Pettiford and Kenny Clarke, and followed it with The Unique Thelonious, a collection of standards, this time with Pettiford and Art Blakey The pianist’s third release for the Riverside label is regarded by many as the greatest of all his albums. Brilliant Corners was recorded in three sessions in late 1956, with two different quintets. ‘Ba-lue Bolivar Ba-lues-Are’ (the title, bizarre even by Monk’s standards, is a phonetic rendering of his exaggerated pronunciation of Blue Bolivar Blues, the Bolivar Hotel being the Baroness’s residence at the time) and ‘Pannonica’ (on which Monk also played celeste) date from 9 October and feature Ernie Henry (alto sax), Sonny Rollins (tenor sax), Pettiford again and Max Roach. The same band laid down the title track on 15 October, although it proved so difficult to get right that no single take — and twenty-five were attempted in a four-hour session — was complete, far less definitive; instead, Keepnews stitched together the album version from multiple takes, something of a negation of Monk’s usual philosophy. On ‘Bemsha Swing’, recorded on 7 December, trumpeter Clark Terry replaced the altoist (Monk returned the favour on Terry’s In Orbit the following year) and Paul Chambers was on bass, while a solo piano version of ‘1 Surrender Dear’ from this session completed the album. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about ‘Brilliant Corners’ is the fact that it exists at all, if Keepnews’s recollections of the date are an accurate indication of events. It is a difficult piece for the period even by Monk’s standards, employing an unusual and irregular structure (an eight-bar A section, followed by a seven-bar B section and a modified seven-bar A section) far removed from the standard song form and blues structures (or, for that matter, as Ran Blake suggests, from Monk’s Afro-American roots), with a double-time theme in every second chorus and enormously complex rhythmic accents. Faced with these challenges, the problems in the studio grew to pressure-cooker intensity, as Keepnews recalls.The mere fact that such thorough professionals as Roach and Rollins and Pettiford were unable to satisfy Thelonious says all that need be said about the immensity of their task. As for young Ernie Henry, who tended to feel insecure under the best of circumstances, he soon came close to falling apart, even though Monk tried to ease the pressure by not playing during the alto solo. Late in the evening, Pettiford and the leader exchanged harsh words, leading to an amazing situation that perhaps could only have happened on this night. During one take, we in the control room were sure the bass mike was malfunctioning: Oscar was obviously playing, but not a sound could be heard. The unpleasant truth was that the bassist actually was not playing; he was merely pantomiming quite convincingly! (Not surprisingly, this was the last time Monk and Pettiford ever worked together.) In the course of their mammoth labours, though, enough had been laid down to allow Keepnews to put together a full take. Such tape editing was unusual in jazz at that time but the result is widely held to be one of Monk’s masterpieces, and with good cause. Thomas Fitterling’s suggestion that the composition itself sounds natural rather than contrived seems over-generous; indeed, the palpable sense of the musicians struggling to master the very artificial, hair-raising complexities of the pianist’s scheme is one of the primary sources of the music’s enduring fascination, and both Rollins and Roach emerge with particular credit. Monk’s subsequent albums for Riverside followed the familiar programming pattern, mixing his tunes with the occasional standard. In addition to the material from Brilliant Corners, his new compositions recorded in the Riverside years were ‘Bluehawk’, “Blues Five Spot’ (aka ‘Five Spot Blues’), ‘Coming on the Hudson’, ‘Crepuscule with Nellie’, ‘Functional’, ‘Jackie-ing’, ‘Light Blue’,the music's enduring fascination, and both Rollins and Roach emerge with particular credit. Monk’s subsequent albums for Riverside followed the familiar programming pattern, mixing his tunes with the occasional standard. In addition to the material from Brilliant Corners, his new compositions recorded in the Riverside years were ‘Bluehawk’, ‘Blues Five Spot’ (aka ‘Five Spot Blues’), ‘Coming on the Hudson’, ‘Crepuscule with Nellie’, ‘Functional’, ‘Jackie-ing’, ‘Light Blue’, ‘Played Twice’, ‘Rhythm-A-Ning’, ‘Round Lights’, and ‘San Francisco Holiday’ (aka ‘Worry Later’). In addition, sandwiched between his first two Riverside sessions, Monk also recorded a rare sideman date with the Gigi Gryce Quartet for Savoy, which featured three more of his original compositions, ‘Brake’s Sake’, ‘Gallop’s Gallop’ and ‘Shuffle Boil’. Another such session took place in May, when the pianist participated in a classic recording with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers for Atlantic, made up of five (already existing) Monk compositions and one by Johnny Griffin, who was then a Messenger but would replace Coltrane in Monk’s quartet in due course. The pianist made only a handful of such sessions under the leadership of other musicians but they were generally memorable occasions, and that rarity value adds an additional spice to this electrifying meeting. Monk and Keepnews attempted to inject variety into their output by varying the formats and settings, both from album to album and within a single disc, as on their next release, Thelonious Himself, which was recorded in April 1957 and combined solo piano selections with a version of ‘Monk’s Mood’ for an unconventional trio of Monk, John Coltrane and bassist Wilbur Ware. Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane, mainly recorded shortly after this session (and issued on Riverside’s subsidiary, Jazzland), featured both quartet and septet music, the latter with Gigi Gryce on alto and both Coltrane andNOMHY Ula KE dG renined it HNO Ute THOSt SOPMSUCALEd Percussion language in jazz. In his book Bebop: The Music and its Players (1995), Thomas Owens makes an interesting comparison of the styles of Clarke, ‘the undisputed founding father of bebop drumming’, and the younger Roach (Klook was ten years his senior). Owens sees Roach as the more aggressive player of the two, epitomized by his much more frequent use of the so-called ‘bombs’ on the bass drum: Where Clarke’s bombs occurred every few measures, Roach’s fall every two to four beats ... Where Clarke played just an occasional snare-drum fill to supplement his ride-cymbal pattern, Roach played so many that his snare drum often was more active than his cymbal . . . Roach’s ride cymbal sounded different from Clarke’s, partly because its tone quality was clearer and more bell-like, and partly because of a different accentuation pattern. [Each of these assertions is accompanied by a musical example in the book.] [But] the most dramatic difference between these two bebop pioneers was in their respective solos. Roach soloed far more frequently, both as a sideman and as a leader or co-leader, than Clarke did. Musicians use the term ‘melodic drummer’ to describe someone who develops rhythmic ideas throughout a solo instead of simply showing off technique. In that sense, Roach is a supremely melodic drummer; his solo in ‘Stompin’ at the Savoy’ is a striking case in point. He often starts his solos with simple patterns and gradually increases the complexity, as in Parker’s ‘Cosmic Rays’. He is a master of motivic developments and sometimes uses rhythmic motives drawn from the theme of the piece. He also plays solo pieces, including, since the late 1950s, solo pieces in asymmetric meters Roach took the supposed limitations of the standard jazz drum-kit, typically made up of bass drum, snare drum, large and small tom- toms, ride cymbal, snare cymbal and hi-hat, and turned them into an intricate vehicle for expression. Interestingly, Roy Haynes, another of the great bebop drummers, has recalled that Roach had no tom-tom when he first heard him play and while he admits he was not sure whether this was dictated by musical or financial considerations, he promptly took the tom-tom out of his own kit! The old four-to-the-bar bass drum accompaniment of traditional and swing-jazz styles gave way in the bebop era to a more fluid styleIn André Hodeir’s Toward Jazz, Thelonious Monk is quoted as saying, “I sound a little like [stride pianist and composer] James P. Johnson.’! Critics have also compared Monk to such stomp-down, stride-and-blues pianists as Jimmy Yancey and Willie “the Lion” Smith. In the late forties and early fifties, Blue Note Records billed him as the “High Priest of Bebop,” and he also led some classic hard-bop sessions. Two of these were Brilliant Corners (1956), with saxophonists Emie Henry and Sonny Rollins; and Monk’s Music (1957), featuring, among others, John Coltrane and Gigi Gryce. No one, however, has ever been able to pin a label on Monk. In one of his infrequent interviews, he told Grover Sales: “I’m not commercial. I say, play your own way. Don’t play what the public wants—you play what you want and let the public pick up what you are doing—even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years.’”2 Born in 1920, Monk was raised on San Juan Hill, an area in the West Sixties near the Hudson River that was New York City’s first black neighborhood. In the same interview with Sales, he recalled: “I learned to read notes beforeI took lessons. My older sister took—the girls always took in those days—and Ilearned to read by looking over her shoulder. Got interested in jazz right from the start. Fats Waller, Duke, Louis, Earl 132Hard Bop Heterodoxy 133 Hines—I dug all kinds of music—liked everybody. Art Tatum? Well, he was the greatest piano player I ever heard!’’3 On his first gigs, he was a church organist and played the piano at house parties: ‘They used to have what they called rent parties and they used to hire me to play when I was very young. They’d pay you about three dollars, and you’d play all night for ’em. And they’d charge admission to the people who would come in and drink. That's the way some people used to get their rent together.’’4 At the age of seventeen, he