I'm sure it's available somewhere on CD, but check out Monk's 22-minute, stop-and-start solo rumination on “’Round Midnight,” which was recorded before he played the take that was issued on "Thelonious Himself." I say some things about it toward the end of this piece, which is in Das Jazz Buch. Some of the writing here sounds kind of spacey to me now. Also, I see that I rather loosely endorsed "recomposition," but that was part of the spaciness. Must have been in a strange place when I wrote this:
[1982]
Long before his death last February 17 at age sixty-four, it was obvious that Thelonious Monk was one of jazz’s premier composers, along with Jelly Roll Morton and Duke Ellington. From the deservedly popular “’Round Midnight” to such less-familiar gems as “Who Knows,” “Skippy,” and “Gallop’s Gallop,” Monk created more than seventy compositions, and, in addition to his own recordings, they are now his legacy. But as new recordings of Monk’s music begin to arrive--tributes from other artists and previously unissued material from the master himself--one wonders about the nature of that compositional legacy.
If Monk had been a composer in the Western classical tradition, his scores would be relatively straightforward blueprints for future performance, structures that any sympathetic interpretive artist could bring to life. But Monk, like Morton and Ellington, was a quintessential jazz composer, a man whose music cannot easily be separated from the way he and his chosen cohorts performed it, night by night. That is, Monk’s works were not composed and then interpreted, even by Monk himself. Instead, they were composed and then recomposed, coming fully to life only when the “intrepreter” brings to the music all that the music itself already possesses.
That daunting yet potentially vital task was one that Monk must have faced throughout his adult life. And judging by the recordings that have emerged since his death, it is a task that should remain daunting and vital for some time to come. Chick Corea’s Trio Music (ECM) and Sphere (Elektra/Musician), from the group of the same name that includes two former Monk sidemen, are the first in what will likely be a wave of tributes to Monk--though, as it happens, neither album was conceived as a posthumous salute. Half of Trio Music, a two-record set, is devoted to Monk compositions, and Corea says that “these tracks were recorded many months before Monk’s passing and aren’t intended as a memorial but as renditions of what I consider some of the classic music of the twentieth century.” A similar desire to honor a still-living artist was the impulse behind Sphere, which, by coincidence, was recorded the day of Monk’s death.
Accompanied by bassist Miroslav Vitous and drummer Roy Haynes, Corea deserves credit for choosing such seldom-performed compositions as “Think of One,” and “Reflections,” in addition to the often-heard “’Round Midnight” and “Rhythm-a-ning.” Also honorable is the pianist’s attempt to alter his normal style--a melange of Ravel, Bartók, and Bill Evans--so that it fits Monk’s musical world, where everything must be clearly stated and there is no room for harmonic sweetmeats or wispy impressionism. After a while, though, one begins to wonder whether Corea is really at home in this music. Once the themes have been stated, his improvisations often seem fidgety, as though he wished to abandon Monk’s stern restraints and frolic a bit in some less-demanding realm. But the ironclad logic of Monk’s music cannot be tampered with, which is why Corea’s version of the austerely graceful ‘Eronel” (attributed to Monk but actually written by Idrees Sulieman and Sadik Hakim) virtually destroys that piece by coyly delaying one of its key phrases. Recomposition, yes, but first one must grasp what is essential.
Such knowledge comes more naturally to the members of Sphere (pianist Kenny Barron, bassist Buster Williams, and the group’s two Monk graduates, tenor saxophonist Charlie Rouse and drummer Ben Riley), and their version of “Eronel” is near-perfect , a relaxed restatement of the piece that simultaneously floats and swings. As Rouse explains in the album’s liner notes, “[Monk’s] compositions, if you really know them, are not the regular slow or medium or fast tempos. He usually set tempos in between. Ben [Riley] and I know the concept Thelonious wanted, having been with him for so long. We have a sense of the rhythmic pattern.”
That would seem to gibe with a remark Monk himself once made, when asked why many musicians find his music hard to play. “It’s not hard to play,” he said, “but I know it, that’s all … maybe.” There is, however, not only a pause between Monk’s “that’s all” and his “maybe” but also a gap in sense, perhaps an ambiguity--one that “Sphere” inadvertently highlights. Barron, Rouse, and the rest are excellent interpretive artists, but they avoid the challenge of recomposition, as though Monk’s “that’s all” meant “this far and no further.” So Sphere presents us with a warmly affectionate and attractive portrait of Monk, but one in which there is little sign of the galvanic creator who can be heard on three new-old albums from the master himself: Live at the It Club and Live at the Jazz Workshop (both on Columbia) and ‘Round Midnight: Thelonious Monk/Gerry Mulligan (Milestone).
