Thelonious Monk Jazz Music Reviews and Analysis

Thelonious Monk: Prelude to Success.

by Martin Williams

from Jazz 3 (October 1964)

In 1956 Thelonious Monk recorded a collection of standards called "The Unique Monk" (Riverside RLP 12-209). The record-an excellent introduction to Monk--was a prelude to his rediscovery and subsequent fame and it received excellent press notices. Nat Hentoff in Down Beat gave it four and a hall stars because Monk remains "one of the insatiably, irrepressibly, and valuably individual jazzmen in our era." He "has an intense sense of drama (not melodrama) that can create a reflectively dissonant, almost hypnotic mood...and a sharply knifed penchant for shaping and reshaping a few key phrases into a hail of plunging aural mobiles." In The Saturday Review, Whitney Balliett called it "an essential record," saying, "Monk's style--loose, almost diffident dissonances, wry single-note lines, a laggard-like beat--is easily plumbed. Here he winds his way... keeping the melody always just below the surface and embellishing it more than reworking its chords..."

One of the most immediately striking things about Monk's playing for me is that everything he says he says musically--if he has no music to make he doesn't fill out a single bar with faked blowing or rambling. All is given in terms of a musical sensibility, or it isn't given at all.

"The Unique Monk" is one of the most humorous jazz records ever made. The mutual agreement with which he makes him and you approach having some respectful fun with such warhorses as Tea For Two and Honeysuckle Rose is superb and is as far from mere ridicule as one could imagine. I will not attempt to describe how he does it; the effect is too subtle for the mechanics of the matter even to hint at. The delicious rubato with which he will now and then approach a perfectly ordinary chord on one of the slower numbers, as if saying he just can't find the obvious, and then delight both of you as he hits it with the joke on yourselves at how obvious it really was--or surprise you both with a delightful dissonance--is alive with human commentary. He can even have fleeting moments of what sounds like honest frivolity and we accept them because this is a man we are with and men can get frivolous. Just You, Just Me is one of his most carefully wrought sets of variations built on and around a melody. Contrast Monk on it with his bassist Oscar Pettiford. Pettiford's solos are really excellent but he is "blowing" on chords; Monk is building a set of variations, like Brahms-like Jelly Roll Morton--with a large sense of musical form and with a constant sense of musical expression. He is not, I would say, merely "embellishing" the melody. And Monk has the artist's special capacity for involving us with him so that we seem to be working it all out together.

Rhythm is fundamental to jazz and if one develops its role soundly, one develops jazz along the way that its own nature implies that it should go. Such an obvious thing, and yet in Monk's playing, how brilliant. In the forties, Paul Bacon, probably the only American critic who understood Thelonious Monk, said of him that he had looked at jazz, seen the gaps and, sacrificing the obvious things that everyone could do, proceeded to fill in these gaps.

Almost anyone knows that Monk is supposed to have been one of the founders of bop. Undoubtedly he made important contributions to the style, but it should be clear by now that what this strikingly original musician has been working on all along is something different.

Monk is a virtuoso of time, rhythm, metre, accent. He has played versions of "standards" which like Just You, Just Me are little more than sets of unique rhythmic variations directly on a melodic line, with an evolving pattern of displaced accents and shifting metres-a conception at once more basic than the groups of melodic embellishments and variations Jelly Roll Morton, James P. Johnson anti Fats Waller produced, and more "experimental" than the harmonic variations, which improvise new melodic lines, of the late swing and bop instrumentalists. And notice his rhythmic and harmonic experiments on a piece like his Evidence, a sparsely suggestive and obviously difficult tissue of notes.

Monk's harmonies, always a part of the picture, are not innovations in themselves-it is the sequence and pattern of alteration in which he plays them that is unique. In this and in simultaneous accentual shiftings, there is almost constant humor, even sardonic humor, that his wonderful, deliberate dissonances often point up.

Monk also plays harmonic variations, and these may seem quite simple, even casual, on the surface. His two choruses on I Mean You in the version he did for Atlantic with the Art Blakey Messengers show the kind of inner logic they can have. The first chorus is based on a descending motif variously altered. The second on a brief and contrasting riff figure which is turned several ways, subjected to a counter-riff or two and, in the end, complemented by a descent which alludes to the first chorus and ties the two together.. And, lest anyone doubt that Monk can improvise an original Iyric melody, let him hear the solo on a blues like Blue Monk or Functional

Monk's style, like Lester Young's in the late Thirties, depends on surprise. It does not, like the work of earlier "stride" pianists (yes, Monk, like Count Basic, is really a member of that school) depend on fulfilling the expected. He can also be one of the most exciting and original accompanists in jazz.

I think that on the whole, Monk's compositions place him with the great jazz composers, but I will confine myself to a few basic points. Whereas Duke Ellington often leans heavily on the "show tune" or "song" tratlition, Monk is more directly instrumental in his conception, even when he uses the 32-bar, A A B A "popular·tune" form. Monk, himself, has made the point about the integration of the B, bridge, melody; notice that the bridges of Monk pieces like I Mean You and In Walked Bud are both developments of bits of the final phrase in the A melody. It is not Monk's habit to base his compositions on "standard" chord sequences, but he may. That is almost bound to be true of any 12-bar blues, of course, but notice the structure of the melody of Blue Monk. Most blues have an open space of about three beats at the end of each four-bar unit. There are "modern" blues which deliberately fill this hole, of course, but the deceptive simplicity with which Blue Monk's melody, built on a traditional motif, unfolds makes for neither a trick nor a contrivance, but an inevitability that flows like life.

Monk does indeed "fill in the gaps."