toured the country with a group accompanying a preacher: ‘Rock and roll or rhythm and blues, that’s what we were doing. She preached and healed and we played. And then the congregation would sing.” Barrelhouse, boogie-woogie, stride, and gospel—all these elements would resonate throughout Monk’s career. Stride, for example, in- forms his solo on “Thelonious” on his first session as a leader for Blue Note in 1947; and gospel informs his luminous inter- pretation of the hymn “Abide with Me” on Monk’s Music. His deep attachment to the black “folk” traditions, both sacred and profane, is one of Monk’s links to hard bop. He revealed it long before “returning to the roots’ became fashionable. It seems a natural development that a new appreciation of Monk in the mid-fifties coincided with the rise of hard bop. Refore then he had had his chamnions—inclndinge Colemanboogie-woogle, stride, and gospel—all these elements would resonate throughout Monk’s career. Stride, for example, in- forms his solo on ‘‘Thelonious” on his first session as a leader for Blue Note in 1947; and gospel informs his luminous inter- pretation of the hymn “Abide with Me” on Monk’s Music. His deep attachment to the black “folk” traditions, both sacred and profane, is one of Monk’s links to hard bop. He revealed it long before “returning to the roots” became fashionable. It seems a natural development that a new appreciation of Monk in the mid-fifties coincided with the rise of hard bop. Before then, he had had his champions—including Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Art Blakey, and Dizzy Gillespie—but many jazzmen were put off by his “weird” conception, his technically demanding tunes, and his eccen- tric approach to the keyboard. Hawkins (with whom Monk did his first record date in a studio in 1944} remembered, in a conversation with Joe Goldberg, that “one of the worst things I went through in those days was with Monk, when he was working in my group. I used to get it every night—’Why don’t you get a piano player?’ and ‘What’s that stuff he’s playing?’”6 In 1955 Monk was still often ridiculed, and Orrin Keepnews of Riverside Records was able to buy his recording contract from Prestige for $108.27. But by 1957 he had virtually been can-134 Harp Bor onized, and reviewers now placed him in what Keepnews called “the automatic five-star category.’ It also seems natural that Monk's reputation and that of Miles Davis should have risen at the same time. In fact, Davis's “comeback” was sealed by his rendition of Monk’s “Round Midnight” at the 1955 Newport Jazz Festival. Both Miles and Monk reformulated the jazz tradition, returning to such basics as timbre, attack, and melody while shaking off bebop’s clichés and its sometimes-calisthenic standards of creativity. Like Miles, Monk preferred to pare things down, creating an uncluttered musical space where he could work out his own solutions. In his essay on Monk in Toward Jazz, Hodeir mentions “the acute struggle between disjunct phras- ing and those pregnant silences”* and declares that “only in Monk’s music do asymmetry and discontinuity enhance one another, thereby assuming their full, symbiotic significance.” These are matters of overall structure, but Monk was of course original in other ways too. Instead of archinghis fingers (as anyone who has taken piano lessons knows all teachers recommend], he held them flat out, creatinga hard, percussive sound that seemed to coax more ringing overtones from the piano than others could achieve. Monk’s harmonic sense was also unique, even though his tunes were often based on con- ventional changes. As Alan Rosenthal observed in the Nation: “His chords were dissonant clusters of notes that often seemed to be groping for some sound, some sort of musical meaning, which could not be expressed on a conventional instrument. Monk once said that he would often strike two adjacent notes on the piano in an attempt to get at the note between the two. One can hear, in Monk’s harmonies, this seeming attempt to express simultaneously every sound or combination of sounds made possible by its being a given moment in a given piece. Moreover, whole phrases of Monk’s tunes—whole tunes, in a few cases—were without any tonal center at all. Instead, the transition from each chord to the next would create a sort of momentary or instantaneous tonality, resulting from the in-Hard Bop Heterodoxy 135 teraction of the two chords. Then, this tonality would change with the arrival of a third chord. In short, the listener’s entire frame of harmonic reference was constantly shifting.”“° Monk's tunes are brilliant little universes full of humor, passion, and quirkiness. His indifference to modern-jazz or- thodoxy and his love affair with the past hada liberating effect on hard boppers. As Miles Davis put it: A main influence he has been through the years has to do with giving musicians more freedom. They feel that if Monk can do what he does, they can.’ Exactly how this happened can be heard on Brilliant Cor- ners, which features Oscar Pettiford and Max Roach as well as Henry and Rollins. (Paul Chambers and trumpeter Clark Terry also play on one track.