Notes by Alun Morgan
* Trinkle Tinkle
(take 3);
* Crepuscule
With Nellie (take 2);
* Darn That
Dream;
* Little Rootie
Tootie;
* Meet Me
Tonight In Dreamland;
* Nice Work If
You Can Get It;
* My Melancholy
Baby;
* Jackieing;
* Loverman;
* Blue Sphere;
Thelonious Monk - piano
recorded on November 15, 1971 in London.
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"Thelonious Monk works so exclusively with the basic
materials of jazz that, in the best moments, his playing almost becomes a
working definition of that music. Monk's pianistic strength lies not in complex
executive feats but in a sensitive, vividly incisive deployment of those
basics; time, accent, meter, space".
Max Harrison's quotation comes from his essay on Monk in 'Jazz
on Record' (Hanover Books), one of the most perceptive pieces of criticism
written about this unique pianist-composer. Any record of Monk is worthy of the
closest study but the six-hour session which took place in the Chappell Studios
in London in November 1971 produced some of the most stimulating music
Thelonious has ever played. This session produced the last commercial records
ever made by Monk. Illness plagued Monk in his later years and when pianist
Henri Renaud went to New York at the end of 1977 in order to produce an album
of the remaining bebop piano players (Duke Jordan, Sadik Hakim etc.) he learned
that Thelonious had been lying, semi-paralysed, at home for some time. The
music papers seemed not to have reported this distressing fact but being
ignored by the news media was unfortunately, nothing new as far as Thelonious
Sphere Monk was concerned.
Born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, on October 10, 1917 Monk
was, quite simply, one of the three or four men who altered the course of jazz
at the beginning of the nineteen-forties. Ill health had often kept him out of
the limelight for lengthy periods but he invariably made up for these absences
whenever he returned to the recording studios and an extensive collection of
his albums must form an essential part of any jazz library. His style of
playing was inextricably linked with his abilities as a composer and each time
he sat at the keyboard he indulged in the art of re-composition. He tended to
work within familiar themes, standard tunes such as Just a Gigolo, Sweet and
Lovely etc. as well as choices from his own richly endowed portfolio of
originals, but his approach each time was fresh and unhackneyed. If he had any
cliches or familiar phrases then at least they have the virtue of being wholly
his own for he appears to have erupted onto the jazz scene complete and new, a
true original of his own time.
Branded "difficult to understand" by those who would
not listen, his music has always struck me as the most ordered, logical and disciplined
of all his contemporaries. Whereas Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie upset the
jazz world with their flashing, pyrotechnical displays of multi-noted runs,
tied to the thematic material by its harmonic relationship, Monk worked
assiduously at the almost forgotten art of rhythmic variations on the chosen
tunes. In this respect his music forged a direct link with the past, with that
enormously powerful and important pianist-composer, Jelly Roll Morton. But this
fact escaped many people because, as Max Harrison pointed out "people who
listened to Monk had never heard Jelly Roll Morton, and people who knew of
Morton's use of motivic development wished to hear nothing of Monk".
Ignorance and bias allowed the music of the two vitally important jazzmen to
co-exist, side by side, without anyone drawing attention to Thelonious's
importance in the lineage of jazz tradition.
Reasonably active throughout much of the sixties as leader of a
quartet containing tenor saxist Charlie Rouse, Monk went on an extended tour
with an aptly named unit the "Giants Of Jazz" in September 1971. (His
colleagues comprised Dizzy Gillespie, Kai Winding, Sonny Stitt, Al McKibbon and
Art Blakey; by common consent there was no leader although it was Dizzy who
made the announcements). The tour took in New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Israel
and just about every European country, east and west, culminating in two
concerts at London's New Victoria Theatre on November 14, 1971 where Atlantic
taped the sextet for issue as a two-LP set. The following night producer Alan
Bates took the rhythm section into a London studio to make a selection of trio
and solo performances. Before the date Alan rang me and asked if I had any
ideas about what material he should suggest Monk recorded. I said I thought it
would be intriguing if he could be cajoled into doing a James P Johnson piece,
or possibly Jimmy Yancey's At The Window. In the event Monk did it mainly his
way but fortunately some of Alan's ideas eventually bore fruit.
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This album collects together ten solo performances and includes
the previously unreleased Loverman and Meet Me Tonight In Dreamland. The
opening Trinkle Tinkle is take three, the first take to be made after Monk's
wife, Nellie, had cut her husband's overlong fingernails! (prior to this the
men in the control room had failed to trace a mysterious tapping sound on the
playbacks). Mrs Monk is saluted on the short Crepuscule With Nellie, a
delightful tune first recorded at a Riverside recording date in June, 1957. The
brooding, carefully played Darn That Dream was first placed on disc by
Thelonious the previous year (April, 1956 to be exact) while the closing Little
Rootie Tootie goes back to a Prestige session of October, 1952 when Monk was
accompanied by Art Blakey at the drums and a Brooklyn policeman, Gary Mapp, on
bass. Whereas Crepuscule was a tribute to Mrs Monk, Little Rootie Tootie was
the nickname given to Thelonious Monk Jr., the son who took up drums and at one
time played with his father's group. Nice Work If You Can Get It is a Gershwin
tune, but one which has a construction almost guaranteed to appeal to Monk. The
song copy as published shows it to have a 34-bar chorus (8-8-8-10) but Monk
manages to truncate that two bar tag at the end into one bar and then, as if to
make amends he completes the performance with a 'cliff hanger' coda. He first
recorded Nice Work for Blue Note back in 1947 and even in those days he was
working with Art Blakey. My Melancholy Baby gets the same kind of treatment as
Darn That Dream, a very intense and introspective reading of the tune. I can
trace no other Monk recording of this tune since his participation on a June
1950 Charlie Parker date when his colleagues included Dizzy Gillespie and Buddy
Rich. It is possible that he has seldom played the tune in more recent years.
Another member of the family, this time a niece, is saluted with Jackie-ing
which seems to have been written originally for a June, 1959 Riverside session by
a quintet containing Thad Jones. The final Blue Sphere was a completely
spontaneous and happy blues. Listening to it again, many years after the event,
I think that perhaps I may, unwittingly, have got some of my wish with regard
to a projected programme. The middle section has a 'stride' left hand like
James P Johnson and the final chorus, slowed down and a little less forcible,
would do credit to Jimmy Yancey.
Alun Morgan