Monk's first recordings as leader were made for Blue Note from 1947-50 (now available on 1510, 1511, and most of 1509). They showed a remarkably original musician, and a man who had already learned the essential artistic lesson of discipline that some men never learn: his own limitations, hence his own artistic form and real potentialities. Monk is, to put it bluntly (and I hope not too dogmatically) , with Joplin, Morton, Ellington, and Waller, one of the great composers of jazz. He is as I have also said one of the great virtuosos of rhythm, metre, and accent in all music, and a master of surprise. At least two-thirds of the Blue Note series is excellent, and Criss Cross, Eronel, Misterioso, Off Minor, Epistrophy, Four In One, and Skippy are probably the Monk pieces.

Prestige has collected some of the Monk of the early fifties on twelve inch LPs. Especially recommended are the Quintets' (7053) play on six fine compositions, and the sureness with which the leader can bring out the best in his side-men is constantly in evidence. The trios (7027) show the economical, witty pianist at work on "standards" and his own pieces with a style at once as basic as simple blues and as soundly advanced as any in jazz.

Since 1955 Monk has recorded for Riverside. Of the previous releases in this series I shall single out, besides the previously discussed, The Unique Monk and Brilliant Corners (12-226) . The Unique Monk is a good introduction to his playing, by the way and is, as I have indicated, a collection of trio performances on melodies everyone knows. It is among the most deeply (often sardonically) humorous jazz records ever made, and has, in Just You, Just Me, a disciplined set of melodic variations of a kind unknown since Morton and Waller. The latter collection has work by two quintets, is complete on its own terms, and is so full of suggestions about future possibilities for jazz, especially in its alternation of tempos on the title piece, that one may well despair of their assimilation.

The fault of the meeting with Gerry Mulligan Monk Meets Mulligan (Riverside 12-247), is Mulligan's, I think, but it is not so much that he met Monk on Monk's terms but that Mulligan on these extended solos is often a man toying with notes and chord changes but not really making music.

Monk's Music (Riverside 12-242) gives further evidence of the knowledge Monk has of the musical worth of every note and phrase he writes and plays, in the sound way he and his septet expand the lines of Well, You Needn't, Off Minor, and Epistrophy. And so compellingly does Monk's own presence guide his groups that, in a sense, it really doesn't matter that trumpeter Ray Copeland has a beautiful tone, excellent technique, but may let his lines wander a bit; that alto saxophonist Gigi Gryce (the weakest soloist) has trouble swinging; that tenor saxist John Coltrane's was then an individual, harmonically provocative, constantly improving talent; that Coleman Hawkins is (as he has been for over thirty years) a master in his idiom and shows it except for a slow start on Epistrophy. Monk himself keeps things fascinatingly alive and in motion.

One rather out-of-the-way Monk record has recently been reissued, on Savoy MG 12137, Monk and a quartet led by alto saxophonist Gigi Gryce. On it, Monk's composition Gallop's Gallop is not very well performed by Gryce, but is well done by Monk and the rest of the quartet, and it is a work that can stand with the very best Monk pieces.

A fascinating aspect of Five by Monk by Five (Riverside 305) is the musical understanding between Monk and Count Basie trumpeter Thad Jones, who seems to know exactly where Monk's music is and where it is going. He makes Monk's loyal partner, saxophonist Charlie Rouse, sound quite conservative by comparison. The recital also introduced two new pieces, one of them the interesting Played Twice

The Quartet Plus Two at the Blackhawk LP suffers from lack of rehearsal which is, alas, especially evident on a new visit to Four In One. But again there is a good new piece, Worry Later. I do not believe that Thelonious Alone is so good as the previous solo recital Thelonious Himself (Riverside 12-235), with its fascinating version of I Should Care, its wonderful swing on I'm Getting Sentimental Over You, probably Monk's best,'Round Midnight, and the nine-minute blues Functional which ingeniously elaborates a single percussive phrase. Thelonious Alone has some perfunctory repetitions here and there, but I found the performance of Blue Monk (which dramatizes its implicit, traditional habanera rhythmic cast) a delight. And the transformation of such highly unlikely ditties as You Took The Words Right Out Of My Heart, Remember, and There's Danger In Your Eyes, Cherie into excellent, two-handed compositions for piano is Thelonious Monk at his best. Such performances also provide an answer, I think, to those who are somehow still puzzled about why Monk should win polls on piano: his piano technique does everything he asks of it, his technique is all jazz technique, and with it he makes a finished music.

The one event that announced that Thelonious Monk was about to become famous was his long stay at the Five Spot in New York, a small room, very well suited to his music and drawing a warmly responsive crowd. Some recording was done at the club (Riverside 262 and 279), but unfortunately it preserves the playing of the least interesting of the several quartets Monk led there. Johnny Grifin plays tenor, and I don't think Griffin really perceived the techniques of Monk's music or its concentrated artistic purposefulness. However, the LPs do preserve some new Monk pieces: Blues Five Spot, Light Blue, and, especially good, Coming On The Hudson.

Now, at last, recordings by the Monk Quartet of 1957 have been issued. Jazzland JLP 46 has three titles by Monk with John Coltrane in the exciting process of discovery, Wilbur Ware on bass, and Shadow Wilson on drums. They are Monk's ballad Ruby My Dear, Nutty, and Trinkle Tinkle the latter probably as exciting and inventive as the music the quarter provided at the club. Besides those three quartet pieces there are alternate takes of Off Minor and Epistrophy from the Monk's Music session. There is also a new version of Functional which is so different from the first that it is actually another piece. The former was largely a percussive blues; this one is more lyric and in its way equally remarkable.

As I say, the quartet with Coltrane was the most immediate prelude to success. Today at last, Monk wins polls, draws crowds, and plays the larger rooms. In 1963 he signed a new recording contract with Columbia. But he has been a major jazzman for over fifteen years.

Portions of this essay appear in Martin Williams' The Jazz Tradition, (Oxford University Press).