| As always on Monk’s dates, his personality reverberates throughout the album, encouraging everyone to extend himself individualistically and to avoid banalities. On the title cut that opens the LP, both saxophon- ists and Roach, challenged by the tune’s eccentricity (they never did get the head quite right, and the take finally released was spliced together from various attempts) and by Monk’s suggestive comping, turn in inspired performances. The raun- chy, squawky theme, played first in medium tempo and then faster, leads into a Rollins solo marked by wide intervalic leaps, extended harmonies, and phrases that begin and end in unwonted places. Then Monk comes in, all minor seconds, dissonances, and idiosyncratic runs and fillips. Henry is gruff and raw, leaning heavily on his vocalized tone, from which he draws a variety of growls and slurs. The last soloist is Roach, playing melodically and even quoting the tune at times. “‘Ba-lue Bolivar Ba-lues-are” is a “classic” Monk blues, at once immemorial and personal. One can feel Henry and Rollins being tugged between standard phraseology and ‘Monk’s universe. The result, in Henry's case, isa kind of bent- out-of shape bebop, a fractured sequence of ideas, as though fragments of bop and R & B had been pasted together in a collage. Monk is calm, lucidly minimal, toying with a few136 Hanp Bor elements to see how far out you can go while staying deep inside. Often he plays in duet with Roach. Rollins’s warm, relaxed solo makes an effective contrast with the more stri- dent and disquieting Heary, while Max contributes another marvelously melodic and dazzlingly polyrhythmic statement, sounding at times like a whole African percussion ensemble. “Pannonica” is one of a series of ballads (including “Round Midnight,” “Monk’s Mood,” and “Ruby, My Dear”) in which fervent romanticism combines with Monkish astringency. After a full-blooded, rhapsodic Rollins, Monk enters on both piano and celeste, echoing one of Rollins’s phrases and then dueting with himself in a solo built around variations on his, ‘own theme, whose melody he alters through subtle rhythmic and harmonic displacements. Another ballad follows: “I Sur- render, Dear,”” one of Monk’s lovingly humorous treatments of standards. The record closes with “Bemsha Swing,” where Monk again bases his solo initially on the theme and then Jaunches into a simultaneous improvisation with Roach, who plays both jazz drums and tympani on this cut. Rollins picks up Monk’s last phrase and soars over the drummer's thunder- ingaccompaniment, altemating long phrases with jagged frag- ments. After a characteristically tart and puckish Clark Terry interlude, Roach moves to the foreground, first in duet with Monk, then alone, setting up call-and-response pattems be- tween his two sets of tubs, and finally in duet with Rollins before the band takes the theme out. Another composer who challenged and extended hard bop- pers was Charles Mingus, Equal in musical stature to Monk, Mingus was the pianist’s opposite in many respects. While Monk was cryptic in his utterances, Mingus was garrulous, writing an autobiographical manuscript that ran to over a thousand pages. Monk’s tunes, models of concision, were very much of a piece. Mingus's opus sprawls, ranging from forays into “classical music” to re-creations of holy-roller church services. Monk’s art, in its way, was serene. Mingus’s was tumultuous, boiling, seeming to chafe at the limitations ofHard Bop Heterodoxy 137 music itself. Nonetheless, the two shared several traits. Both rejected modern-jazz conventions and, drawing partly on the past (in particular the work of Duke Ellington), created worlds that set them apart from their contemporaries. They were at once more “traditional” and more experimental than most hard boppers. Thus, when hard bop began to seem played-out in the late fifties, Monk and Mingus each offeredan altemative way of thinking, helping to save the school from the canned funk and simplistic clichés that sometimes threatened to choke it. ‘There are many stories of how Mingus would goad “hip” young musicians into reaching beyond their formulas. We have already seen his effect on Jackie McLean. Recalling the same period—when he and McLean were both in Mingus’s band—pianist Mal Waldron told Joe Goldberg: “He makes you find yourself, to play your own style. At that time, I played a good deal like Horace Silver, and whenever I did, Mingus would be on me with ‘That sounds like Horace’... When I ‘was with him, all the guys were playing very ‘hip’ blues, with all kinds of extra chords and passing tones. Mingus got rid of that, and made it basic. He made us play like the old, original blues, with only two or three chords, and got a basic feeling. ‘And he brought in some gospel music too, the first time that ‘was done. And suspensions. The way Miles and Coltrane play, getting to a particularpart of a number and staying on the same chord for several bars before going on, Mingus was the first one to do that.""