Help with bridge to "Round Midnight"

[JSngry]

I refuse to play Monk tunes - too personal -

I'm sure that works for you, seriously, (I understand the "too personal" aspect, I'm like that with "Giant Steps") but I don't know that I'd advocate that for everybody...I mean, there is much to be learned there (as there is with "Giant Steps"), and an "intellectual" understanding is only part of it (as it is with "Giant Steps").

Gezz, I'm on the verge of talking myself into getting into that whol "Giant Steps" elevator shaft, I'd best quit now.

[Larry Kart]

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.

[AllenLowe]

always good to see a Larry Kart piece I had not seen before - thanks Larry -

vis a ve Giant Steps, I should tell you Jim, about my meeting with Tommy Flanagan about 30 years ago - I said to him, "what was it like playing on Giant Steps?" thinking he would report some great musical epiphany - he said, "it was just a set of chord changes."

Edited July 26, 2008 by AllenLowe

[JSngry]

Yeah, that's what he says now...

He's on record (back a few decades) as saying that when he first got the changes (a few days before the recording), he thought it was a ballad, and ran through them as such. Then, when the session came and he found out the intended tempo, he was kinda like,"O.....k.....".

Hell, listen to him on all the takes, he pretty much just plays block chords, and as lightly as possible.

No dis, I mean, those are some tough-ass changes to get hit with cold, especially back in that day when the whole notion of key centers regularly moving in thirds was far from even semi-common.

I stay away from them because I'm an intrinsically lazy mofo, and I've loooked long and hard at the possible cost/benefit analysis, and all I can see the end result of learning how to be fluent in Giant Steps changes being is being fluent in Giant Steps changes, if you know what I mean. Now, sure, for Trane, that opened up a lot of possibilities for him to incorporate into his upcoming "modal" explorations, but that's Trane, dig? Trane had his mission, I had mine (and I say had because, really, I don't know if I can even consider myself a player anymore, or if I at some point will again...)

But as it relates to Monk, well, I at least understand the math, and have played those changes before, more than once, and have a rudimentary....visceral appreciation of what the game is. So I don't think it's necessarily recommended to totally ignore playing either Monk or Giant Steps on the "too personal" grounds. I think you need to go ahead and stick your whatever in there, just because, and then decide how much further you want/need to go.

I got a friend who trained for the preisthood with the Jesuits. He dropped out after a while, but he swears that part of the deal is that before you take the oath of celibacy that, if you're a virgin, they - the Jesuits - will hook you up with a woman (a hooker, I guess, either that or a real friendly parishioner...) so you can fully understand just what it is you're forswearing. I hope we can avoid all the cheap priest jokes here, because that's not the point. The point is that before you make the decision to avoid anything "on principle", you best understand what it is you're going to be avoiding.

Edited July 26, 2008 by JSngry

[Michael Weiss]

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.....

What a great piece, Larry. You really get it.

"correct" changes and "accepted" changes.

This makes much more sense.

It's perfectly understandable how a recording of an interpretation of a piece by someone other than the composer can become more popular than the composer's. But the "Real Book" is another can of worms. I often remind students that the Real Book was written by Berklee students like themselves, replete with downright mistakes, incorrect assumptions, and without concern about making a definitive representation of the song. Hopefully, this lesson becomes a major turning point in the student's desire to do their own homework. One could argue that, of all the negative effects that learning to play jazz in schools has yielded, the Real Book has to be one of the worst, along with all the "how to" method books.

[medjuck]

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."

Does anyone know if this available on cd?

[JSngry]

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."

Does anyone know if this available on cd?

[Soul Stream]

Just for the sake of argument, can anybody post a lead sheet of the whole song "Round Midnight" that would be Monk or Lacy worthy? I'm very curious....

[Larry Kart]

You really get it.

