miles album of the same name, is given a reading of similar intensity to “The Eye of the Hurricane.” At the end of his solo, Wynton plays a chromatic descending scale which Herbie picks up and makes the foundation for the opening of his solo; Ron Carter picks up on the same pattern, performing it in portamento.

“Pee Wee,” a Tony Williams composition also found on Sorcerer, here gets a sleepy reading courtesy of Wynton’s muted playing, contrasting Herbie’s surging piano. Wynton plays the tune an octave up from its original performance by Wayne Shorter, and the result loses some of the quiet urgency of the original performance. The contrast with Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn’s “I Fall in Love Too Easily,” the only tune on the album from the Great American Songbook, is strong; together Herbie and Wynton play an emotionally rich rendition of the ballad to close out the set, in a reading reminiscent of Miles’ approach to “My Funny Valentine.” Herbie’s coda, in a different tonality entirely, underscores the somber brevity of Cahn’s lyric, bringing the album to a close in a very different place from where it started.

After this album, Herbie and Wynton’s paths diverged. The same sessions that produced Quartet also produced Wynton’s debut album, where he and Herbie’s trio were joined by Wynton’s brother Branford on saxophone, as well as other musicians. Herbie spent most of the 1980s following a very different direction; we’ll get a peek of that next time.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

Miles Davis, Bags Groove

Album of the Week, August 24, 2024

When we began listening to Miles over two years ago, we touched on the heroin addiction that nearly derailed his career just as it was starting. We then jumped ahead to 1955 when he began recording a series of pivotal albums for Prestige that led to his fame and fortune (and a bigger contract at Columbia). But starting at the beginning of 1954, Miles was coming back, having gotten clean from his addiction and recording newly disciplined and interesting music. Prestige released the results on 10″ LPs, and then, following Miles’ departure for Columbia, reissued them on 12″ records.

Two of those sessions, recorded June 29 and December 24, 1954 in Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in Hackensack, make up Bags Groove (the brilliant typographic album cover by Reid Miles omits the apostrophe, ducking the question of how to do a proper possessive, and I reluctantly follow suit). The players are a pretty significant who’s who. The first session (on side 2 of the record) includes Sonny Rollins and Horace Silver, while the second (side 1) features Thelonious Monk and “Bags” himself, Milt Jackson, on vibes. All tracks feature Percy Heath on bass and Kenny Clarke, a year away from expatriating to Paris, on drums.

“Bags Groove” comes in two versions, marking the first time in this blog series that we’ve run across a classic jazz LP that actually includes an alternate take. Both takes lean toward the “cool” side of Miles’ early repertoire, thanks to Jackson’s modal introduction and Miles’ Harmon mute. The liner notes by Ira Gitler say that Miles asked Monk to lay out during his solo, which must have aggrieved Monk to no end! But Monk does as asked; in the second take he drops out for the entirety of Miles’ solo, re-entering behind Milt Jackson, where he subversively adds different and unexpected chords until Bags himself drops out and Monk takes over. Hearing Monk do his thing has to be the principle pleasure of this arrangement, in fact, aside from the fluency of Miles’ solo over what would otherwise be a pretty straightforward 12-bar blues.

The numbers with Sonny Rollins are a different story. Sonny was apparently writing compositions on scraps of paper during the June 29 session, and three of his most enduring and most-covered compositions are the result. “Airegin” (“Nigeria” spelled backwards) has more than a little of the feel of “A Night in Tunisia” in the introduction, but it pretty swiftly shifts to its own thing—not yet as volcanic as it would be in another year with Miles and Trane on Cookin’, but a pretty hot groove nonetheless. The tempo is ever so slightly more relaxed here, perhaps in part due to Percy Heath, whose walking bass line sounds like it doesn’t want to be hurried.

That same sense of relaxed groove permeates the Charlie Parker-like “Oleo,” which again is a much more laid back take than that which the First Great Quintet would record on Relaxin’. But don’t tell Sonny; he and Monk get into some understated interplay during his solo, and there’s even a great moment where he single-handedly alters the chords on his way out of the solo with just one note. Monk is a little less demonstrative in this number, perhaps because no one told him not to play!