!2 Born in 1922, Mingus grew up in Watts, California. His first exposure to music occurred in the church he attended with his stepmother: “A lot of my music came from the church. All the music heard when I was a very young child was church music. Iwas eight or nine years old before I heard an Ellington record on the radio. My father went to the Methodist church; my stepmother would take me to a Holiness church. My father didn’t dig my mother going there. People went into trances and the congregation’s response was wilder and more uninhibited138 Harp Bor than in the Methodist church. The blues was in the Holiness churches—moaning and riffs and that sort of thing between the audience and the preacher.” The Ellington record was “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo,”” “the first time I knew something else was happening beside church music.”"* After taking lessons on trombone and cello, Mingus finally chose the bass, which he studied first with Red Callender and then with Herman Rheinshagen, a former member of the New York Philharmonic. Under their tutelage and through his own diligence, Mingus developed a prodigious technique. In the late forties and early fifties, he was heard in a multitude of contexts, including (for various lengths of time) the bands of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton, Earl Hines, |. Johnson, Red Norvo, and Charlie Parker. Certain jazz bassists—Percy Heath, for example—are outstanding “walkers”; that is, they can establish solid, cushiony beats that lend tremendous rhythmic impetus to the soloists they're accompanying, while also creating harmonic density through well-chosen notes. “Walking,” however, was not Mingus's specialty. Instead, he developed a freer style, both in accom- paniment and in solos, that represented a step beyond Ellington bassist Jimmy Blanton’s innovations in the early 1940s. Mingus’s work tended toward the liberation of the bass from a subordinate role. In an excellent study of Mingus's life and work, Brian Priestley describes his vast influence on several generations of bassists playing several kinds of music “Bach of these three approaches [that can be found on Mingus's early records|—the double-stops, the octave leaps, and the subdivision of the beat by means of passing-notes—were even- tually to develop further . . . But equally, they were to influ- ence many of his successors and, ultimately, not so much through Mingus's own example but through the combined weight of all the jazz bassists he had influenced by the 1960s, they had a marked effect on the style of bass-guitar players, first in the soul field and then in rock and pop music gener- ally.”15Hard Bop Heterodoxy 133 Hines—I dug all kinds of music—liked everybody. Art Tatum? Well, he was the greatest piano player I ever heard!” On his first gigs, he was a church organist and played the piano at house parties: “They used to have what they called rent parties and they used tohire me to play when I was very young, They'd pay you about three dollars, and you'd play all night for ‘em. And they’d charge admission to the people who would come in and drink. That's the way some people used to get their rent together.”* At the age of seventeen, he toured the country with a group accompanying a preacher: “Rock and roll or rhythm and blues, that’s what we were doing. She preached and healed and we played. And then the congregation would sing.”* Barrelhouse, boogie-woogie, stride, and gospel—all these elements would resonate throughout Monk’s career. Stride, for example, in- forms his solo on “Thelonious” on his first session as a leader for Blue Note in 1947, and gospel informs his luminous inter- pretation of the hymn “Abide with Me” on Monk’s Music. His deep attachment to the black “folk” traditions, both sacred and profane, is one of Monk’s links to hard bop. He revealed it ong before “returning to the roots” became fashionable. It seems a natural development that a new appreciation of Monk in the mid-fifties coincided with the rise of hard bop. Before then, he had had his champions—including Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Art Blakey, and Dizzy Gillespie—but many jazzmen were put off by his “weird” conception, his technically demanding tunes, and his eccen- tric approach to the keyboard. Hawkins(with whom Monk did his first record date in a studio in 1944) remembered, in a conversation with Joe Goldberg, that “one of the worst things I went through in those days was with Monk, when he was working in my group. used to get it every night—'Why don’t you get 2 piano player?” and ‘What's that stuff he’s playing?’”6 In 1955 Monk was still often ridiculed, and Orrin Keepnews of Riverside Records was able to buy his recording contract from Prestige for $108.27. But by 1957 he had virtually been can-ES HARD BOP HETERODOXY: MONK, MINGUS, MILES, AND TRANE In André Hodeir’s Toward Jazz, Thelonious Monk is quoted as saying, “I sound a little like [stride pianist and composer] James P. Johnson.” Critics have also compared Monk to such stomp-down, stride-and-blues pianists as Jimmy Yancey and Willie “the Lion” Smith. In the late forties and early fifties, Blue Note