MONK PLAYS CHOPIN

[JPF]

Go here, then scroll down to the 5th "listen to." It's the Chopin "Military" Polonaise (I'm told). He just kind of fools around for the first minute, then watch out!

Thanks to Terry Teachout for the heads up.

P.S. That's the Baroness talking in the background.

Edited June 15, 2005 by JPF

[Brad]

Why not? One of my favorites is Bud on Bach.

[CJ Shearn]

wow!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[White Lightning]

NICE!!!!

[brownie]

Beautiful!

Outstanding music. Hope they will be more of this on the site...

Didn't realize that Nica spoke with such a british accent!

[Bright Moments]

cool!

[Alexander Hawkins]

Wow, what a great site!

[Rooster_Ties]

I swear I've heard Sun Ra playing Chopin as well, somewhere. Was either on some solo piano gig, or in some very small-group context (best as I can remember). Or else something I saw in a Ra discography once.

[JPF]

Who said he didn't have technique?

Also, you should listen to the first clip in the list, in which he playfully tells Nellie he's the "high prince of bebop." In that clip, he says his own name, and he pronounces it "Thee-lonious." Have we been pronouncing it incorrectly all these years? Maybe I'll write to T.S. and see what he says about it.

[clifford_thornton]

I always think it's weird when people say Monk (or Bud, or Cecil) don't have technique... and yet people still do.

[mikeweil]

Some habits die hard, and calling Monk a technically incompetent pianists is one of the mots stubborn ones.

Jon Hendricks reported Monk was at his house when he had written the lyrics for "In Walked Bud" and played a perfect arpeggio with round fingers - telling he could play that way, but didn't want too ....

[michel devos]

Well, all depends how the levels of competence are set....

Do we talk about a beginner pianist (child), good amateur, advanced student, conservatory 1st prize, or Sviatoslav Richter..?

I do not think it is a good idea to have too close a look at the jazz pianists technique, simply because this music usually does not demand high technical abilities .

Against today's state of the art piano playing,I mean pure technic, jazz pianists are unfortunately not rating very high, with a few exceptions such as Brad Mehldau and the late Michel Petrucciani.

Nevertheless, that does not stop me from enjoying immensely Erroll Garner, the Three Sounds and Horace Silver ...no sweat

P.S I'm afraid this Monk's excerpt is not going to make me change my mind...awful( but that's just my opinion )

Edited June 16, 2005 by michel devos

[7/4]

I do not think it is a good idea to have too close a look at the jazz pianists technique, simply because this music usually does not demand high technical abilities .

Say what???

[Guy Berger]

Is this an unusually difficult Chopin piece? How well does Monk pull it off compared to classical pianists?

Guy

[Rosco]

Is this an unusually difficult Chopin piece?  How well does Monk pull it off compared to classical pianists?

      Guy

←

It's as good as Gould!

[Rosco]

That's amazing... and there's a lot of other great stuff on there too. I can't believe I hadn't checked this site out until now.

Anybody got any idea where the pieces with Coltrane originate?

And will we ever get to hear the Library of Congress recordings with Trane from Carnegie Hall?

[l p]

that's not monk playing chopin.

Edited June 17, 2005 by l p

[maren]

that's not monk playing chopin.

←

Do you know that for a fact, or is that just your assessment of what you heard?

Personally, I thought the recurrent left hand (bass) figure sounded just like him

(bottle-a-bump-bump, as in:

Right hand/treble**: BUM-bah-dah, bah-duh-duh-duh-duh-BUM-bah-dah

followed by left hand: bottle-a-bump-bump)

Plus the not-quite-idiomatic-but-dramatic-and-satisfying dynamic shifts are awfully Monkish...