That will go on my tombstone (if I get a say), along with a similar remark from Rich Perry. I said hello during a break at a Rufus Reid gig and mentioned that he might recall an email I had sent to Bill Kirchner several years before that went on at some length about what I thought was afoot in Rich's playing and that Bill had then passed on to Rich. "Yes, I remember that," he said. "Very astute."

[JSngry]

Just for the sake of argument, can anybody post a lead sheet of the whole song "Round Midnight" that would be Monk or Lacy worthy? I'm very curious....

That "official" Monk portfolio that's out (Hal Leonard?) is about the best I've seen for any Monk tune.

[AllenLowe]

by the way, I think part of Flanagan's noncholance was a bit of professional jealousy or, really, pride - as in, 'hey it wasn;t just Coltrane on that record, I'm an important guy too." Tommy was a gentle guy, but he understood his own abilities -

[AllenLowe]

Mike - about the Real Book - I understand the problems with it, but I think it's a good thing - personally I learned the idea of chord changes from going through it, generally for the better. As a self-taught harmonist, it taught me how to use the piano to approach "standard" or triadic changes as a complicated but related sequence; it was always useful to compare its changes to original lead-sheet changes. It also gave me good ideas on how to use intervals to re-harmonize (eg. looking at a "G" as many things: the top of an AbMaj7 or as the 6th of a Bb chord or as the 9th of an f chord) - all things which allow huge amounts of harmonic and improviser freedom. I know that there are probably better ways to learn this, but it worked well for me, or at least within my own self-contained system (enough so to receive compliments from both Julius Hemphill and Randy Sandke, so I always felt I was doing something right - and the Real Book was a big push in the right direction) -

Edited July 26, 2008 by AllenLowe

[Teasing the Korean]

Mike - about the Real Book - I understand the problems with it, but I think it's a good thing...

While I have problems with the Real Book - many of the them - it DOES serve a purpose. In an ideal world, no one would need it, but the world I live is (sadly) not ideal.

[7/4]

Just for the sake of argument, can anybody post a lead sheet of the whole song "Round Midnight" that would be Monk or Lacy worthy? I'm very curious....

sending pm with attachment.

Edited July 26, 2008 by 7/4

[Soul Stream]

I'm by no means a "Real Book" hater...it's been a real help in my musical self-education. That said, it caused me lots of confusion with 'Round Midnight. But thanks to everyone here I'm getting a real good edumacation done proper! Thanks 7/4 for the pm. Also Jim...I just got that Hal Leonard book and it's really, really good. Can't wait to dig into it. It's version had the same changes for the bridge that Michael gave me.

[AllenLowe]

for me it was a real musical education - especially for tunes that were a little bit out of the mainstream and that had good changes in the Real book - like "Where Are You," "You Are Too Beautiful," "I Should Care" - particularly if one compares them to the original sheet music changes; first of all, by looking at the original sheet music one has a better idea of what the original composer intended and one can build from there - as Monk did on many occassions - on the other hand, it always fascinated me that Monk himself frequently stayed near the original sheet music changes - listen to his solo Columbia version of Dinah - where a typical modernist would look to reharmonize the A section (adding probably 2 and 3 minor subs) he stays on the F like an old-time pianist - which in many ways I think he was (even his version of stride sounds more like a '30s ragtimer than it does like James P.) - also on the Monk/Rollins version of More Than You Know, he resists the temptation to play a 2-5 in the third measure of the melody - my point in all of this is that the Real Book was, for me, an eye-opener on how jazz players use harmony, especially in relation to the original music -

[JSngry]

Also Jim...I just got that Hal Leonard book and it's really, really good. Can't wait to dig into it. It's version had the same changes for the bridge that Michael gave me.

Mike Fitzgerald was involved at some level, iirc. It's money, imo.