Records billed him as the “High Priest of Bebop,”” and he also led some classic hard-bop sessions. Two of these were Brilliant Corners (1956), with saxophonists Emie Henry and Sonny Rollins, and Monk’s Music (1957], featuring, among others, John Coltrane and Gigi Gryce. No one, however, has ever been able to pin a label on Monk. In one of his infrequent interviews, he told Grover Sales: “I'm not commercial. I say, play your own way. Don’t play what the public wants—you pley what you want and let the public pick up what you are doing—even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years.” Born in 1920, Monk was raised on San Juan Hill, an area in the West Sixties near the Hudson River that was New York City’s first black neighborhood. In the same interview with Sales, he recalled: “learned to read notes beforel took lessons. ‘My older sister took—the girls always took in those days—and Tlearned to read by looking over her shoulder. Got interested in jazz right from the start. Fats Waller, Duke, Louis, Earl 132Brilliant Corners and Riverside Monk's first album for Riverside Records, Thelonious Monk Plays Duke Ellington (1955), originated from Orrin Keepnews's desire for him to gain a wider audience, but in some respects the album was awkward and ill- suited to Monk. In retrospect, it is not clear whether it was to his advan. tage: He was already known through his Blue Note recordings—of which the critical commentary of the day continuously emphasized the virtues of his compositions over his piano playing—so by presenting him without those compositions, and in the shadow of Ellington, he may have been at a disadvantage. A Down Beat review went so far as to say that “it does Monk little good to force him to adapt to a program for which he has little empa- thy as a pianist-uriter, though he may have a large liking for Ellington as a listener.”" The second album for Riverside, The Unique Thelonious Monk, also did not feature Monk's compositions, and came with the qualifying statement “very personal treatments of great standards" as.a subtitle on the cover, Reviews were more positive but not overwhelmingly so, ‘When Brilliant Corners was released in 1957, it was clear that Monk had crossed the threshold from being interesting and idiosyncratic to being a 1. own Beot, January 25,1956, pp. 23-24. The review a with Randy Weston plying Cole Porter worked because Randy is more adaptable and ‘more ofa technician than Monk, and also because Perteris less of a composer than Elingten.” ventions that 2 eimilar planBrion Comer and Riese 8 force to be reckoned with, atleast for the crities. Nat Hentoff gave the al- bum a five-star review in Down Beat, a significant public acknowledgment ‘of Monk's talents. The title piece, “Brilliant Corners,” is dense and de- manding, with its unusual 22-bar form played alternately as slow walk and double time, and, as Keepnews's comments in the liner notes reveal, the musicians were having a difficult time playing it. The theme itself is rife with chythmic displacements and alternating fast and slow motifs. The end result after a reputed four hours of trying to get it right was a spliced ver sion drawing on the best choruses from different takes. In the released composite take, Sonny Rollins soars over the chords with ample references to the melody, but alto saxophonist Ernie Henry seems utterly lost, not the least bit helped by the fact that Monk lays out during hs solo. Riverside, founded by Bill Grauer and Orrin Keepnews in 1953, quickly be- came—along with Prestige, Blue Note, Pacific jazz, and Contemporary— one of the most important record companies to document the jazz being played in the 19508. Besides Monk, its artists included Bill Evans, Cannor- ball Adderley, and Wes Montgomery. Keepnews produced the sessions, and during the period that Monk was under contract with Riverside, from 1955 to 1961, he participated in 30 recording sessions, including engagements at the Five Spot, the Blackhawk in San Francisco, and the Town Hall concert Two concerts from the 1961 European tour were issued later as part of Monk's remaining contractual obligations before signing with Columbia, 15. Liner notes for Brilliant Corners ‘eepnews wrote the liner notes to Monk's Riverside albums, in- cluding the original notes to the Brillant Corners album reprinted here. The final summary of his work for Riverside i represerted in an ‘essay on Monk's Riverside years in 1986 for the LP box set Thelonious ‘Monk: The Complete Riverside Recordings. The box set received Gram- ‘mys for Best Historical Album and Best Album Notes in 1987. Keep: rnews's description of the Riverside sessions is perhaps the best available documertation we have ofthis important era of Monk's music. Inthe netes below, which appeared on the cover of he original sleeve ‘when it was released in 1957, Keepnews confesses tohaving deliberately 1. The boxset has since been reissued in CD format as Riverside RCD-022.2,6 CRITICAL RECOGNITION (1955-1961) seduced listeners with the first two Riverside albums of non: Monk ma: terial, to get them to accept Monk through the aid