The sole standard on this session, “But Not For Me” appears in two takes, with take 2 first. Thanks to Monk, we don’t get a straight ballad, but a sort of wink at one; he doesn’t seem to accompany the other players as much as he comments on them. Rollins’ solo is a rollicking one, with more than a little swagger in its swing as he works in bits of “Doxy” into the second verse of his solo.

Speaking of “Doxy,” the third of the great Rollins standards here, Gitler calls out the “funky” character of the music; I’d prefer to call it “suggestive,” in a slightly exaggerated Mae West-style “come up and see me sometime” spirit. Interestingly, Rollins’ own solo is the only one that doesn’t feature any intimations of either hanky or panky.

We close with “But Not For Me (Take 1)”; are we suggesting that the doxy is not for us? Here the repetition of the performance is OK with me as the solos are anything but repetitive. Miles in particular takes a unique approach to the rhythm of his solo, playing a sly hemiola before dropping completely out of the last bar before Rollins picks things up. Monk is less oblique here than on Take 2, playing an unusually straight ahead solo before he develops into the idea of commenting on the other players on the last chorus. It’s a solid ending to a solid session.

Bags Groove gives us a great window into Miles the bandleader before he put his first great band together, as we get a fascinating glimpse of what an alternate quintet might have looked like (imagine Thelonious Monk on Milestones!). Next time we’ll check on some of the players that did become part of that quintet, and the one who made it a sextet, in a live setting.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

PS – A note on collecting vinyl: Sometimes you get lucky. I didn’t set out to find a copy of the 1958 second pressing of this early Miles set earlier this summer, but when I walked into the antique shop in western Massachusetts it was right there, and to my delight it was gorgeous and beautifully playable.

McCoy Tyner, Nights of Ballads & Blues

Album of the Week, February 10, 2024

On March 4, 1963, McCoy Tyner was in Rudy Van Gelder’s studio at Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey with Steve Davis on bass and Lex Humphries on drums. Unlike his prior session for Impulse!, this was going to be a session entirely of ballads. Who knows why—perhaps because Bob Thiele liked the results of the sessions, finished the previous year, that led to John Coltrane’s Ballads album; perhaps because Thiele wanted to balance Trane’s avant garde tendencies with more albums for more conservative jazz listeners. For whatever reason, two weeks before Herbie Hancock entered Van Gelder’s domain to record My Point of View, this single session of ballads yielded one of the most approachable records of Tyner’s early career.

The Ellington/Strayhorn/Johnny Mercer classic “Satin Doll” was by this point something of a chestnut, having been recorded by dozens of musicians despite having been written only in 1953. Tyner’s approach to the chords of the tune and his use of unusual rhythms in his solo helps keep the song fresh here. Steve Davis’ walking bass and Lex Humphries’ brush-forward drumming both keep the piano in the foreground, though Humphries has some inventive patterns for the drums throughout.

“We’ll Be Together Again,” written by Carl Fischer with lyrics by Frankie Laine, is far less well known, and the band takes advantage of the comparative freshness of the tune to create a sound that is more distinctive. The descending chords of the melody here create an effect not unlike a Bill Evans composition, with more than a hint of melancholy peeking out from behind the sunny melody. It’s a striking tune, and Tyner eschews the use of his customary block chords to let the melody speak more directly; he deploys unusual arpeggios that draw out darker shadows in the chords as accents to the melody on the head, but stays closer to the chords in the solos. It’s a good illustration of Coltrane’s observation, quoted in the liner notes: “He gets a personal sound from his instrument; and because of the clusters he uses and the way he voices them, that sound is brighter than what would normally be expected from most of the chord patterns he plays.”

If anything should belie the perception that Tyner was simply a conservative musician, it might be the presence of two Thelonious Monk compositions on the album. “Round Midnight” was of course a famous part of the jazz canon by now, following covers by Miles and others. His version of the standard opens with a solo verse on the theme that demonstrates some of those “personal clusters” as well as Tyner’s renowned sensitive touch. When the rest of the trio comes in, it’s with a rhythmic approach that pivots between major and modal, bringing a new feeling to the standard rather than echoing Miles’ arrangement.