The It Club and Jazz Workshop sets, four records in all, were recorded on October 31 and November 4, 1964, by Monk’s working group of the time (Rouse, Riley, and bassist Larry Gales). The repertoire on each album overlaps, with seven compositions being played on both nights; yet Monk’s need to recompose his music makes these dual versions of “Well You Needn’t,” “Bemsha Swing,” and the rest into quite different experiences. In almost every case the It Club performances are more in¬tense, for this must have been one of the best nights this band ever enjoyed. Rouse, who could be a lackadaisical soloist, is pushed to the point of near-delirium; and Monk himself is in equally ferocious form. There is his massive, staggered-chord passage on “Balue Bolivar Ba-lues-are,” the way he works a fragment of “Blues in the Night” into his solo on the same piece, the sheer aggressiveness of his playing on “Well You Needn’t” and a great deal more. Turning to the Jazz Workshop album, one hears less electricity, less heat. But how much and how intriguingly Monk’s approach to “Well You Needn’t” has changed in just four nights, as he finds a jumping, Savoy Sultans-style groove that makes you want to at once laugh and dance.
A tune-by-tune comparison of the It Club and Jazz Workshop albums yields many such riches. But even more fascinating, as fascinating as any Monk performance that comes to mind, is his twenty-two-minute solo piano exploration of “ ’Round Midnight” on Thelonious Monk/Gerry Mulligan ’Round Midnight (Milestone). Three-quarters of the two-record set is devoted to original and alternate takes from the August 13, 1957, session that paired Monk and baritone saxophonist Mulligan--a meeting that failed to strike sparks, though Monk and bassist Wilbur Ware are in good form and Mulligan solos handsomely on “Sweet and Lovely” and “ ’Round Midnight.” Then there’s the other “’Round Midnight”--the solo piano version, which comes from the April 5, 1957 session that produced the album Thelonious Himself.
The originally issued take of this “’Round Midnight” was one of Monk’s masterpieces, an intense, nearly seven-minute rumination on his most famous theme. But now we have that take plus the music that immediately preceded it, Monk’s extended attempt to decide just how he wanted to handle “’Round Midnight” on that particular day. He starts and stops no less than seven times before beginning the final performance, which may suggest that this newly issued material is a collection of scraps that would have been left unreleased. But the incompleteness of these trial runs is a small price to pay for what we get in return, an almost literal opportunity to read Monk’s mind.
Probably aware that he was not going to attempt a complete take for some time, Monk takes hold of “’Round Midnight” as though he had never encountered it before--poking at its rhythms, stretching its harmonies and melodic shapes this way and that until the “’Round Midnight” we already know seems about to disintegrate. But what appears to be disintegration is really a microscopic musical analysis, as Monk breaks his composition into its smallest component parts in order to discover anew what it is actually made of. Once Monk has sifted through the fragments a few times, we too know what “’Round Midnight” is made of--a series of irreducible, crystalline motifs, each one as potentially beautiful as the familiar whole and each one, so it seems, capable of generating a very different “’Round Midnight,” depending on which facets Monk wants to highlight.
So even though the final version of “’Round Midnight” is one of Monk’s masterpieces, the takes that precede it aren’t really incomplete at all. Instead they suggest that the seemingly unshakeable logic of Monk’s music was built upon a ceaseless questioning of the forces that held together his own music, or anyone else’s music for that matter. From that point of view, there could be more than one way to take Monk’s “It’s not hard to play, but I know it, that’s all ... maybe “ response to the question “Why do musicians find your music hard to play?” In one sense, Monk’s answer obviously means, “Maybe it’s hard for them because I know how it should go, and they don’t.” But that floating, semi-isolated “...maybe” also seems to look back at “I know it” and “ that’s all” and, in a very Monk-like way, set them syntactically adrift--as though he were saying something like “But what all is this ‘it’ that I know? And to what extent, and in what ways, do I actually know it?” “I know its” chasing after “maybes,” radical risks undertaken in the face of radical doubt--¬perhaps one source of Thelonious Monk’s profound musical logic was his sense of how hard won the order he made actually was.
_forumlogo.png.a607ef20a6e0c299ab2aa6443aa1f32e.png)