of familisr melodies, The description of the difficuty in playing “Brillant Comers” ‘omits the fact thatthe released version ended up being a spliced comm posite of several different takes, later revealed by Keepnews in the 1986 liner notes. “This orginally appeared a the liner notes to Bilint Comers, by Onin Keepnew Riverside RLP 225 in 1957 Used by permission of Orin Keepnews. ‘Thelonious Monk remains among the most challenging, provocative and dis- ‘urbing Figures in modern music. He has consistently been described in such terms for as long as he has been on the jazz scene—which is precisely as long 4s there has been modem jazz, for Monk of course was one of the principal molders of the new jazz. He will very probably continue to be described this way. For Monk's music is decidedly not designed for casual listening. Every- thing he writes and plays is jazz into which an important creative talent has put more thana litte of himself. Thus, inevitably, Monk and his music demand the most difficult thing any artist can require of his audience —attention, Thelonious Monk's music can also be among the most rewarding in mod. ‘em jazz. And iti that (to those who will listen) for exactly the same reasons that it challenges, disturbs and demands: because Monk is himself What he of fers is not smooth, public relations conscious artifice or surface skills, but merely the music that isin him and that he is impelled to bring forth. There are men who can bend and shape themselves and their work (perhaps to fit ‘current public taste, perhaps to suit the aims of a stronger artistic personal- ity). There are others whose natural, undiluted self expression manages to strike a responsive chord in lots of souls, or at least seems to. Finally there are those non-benders and non-conformers who don't happen to sem easy to un- derstand. Among these is Monk, and for such men the basic audience can consist only of those who are willing to try a bit to grasp the stimulating, in tensely rewarding message that is being sent ott. ‘These comments are not intended as any sort of fairly clever reverse-twist psychology (you know: “only very hip people, like me and like you who are reading these notes, can really dig Thelonious"). On the contrary, we at Riverside feel very strongly that the whole emphasis on the exceedingly far- out and ‘mysterious’ nature of Monks music has been seriously overdone dur- ing the early years of his career, so that many who would have found themselves quite willing (and able) to listen were frightened away in advance.Bllnt Comes nd Rese 8 Thisis Thelonious third album for this label, the first wo were entirely made up of standard tunes, played with trio instrumentation. This was fully deliber- ste, a plot to seduce non-fellowers of Monk into giving him a hearing. There ‘was no musical compromise; but there was at least the handle of a familiar melody to begin with. Those two previous albums—as reviewers, musicians and others with no special need to flatter Mork orus have noted—were outstanding, articulate efforts. But the present LP is something else again. This is Thelonious at work ‘on matters much more difficult (and potentially even more rewarding): this is ‘Monk writing, in his own highly personal way, for five instrumental voices. It is Monk expressing himself by means of the unorthodox construction, ap- proach, and phrasing that is uniquely his, and that has by now matured into a style possessing great depth, wit and strength (The one exception here, a solo treatment of the standard “I Surrender, Dear’ in a compellingly moody vein, came about because Monk felt like it and felt it wasa change of pace that would fit in. It did.) Itshould be noted at about this point that Mork’s musics not only not the casiest listening, itis ako not easy to play. Musicians could save themselves a lot of trouble by rot recording with Monk—but its a form of trouble that a great many of the best men have long considered a privilege (as well as an education) Sonny Rollins is a wonderfully inventive, strong-toned artist who has al- ready made a considerable impact on the jazz public and on fellow musicians, ‘who is clearly going on to @ position of even greater imporiance. Emie Henry worked in Monk's quartet during 1956, and then took over Phil Woods’ alto chair in Dizzy Gillespie's big band; he is fluid, leaping, non-derivative styl- ‘st who has appeared on two previous Riverside LPs and whom we are betting ‘on for near-future stardom. Oscar Pettiford and Max Roach no longer need fancy descriptive adjectives: by now surely their names alone tell the story ‘When Henry and Petiiford were unavailable for the final date, the replace- sents were of top caliber: Clark Terry (a stand ovt with Duke Ellington since 1951 and termed, by Leonard Feather, “one of the most original trumpet play- «rs in contemporary jazz") and Paul Chambers, currently with Miles Davis and among the very finest of the newer bassiss. ‘These men worked hard. They struggled and concentrated end shook their heads over some passages with those half-smies that mean: "Hare this ‘is infosible” For the