The foundational work of composer and pianist Thelonious Monk is heard in these six remastered studio sessions for Blue Note Records recorded between 1947 to 1952, performing twenty three original compositions in bands from trios to sextets with a who's who of emerging jazz leaders including Art Blakey, Max Roach, Lou Donaldson, Kenny Dorham, and Milt Jackson.
Label: ezz-thetics by Hat Hut Records Ltd Catalog ID: ezz-thetics 1141 Squidco Product Code: 32495
Format: CD Condition: New Released: 2022 Country: Switzerland Packaging: Cardboard Gatefold The Thelonious Monk Sextet
Idrees Sulieman,trumpet; Danny Quebec West,alto saxophone; Billy Smith, tenor saxophone; Thelonious Monk, piano; Gene Ramey, bass; Art Blakey, drums at WOR Studios, NYC, October 15, 1947 recording the compositions 1 Thelonious & 9 Humph.
The Thelonious Monk Trio
Thelonious Monk, piano; Gene Ramey, bass; Art Blakey, drums at WOR Studios, NYC, October 24, 1947 recording the compositions 3 Well You Needn't, 4 Off Minor, 7 Ruby My Dear & 22 Introspection.
The Thelonious Monk Quintet
George Taitt, trumpet; Sahib Shihab, alto saxophone; Thelonious Monk, piano; Robert Paige, bass; Art Blakey, drums at WOR Studios, NYC, November 21, 1947 recording the compositions 2 'Round Midnight, 5 In Walked Bud, 12 Monk's Mood & 13 Who Knows.
The Thelonious Monk Quartet
Milt Jackson, vibes; Thelonious Monk, piano; John Simmons, bass; Shadow Wilson, drums at Apex Studios, NYC, July 2, 1948 recording the compositions 6 Epistrophy, 8 Evidence, 10 Misterioso & 11 I Mean You.
The Thelonious Monk Quintet
Sahib Shihab, alto saxophone on *; Milt Jackson, vibes on *; Thelonious Monk, piano; Al McKibbon, bass; Art Blakey, drums at WOR Studios, NYC, July 23, 1951 recording the compositions 14 Four In One*, 15 Straight No Chaser*, 16 Criss-Cross*, 17 Eronel*, & 18 Ask Me Now.
The Thelonious Monk Sextet
Kenny Dorham, trumpet; Lou Donaldson, alto saxophone; Lucky Thompson, tenor saxophone; Thelonious Monk, piano; Nelson Boyd, bass; Max Roach, drums at WOR Studios, NYC, May 30, 1952 recording the compositions 19 Skippy, 20 Let's Cool One, 21Hornin'In &23Sixteen.
"He has written a few attractive tunes, but his lack of technique and continuity prevents him from accomplishing much as a pianist."
The fatal flaw in Leonard Feather's 1949 assessment of Thelonious Monk (from the book Inside Bebop) was a then relatively common, albeit insidiously superficial and short-sighted, perspective: jazz as an interpretive, and not a fully integrated compositional, discipline. From this point-of-view, the improvisational skills of a jazz musician were seen as a way to exploit, and at best enhance, the familiar aspects of popular song form, while simultaneously displaying their digital virtuosity. At this point in time, the avatar of piano technique put to the use of flamboyant ornamentation was Art Tatum; other notable figures, like Earl Hines and Teddy Wilson, brought melodic ingenuity and elegance to their performances. Even the emerging Bud Powell could be rationalized as a boppish reconfiguration of Tatum's keyboard prowess.
But instrumentalists of even their stature did not compose the bulk of their repertoire. And those few pianists who had established an early reputation in jazz composition - primarily Jelly Roll Morton and Duke Ellington (or, slightly later, a Tadd Dameron or George Russell) - were misunderstood to be players within a functional, if not intentionally crowd-pleasing, role. (We can argue Morton's exceptions to this description at some later date.) On his own, however, Monk devised a new theoretical basis for his compositional aesthetic, an unorthodox, deconstructed and reinvented pianistic approach that defined his music's unique rhythmic and melodic parameters. Simply put, by 1949 (and thereafter) his idiosyncratic piano technique and his radical compositions were cut from the same cloth, fully integrated as to form and function. The piano was the vehicle of expression for his compositional mindset, which explains his various surgical confrontations with "standards," which he was not interpreting but re-composing from the inside-out, and the resulting misconception of his "lack of technique and continuity."
The evidence is here, on this disc, which collects the twenty-three original pieces he recorded in the six studio sessions for Blue Note from 1947 to 1952. It's especially revealing that so many of these remarkably creative pieces - far from being the merely "attractive tunes" that Feather scarcely acknowledged - came to comprise the foundation of Monk's canon, revisited often throughout his performing career, suggesting that the composer selected them specifically to elaborate new variation upon variation, spontaneously, of their rhythmic and harmonic eccentricities, very much as J.S. Bach did two centuries earlier.
In fact, the majority of these compositions are probably better known in other, later, frequently live, versions than these first releases, which nevertheless allows us the opportunity to re-experience the jolting effect of their initial impulse. As Gunther Schuller has suggested, at their best they are no longer "tunes" but tone poems; drama and design are indivisible. Monk's complex, intrinsic sense of detail and construction take precedence over instrumental application. In the widely spread intervals and cascades throughout "Ruby My Dear" or the insistent chords and repeated notes of "Well You Needn't" the choices seem more ear-oriented than pianistically practical. Likewise, the asymmetrical patterns in "Straight, No Chaser," the circuitous line of "Criss Cross," and the absurdist melodic shape of "Four in One" are clearly outside of keyboard conventions, the product of pure imagination. It is precisely the unfamiliarity and seeming incongruity of Monk's technique that articulates the tension necessary to confirm the sublime. As the British philosopher Francis Bacon offered nearly four hundred years earlier, "There is no exquisite beauty without some strangeness in proportion."
There's something to be said about the unusual ensembles employed in these sessions as well. Names like Danny Quebec West, Billy Smith, and George Taitt may mean nothing to us today, and the reputations of Idrees Sulieman or Sahib Shihab may fade over time, but they provided Monk with a fascinating broader palette as he developed these pieces for recording than he was later accustomed to work with. Thus we have the strange horn voicings of "Thelonious" (followed by Monk's cubist phrasing and revealing stride episode), the tangy out-chorus of "Skippy," and the almost claustrophobically dissonant harmonies of "Hornin' In" and "Sixteen" - arrangements not to be repeated, and which induce some regret that Monk limited his working group to a single saxophonist over the years. (On that point, Misha Mengelberg loved to pronounce Lucky Thompson as the most compatible saxophonist that Monk ever had, however briefly.)
Truly creative artists have greater insight into the process and necessity of their efforts than do we mere mortals, which may be why Gertrude Stein's statement (from Composition as Explanation, written in 1925-26), having nothing to do with Monk, may have everything to do with Monk; that is, "Everything is the same except composition and as the composition is different and always going to be different everything is not the same." "-Art Lange, Chicago, September 2022