Rosco's "good-as-Gould" comment is really spot-on for me (whether you meant it as praise or dis! AFAIC it's a compliment to Monk!): I encountered Gould's Well-Tempered Clavier when I was about 15 and ate-breathed-slept with it for a year. Discovered Monk two years later, with a similar obsessive crush (come to think of it, my first pianist crush was at 13: Artur Rubinstein playing Chopin. Next was Horowitz playing Chopin, Scriabin. I myself had been studying the piano since I was 7.)

Anyway, to my ears there was a kinship between Gould and Monk: percussive, contrapuntal (well, I guess that's between Bach and Monk!), idiosyncratic, unusually attentive to tone (using different tone production -- percussive, marcato, legato, etc. -- to delineate different contrapuntal voices)...

Had a falling-out with a piano teacher over Gould's recording of a Beethoven sonata, which I loved -- whereas my young teacher, newly-minted MFA from Indiana@Bloomington, said "It's BEETHOVEN, Ann -- not rock-and-roll!"

This recording definitely sounds like Monk to me -- I wouldn't agree with Michel Devos that it's "awful" -- I imagine Monk playing it for his own pleasure and education -- to answer Guy's question about how technically difficult it is, I would say it's kind of at the doorway leading into pieces that demand a "really big technique" (like Liszt/Transcendental Etudes or Beethoven/"Hammerklavier"). I was able to play the opening part well. For me, the "B section" -- minor key with all the arpeggios -- was more difficult -- interesting that Monk-or-whoever seemed more proficient with those arpeggios than with the big note-studded chords of the A part -- I was the other way around. But that's the thing about music and technique -- there are an awful lot of gradations ("Gradus ad Parnassum", anyone?) and many musicians, with a lot to offer, will have their individual areas of mastery and weakness.

(Reminds me of a Vladimir Horowitz documentary I saw, where he's giving a master class, and then talks about it just to the interviewer afterwards, saying how humbling it is when some sniveling 10-year-old dashes off perfectly a passage that you, "the master" can never get through without a few clams! And THAT reminds me of piano teacher I mentioned above, asking me to critically listen to a concerto he was working on, and then pleading, in response to a specific criticism, "Even HOROWITZ misses those!")

**I know it's not JUST the right hand on this part, I mean it's the most prominent.

[Joe G]

I enjoyed that post very much.

[Guy Berger]

By the way, I didn't mean to imply that if Monk isn't playing a "difficult" classical piece "properly" (which he may very well be doing -- my prior is skepticism -- but I don't have realplayer and can't download the clip) he doesn't have "technique". Just that the whole "Monk can play Chopin, of course he has technique" argument bugs me, it seems to concede the bogus argument that Monk's "regular" playing was somehow technique-deficient and that legitimacy comes only playing Chopin, or playing like Bud.

Guy

[l p]

i don't hear any monk there. i think a researcher suggested that it might be Barry Harris.

[JSngry]

lp & I unfortunately seem to have a terminal "personality conflict", but I know enough of his involvement in collecting and researching stuff like this to not dismiss his claim out of hand.

I would like to know, though, why the Monk family put it up on the site "as advertised" if there was some/any question as to proper attribution. I ask that not as an attempt to sideways discredit kp's claim, but out of genuine curiosity,

[l p]

i can't look at the notes about this item now, but wasn't there at least one other mp3 on that site, "joy to the world"(?), that they've since taken down. that one wasn't monk either. i believe that i was told that the monk family got a batch of nica's recordings, and sifted through them. she recorded other musicians at her house, as well as monk, so a mistake could be made.

i just don't hear monk's distinctive playing on this mp3, especially during the few seconds before the chopin piece starts - which, in this case, would probably be the easiest place to identify him.

[JSngry]

i just don't hear monk's distinctive playing on this mp3, especially during the few seconds before the chopin piece starts - which, in this case, would probably be the easiest place to identify him.

I had the same specific reaction. Not that that necessarily proves anything, but...

[l p]

ok, i have access to my info. there is a longer version of this session in circulation. the guy runs through many tunes, including quite a few monk tunes. and it's definitely not monk playing.