Monk's Music

Thelonious Monk's startling classic in its best sound

1957 was a landmark year for Thelonious Monk, possibly the most overtly original pianist in jazz history. He started playing in New York nightclubs again for the first time in six years, owing to the return of his cabaret card (essential for the city’s musicians back then), which had been suspended due to a drug charge. He recruited John Coltrane, who brought a thrilling new timbre to his band. And he recorded Monk’s Music, one of his most splendid albums—a brash claim, given that he recorded more than 50 albums in the quarter-century between his first sessions for Blue Note in the mid-1940s and the final ones for Black Lion in 1971. It was made almost precisely in the middle of that span—one of four Monk albums released by Riverside Records in that single year.

 Monk’s Music is also an unusual record, one that startled listeners at the time and still could today. It’s a septet album (piano, bass, two tenors, one alto, a trumpet, and drums), the largest ensemble Monk had put together up to that time. It begins with the horns blowing harmony on a straight rendition of the gospel hymn, “Abide by Me.” (Monk, who grew up in North Carolina, began his career playing with a gospel group, and he may have been attracted to this piece because it was composed by one William Henry Monk.) It’s lovely but an oddball way to start off a jazz album.

The subsequent five tracks are all Monk originals. Leading off is “Well, “You Needn’t,” which he first recorded for Blue Note 10 years earlier in a trio setting. It’s one of Monk’s most rollicking numbers, built around chromatic chords, ascending and descending staircase-style, mathematically precise but feeling like a twisting roller-coaster ride. The version here might be best known for the moment when Monk cries out “Coltrane! Coltrane!” and Trane responds with a hair-raising solo, which is all the more remarkable when you consider that Monk had to shout out his name because Trane, who was hooked on drugs at the time, had nodded off—what we hear is not just improvised but banged out just this side of unconsciousness. Amazing.

Then comes “Ruby My Dear,” a gorgeous ballad—another piece from Monk’s 1947 Blue Note trio session—covered here by just the rhythm section and Coleman Hawkins, the other tenor saxman on the session, blowing the melody in his gorgeous husky tone. Hawkins was a remarkable, even unique figure in mid-century jazz, not just spanning the swing and bop eras but imbibing—in some way,s defining—both idioms. He cut a hard-swing rhythm, while also inventing the complex chord-based improvisations that Charlie Parker embellished just a few years later. (Listen to Hawkins’ 1939 cover of “Body and Soul.”) More than many of his colleagues from swing or bop, Hawkins encouraged, and eagerly joined in with, more progessive players still. He hired Monk in the mid-1940s, when every other jazz star—and Hawkins was very much a star—thought the pianist, with his off-center chords and jangled cadences, was too weird. Monk’s Music marked a returned favor, at a time when Monk was ascending and Hawkins was thought to be old-fashioned. This was misleading: In 1963, six years after this session, Hawkins met up with Sonny Rollins, who was in the midst of his avant-garde period, for a wild and woolly album called Sonny Meets Hawk, and gave as good as he got. Anyway, back to Hawkins’ rendition of “Ruby, My Dear”—it’s one of the most beautiful things ever.

 Side B contains two more Monk jangled tunes—“Off Minor” (also first recorded on the 1947 trio session) and “Epistrophy” (adapted from a 1948 session, also on Blue Note, with Milt Jackson on vibes)—and finishing off with the album’s one Monk piece that he wrote for this album, “Crepuscule with Nellie,” a gentle ballad dedicated to his wife, who was sick at the time. (“Crepuscule,” misspelled on the album’s jacket, is an obscure word—Monk knew and used many obscure words—meaning twilight.)

 The album’s other musicians, by the way, are Ray Copeland on trumpet, Gigi Gryce on alto sax, Wilbur Ware on bass, and Art Blakey on drums—who, as it happens, also played drums on that 1947 Blue Note session.

 Some Monk fans prefer the earlier Blue Note versions of the pieces on this album. Because they’re mainly trio albums, Monk plays the melody and provides the harmony; you get a starker sense of what made—and still makes—his music, and his treatment of it, so pleasingly disconcerting. Still, there are magical charms to these larger arrangements too. A decade into his career, Monk wasn’t accenting his eccentricities as much, but he'd learned to achieve the same effects more subtly—and, I would say, more deeply. This is music worth a lifetime of listening.

 It's a breathtaking experiment, this album, spanning the waterfront of Monk’s music, which is to say a peculiar expanse of waterfront—alternately, or at once, melancholic, giddy, meditative, turbulent, densely dark yet piercingly clear—in music, or art, generally..

 This is another album in Craft Recordings’ vinyl reissues of Fantasy Records’ Original Jazz Classics series—and it’s remarkable in one additional way. It is, as far as I know, the best-sounding pressing of Monk’s Music, better even than Electronic Record Company’s release of a few years ago, which cost 10 times as much as Craft’s ($400 vs. $40). Compared with the ERC, the Craft pressing—mastered and cut by Kevin Gray from the original analog tapes—has deeper and more tuneful bass, subtler dynamic contrasts, and a trapset that’s located farther back in the soundstage, with a crisper snare and hi-hat. The differences are not minor.

That said, the recording, put to tape by Jack Higgins, who engineered many Riversides of this period, isn’t perfect. Much of it is excellent, but some of it is a bit tinny, and on the tracks where the full septet plays at full blast, it sounds a bit oversaturated. Still, the flaws detract only slightly, and usually not at all, from the riveting pleasure of this music.