“For Heaven’s Sake” is a little-known ballad by Sherman Edwards, Elise Bretton and Donald Meyer. Tyner gives it a straight reading that, in the last verse, opens some space between the chords, letting the tune breathe. It’s a striking moment, particularly as his final chords veer into a different tonality.

Gene DePaul and Don Raye’s “Star Eyes,” first given a jazz reading by Charlie Parker, here opens with a set of modal chords that seem likely to take us in a different direction, before the main tune comes in. Here Tyner displays a virtuoso flourish by taking the solo in double time, then layering dizzying arpeggios over the chords. It’s far from a laid back ballad reading, and the combination of his flourishes and Humphries’ occasional jab on the drums causes one to sit up a little straighter and listen.

“Blue Monk” is the second Monk composition on the album, and Tyner gives it a straight-ahead blues reading that features more of the pianist’s unusual chord voicings. Davis is a little more foregrounded here with a forthright walking bass that ventures into some unusual chords in the last four bars of the tune, as well as his only solo on the album. Tyner explores some unusual modal corners in his solo, and Humphries plays with the meter, joining the pianist on some of the triplets in the tune and dropping the occasional bomb. But it’s still a fundamentally conservative approach to the tune, albeit a pleasant one.

Tyner’s “Groove Waltz” is the only original on the album, and it’s a doozy, a modal waltz that follows twelve-bar blues form. The band sits up a little straighter for this one, with Humphries coming a little more to the fore with some inventive explosions and Davis keeping things pinned to the straight-ahead rhythmic heartbeat. Tyner’s melody wouldn’t be out of place on a Herbie Hancock record, but his densely voiced clusters—and that waltz—create a sound that’s distinctively his. It’s by far the highlight of the album for me, and producer Bob Thiele’s fadeout makes me want to listen to the original session tapes to hear how the band brought this one to a close.

The Mancini/Mercer standard “Days of Wine and Roses” closes out the album in a more familiar place with a gentle arrangement of the ballad. Tyner’s trick of introducing brief passages in a different mode surfaces here toward the end of the first and last verse, briefly lifting the tune into a different sound world. His use of a different rhythmic direction in the final chorus likewise sets this apart from a routine reading, as does the conclusion, in which Davis anchors the key with a bowed tonic note while the band concludes the tune.

Tyner wasn’t done with exploring the traditional ballad repertoire, and neither was Coltrane. Next week’s record is perhaps the most spectacular example of the journey through the discovery of melody that Trane’s quartet took in 1962 and 1963, on which they’re joined by an unlikely collaborator.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

Bill Evans Trio, Trio ’65

Album of the Week, February 11, 2023

Bill Evans didn’t record much in 1964—he was too busy touring. Aside from a studio session with Stan Getz, Ron Carter (alternating with Richard Davis) and Elvin Jones, his only recorded output from the year was a session with singer Monica Zetterlund (appearing under her name as Waltz for Debby) and live sessions in California and Europe. None of those sessions included Gary Peacock, whose contributions to Evans’ catalog began and ended with Trio 64. Instead, Evans was back touring with Chuck Israels and a new drummer, Larry Bunker.