original compositions on this date represent Monk at his most inventive and therefore (to repeat myself) at his most challenging. “Bril- liant Corners,” with its uneven meter and its tempo changes, is undoubtedly38 CRITICAL RECOGNITION (1955-1961) the real back-breaker, but this doesn't mean that the others are simple: “Pas nonica,” which I'd describe as a near-ballad with guts; the blues, which has lots of extended blowing room (and don't neglect to dig the several things Monk is doing behind the horns): and “Bemsha Swing,” only one of the four originals not specifically prepared for this record date—Thelonious wrote it several yearsago, with drummer Denzil Best, and has recorded it twice previously, but comparison will show that it hasn't remained static during that time. (Anoteon the odd tite of the bes it is merdy an attenpt test down phondially the pronunciation Monk insisted on as most fiting for what might most simply be called “Blue Boliver Bhs.) ‘These musicians worked hard, also, because Monk's creativity never stands still during a preliminary nin through of a number, between “takes" or even during one, changes of phrasing or of detail will evolve, asa constant fusion of arrangement and improvisation keeps taking place, Sometimes even instru- entation gets altered a bit, Thelonious came acioss a celeste in the studio, decided it would go well in"Pannonica,” and so set it up at right angles to the piano to be able to play celeste with the right hand, piano with the left, dur- ing part ofthis number Similarly, it was an impromptu it of experimentation that resulted in Max Roach’s “doubling” on tympani and drums through “*Bemsha Swing,” in most unorthodox and effective fashion. ‘And Monk isa hard task-masier at a recording session, a perfectionist (‘Tve never been satisfied with one of my records yet,” he says, end means it) who knows just how he wants each note bent and phrased and who drives the oth- ers as hard as he drives himself —which, in an abstract sense, is possibly a lit tle unfair of him. In the end, it wasn't “impossible'—merely far from easy, and in the end everyone else was satisfied and Monk probably almost satisied, And the final results are obviously very much worth having accomplished and (to return to the first theme of these comments) worth paying attention to. 16. Down Beat Review fter the lukewarm receptions of the first two Riverside albums, Nat Hertoff's review ofthe Brillant Corners album in Down Beat set the precedent for a subsequent series of high critical appraisals of Monk's music. The following year, 1958, Monk headed the top place for pianists in Down Beat's international Jezz Citics Poll.Bllint Cores and Riveside 80 ‘This article originally sppesred in Down eo june s, 957, pp: 28-29. Reprinted with persion of Daun Bet. Rating: “**** This is rally a mood album, the kind of mood that envelops corners that can be called brilliant but ere more inimitable than that increasingly indiscrimi- nate adjective might connote, Monk is an instantly identifiable individual in a music world that recently has been more marked by the ubiquitousness of its mirrors than by its one-of-a-kind landmarks. Because Monk is wholly himself, the corners of his musical imagination yield continually unexpected, freshly personal thoughts, and these in turn are linked in consistency once the overall shape of Monk's message is absorbed and reflected upon, He does, then, create and deepen throughout this album a mood caused by the irresistible immediacy and originality of his stories and of the language in which they are spoken by him and his colleagues. ‘The notes underline the fact that Monk is writing here for five instrumen- tal voices as contrasted with two previous sets without horns for the label, Frankly, | am less impressed with the actual writing for the five, particularly that for ensemble, than I am by the beginning impetus he gives each piece by his Monk-idiomatic melodic twists and pragmatic, this-is-how-I-hearit chord. structure ‘The Monk musical personality thus having been set, he is able to dominate by the force of his personality the resultant scene so that the soloists, while they retsin their individuality, nonetheless fit their improvisations into: Monk’ perspective. There is a commanding gestalt operative in a Monk per- formance for no matter how many instruments, and when he has men who are willing to work with him, as here, the impact of that gestalt isall the more memorable—and influential on other musicians ‘Monk remains the most formidable player of Monk, but he gets excellent co-operation here from Roach, Pettiford, and Rollins (dig Sonny on Track 2 (Ba-lue Bolivar Ba-lues-are). (Emie] Henry is forceful and in context but is not yet as authoritative a voice as Sonny. (It not paradoxical to point out that Monk is heard to best advantage with strong individual personalities.) ‘Terry and Chambers make it in their one track. And Monk by himself trans: lating "I Surrender, Dear” into his weltanschauung is one of the listening balls of the year, any year. This is Riverside’ most important modern jazz LP to date.