[JSngry]

- my point in all of this is that the Real Book was, for me, an eye-opener on how jazz players use harmony, especially in relation to the original music -

Yeah, I've got an old fake book from, probably, the 1950s which consistes of a lot of"assembled" copies of original lead sheets, and the first thing that struck me was that the ii-V progression was virtually non-existent. Damn near everything was IV-V. Especially a minor-ii-V progression. No such thing as a half-diminished, it was always a "minor 6th" chord built off the IV. Which makes Dizzy's comments about how when it first showed up in bebop he had to refer to it as "a minor 6th chord with the 6th in the bass" to get cats to grasp it all the more revealing, I think.

Then again, there's the whole functionality-of-song thing. A IV-V progression is just going to be more "suited" to the "environment" of a formal stage production than a ii-V. The "space" between the ii and the V creates an openness in which shit can...happen, that is intrinsically contrary to the tightly scripted needs and motivations of a theatrical narrative from that time, which is better served by the "tight" space of only moving IV to V.

Or hell, more suited to that time in general. Life was rife with "the expected" back then, it was expected to be!

[AllenLowe]

I remember a pianist complaining about working with Benny Goddman, that "he uses the sheet music changes!"

[Soul Stream]

It's funny how our ears are so used to hearing so many ii V substitutions in jazz that when I hear older jazz styles...they sound fresher to my ears since they don't have all the substitutions I'm expecting.

[JSngry]

Similarly, that's why "free" playing sounds/sounded so fresh - after a while, all changes begin to sound similar...

I mean, really, I've never had a problem working with singers, because virtually every standard is constructed from the same relative handful of devices. The difference, when there is one, is how they're put together. But one time throught the singer's vers, comes time to solo, and 99% of the time, I'm good (ok, "good") even if it's the first time I've heard the sucker, because eventually, they're all the same.

Of course, there are a handful of exceptions, and "jazz originals" are not quite so predictable (although complexity and predictability are often confused, I think...), but ultimately, "song form" is what it is, for better and for worse, and "surprising" it what it usually ain't...Free playing has also reached that point by and large, so I'm not playing favorites or anything here.

Ultimately, spirit is what carries the day. And form must serve spirit, not vice-versa. This is not a call to "it's all good" slovenliness either. I'm just saying that no matter how good you learn to connect the dots, they're still somebody else's dots, somebody else's picture. You gotta make your own dots, and you gotta make them REAL.

And that, as they say, is the difficult part...

[Soul Stream]

Put on a Louis Armstrong recording.... Sounds pretty brand new these days.

[JSngry]

Yeah, until you leave the house.

I mean, yeah, I know what you mean. But you gotta know that it's the spirit that's getting to you, not the song or anything else "concrete" about it. Not unless it's "nostalgia" at work, in which case how much of a misunderstanding of the greatness of Louis Armstrong's best work is that?

[Soul Stream]

I guess the thought is that sometimes the approach to music is so old, it's new again...in the sense that you'll hear things and it'll make you think. This all in relation to Monk not using a substition, and it sounding old/new all at once.

[JSngry]

I hear ya'.

You know what's funny to me, though, is how the "evolution" of the post-Wynton school of jazz is from mid-60s Miles to late-60s Miles to where now, guys are starting to incorporate KEYBOARDS and FUNK RHYTHMS and POETRY (i.e. - intelligent rap lyrics) shit, like it really is some sort of real evolution instead of just replaying the evolutionary cycle of the past. At the rate we're going now, it won't be too much longer before a new Wynton comes along to make shit even more restrictive. For that day, I can hardly wait.

To me, "the past" has (at least) two elements - the temporal & the eternal. I guess for each of us it's our call as to exactly which is which, but the idea of "going back to see what we missed", although attractive and at times even useful on a small-scale basis, inevitably falls short as a way to "move ahead", because what was going to be done, what needed to be done, was done.

All of which is to say that, yeah, playing standards with fewer substitutions is fun, and, yeah, it can force you to rethink (which is always a good thing), but beyond that....there ain't no beyond that.

Not that there needs to be. I'm just sayin'...