The new album, which like its predecessor was recorded in one session in New York City, on February 3, 1965, follows a similar format: all standards, no originals, and more than a few numbers that Evans had recorded before. As for the players, we’ve met Israels before; Bunker is new to this column, but not to jazz. He had one of the most varied careers of a jazz drummer ever, having appeared on records over the course of his career for (deep breath): Peggy Lee including Black Coffee, Buddy Collette, Stan Getz, Stan Kenton including A Merry Christmas!, Gary Burton, Chet Baker, Benny Carter, Clare Fischer, Woody Herman, Dizzy Gillespie, Plas Johnson, Johnny Mandel, Shelly Manne, Carmen McRae, Oliver Nelson, Paul Horn, Art Pepper, Shorty Rogers, Pete Rugolo, Bud Shank, Lalo Schifrin, Sarah Vaughan, Wendy Waldman, the Fifth Dimension including Stoned Soul Picnic, Tim Buckley on Sefronia, Linda Ronstadt, Michael Franks, Diane Schuur, Kenny Rogers, Walter Murphy, Barry Manilow, Michael Bolton, Natalie Cole, Al Jarreau, Diana Kraal, Cheryl Bentyne, Vince Gill, Robert Palmer, U2 (he is the timpani player on “Hawkmoon 269,” from Rattle & Hum), and Christina Aguilera, on My Kind of Christmas. A session drummer at heart, he nevertheless made six recordings with Evans, appearing on two Milestone sessions (Time Remembered and At Shelly’s Manne-Hole), the Zetterlund record, a live trio recording, and an odd session with symphony orchestra, in addition to Trio ’65.

The opener, “Israel,” is a fast moving modal blues that starts out swinging and then doubles down. Evans plays rapidly descending arpeggios in his first solo that are a little reminiscent of Coltrane’s “sheets of sound.” Israels takes two solo choruses, and Bunker takes a solo chorus and then trades eights for a bit with Evans, echoing some of the rhythms from the pianist’s solo along the way.

“Elsa” is a classic Bill Evans Trio ballad, with Israels leveraging the suspended note on the 5th to good effect in his introduction. The arrangement moves in a sort of shuffling waltz, with brisk patterns on Bunker’s brushes surrounding Evans and Israel’s playing like a filigree. Throughout, Israels alternates a simple underpinning of the chords with a more elaborate descending bass line that reinforces the melody, switching with Evans seemingly telepathically.

This version of “Round Midnight” plays the much-loved and oft-played Thelonious Monk standard in an intimate, but not simple arrangement. Indeed, the trio seems to manifest all the parts of a more elaborate quintet performance among themselves. Israel’s playing in the middle choruses takes more and more prominence until it seems to spontaneously morph into a bass solo.

“Love is Here to Stay” is an unsentimental but jovial romp through the old Gershwin standard. Ella Fitzgerald may have done the definitive version of this tune in her Song Books, but she’d need to hold onto her hat to keep up with the trio here. The effective use of space in the arrangement of the chorus and the outro that shifts the song into a different key are both worth listening for.

“How My Heart Sings” is a brisk reprise of the title song from his earlier Riverside session. Here you can really hear the difference made by Bunker’s contribution to the trio’s sound, his brisk snare and hi-hat work urging Evans and Israels along. Israels is a particular delight on this track, with a lyrical bass melody under the chorus that sings. The whole track is over in less than three minutes.

“Who Can I Turn To” is a contemplative ballad, with Evans taking the first chorus out of time before a transition into a swinging second verse. The transition between verses hangs suspended in harmony each time, as Israels pauses on the fifth before dropping back down to underpin the chords. Evans shifts both time, moving rhythmically around the chords, and harmony in his solo.

“Come Rain or Come Shine” begins as a more melancholy iteration of the group dynamic from the prior track, but where “Who Can I Turn To” eventually finds a sunny mood, here the clouds stay stubbornly overhead. Minor key aside, Israels’ solo here is almost as brilliant as his subtle playing behind Evans; the pizzicato chords he plays ever so slightly out of time behind Evans in the intro to the last verse are stunning.

“If You Could See Me Now” becomes a showcase for the trio as they shift the rhythmic emphasis of the tune with each verse, keeping the chord progressions the same but playing swung eighth notes in one iteration, legato runs in another, marcato progressions in the third, and on for each evolution of the tune. Each verse seems to turn the kaleidoscope another fraction, revealing new highlights in the tune.

Trio ’65 would be the penultimate album for this incarnation of the Evans trio; they would play together just once more on Bill Evans Trio with Symphony Orchestra. The trio we’ll hear next time has some fresh faces at both bass and drums who would bring new energy to Evans’ approach.

You can listen to the full album here:

https://youtu.be/RBRF2cRVW1E

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.