Latest Release
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- FEB 3, 2024
- 36 Songs
- Straight, No Chaser · 1967
- Brilliant Corners (Remastered) · 1957
- Plays Duke Ellington · 1955
- Brilliant Corners · 1957
- Thelonious Monk & Sonny Rollins (Remastered) · 1954
- Solo Monk (Expanded Edition) · 1963
- Bags' Groove (Rudy Van Gelder Remaster) · 1955
- Genius of Modern Music, Vol. 1 · 1947
- The Definitive Thelonious Monk On Prestige and Riverside · 2010
- Thelonious Himself (Remastered) · 1957
Essential Albums
- This LP allowed the pianist to stretch out as a player and a bandleader. The performances have an unhurried quality, allowing Monk’s percussive chords to dance around with unassuming grace. And his band is well-drilled: John Coltrane’s name didn’t appear on the cover, but you can hear the pianist calling out to him for the first sax solo on “Well You Needn’t.” The result shows how Trane had absorbed Monk’s style—modernist abstraction with memorable motifs.
- 1968
- Drug addiction brought John Coltrane’s first historic stint with Miles Davis to an end, so it was the impossibly enigmatic piano genius Thelonious Monk who offered Trane a way forward after getting clean in 1957. Monk’s harmonic mazes stimulated Coltrane’s imagination and dovetailed with his own ambitious explorations on tenor sax. An extended quartet gig with Monk at the Five Spot gave Coltrane the creative stability he needed, and enormous musical growth ensued. Some of the live material is documented (with poor fidelity) on Discovery! Live at the Five Spot, but in 2005 the long-lost and excellent-sounding At Carnegie Hall emerged, shedding a whole new light on the Monk-Coltrane partnership. Apart from that, Thelonious Monk With John Coltrane is just about the only other item to showcase this pairing of jazz giants. Compiled in 1961, the tracks fall into two categories: “Ruby, My Dear,” “Trinkle, Tinkle,” and “Nutty” feature Coltrane and Monk in a quartet setting (with bassist Wilbur Ware and drummer Shadow Wilson), stretching out much as they might at the Five Spot. “Off Minor” and “Epistrophy” are alternate takes from the June 1957 sessions that yielded the classic Monk’s Music, which found Coltrane in a septet with other horn players (and Art Blakey on drums). Interestingly, Coleman Hawkins plays “Ruby, My Dear” as a ballad feature on Monk’s Music, so Coltrane’s version here offers a historically significant contrast. Both the extended solo piano blues “Functional” and the reissue bonus track “Monk’s Mood” are from the April 1957 Thelonious Himself sessions, and it’s “Monk’s Mood" on which Coltrane appears, with just Ware on bass and no drummer. This is easily one of Monk’s most arresting ballads, and here it takes on the rare and intimate glow of a chamber piece.
- Brilliant Corners is one of just a few Monk recordings to feature the pianist-composer in a mentor role to Sonny Rollins, then an emerging tenor saxophone great. Rollins had made a breakthrough sideman performance with Bud Powell in 1949, and a year or so after this 1956 session, Monk would form a brief but seismic alliance with another great emerging tenor of the time, John Coltrane. There was something about Monk’s thorny writing that challenged tenor players and brought them closer to realizing their own visions as improvisers. Look no further than the leadoff title track, “Brilliant Corners,” to hear the kinds of harmonic, rhythmic, and formal demands that Monk’s music could entail. The story goes that the band played take after unsatisfactory take until producer Orrin Keepnews ended up splicing together a usable one. But the music that emerges is still extraordinary: a strange and slow melody that stumbles upon itself before—surprise!—relaunching at twice the speed, only to grind to a near halt again for the next chorus. Soloists have no choice but to grip the rollercoaster tightly, but they uncover fascinating secrets along the way. Bassist Oscar Pettiford and drummer Max Roach do their masterful rhythm section thing through it all. On most of the set, Rollins splits saxophone duties with altoist Ernie Henry, though trumpeter Clark Terry and bassist Paul Chambers come on board for the closing “Bemsha Swing.” Roach’s use of timpani on that track and Monk’s use of celeste on the ballad “Pannonica” speak to a pursuit of unusual tone colors and aesthetic left turns on the album. The solo piano number “I Surrender, Dear” brings Monk’s offbeat interpretive sense into full view. But the centerpiece might be the long, slow blues “Ba-Lue Bolivar Ba-Lues-Are,” where Monk’s spacious, economical pianism reveals a deep debt to late-’30s Count Basie. Rollins, meanwhile, taps into a mood not unlike his classic “Blue 7” from Saxophone Colossus, which he’d just recorded a few months before.
- 1977
- 1968
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- A swinging composer of classics who took melodic risks.
- Focusing on the pianist's many ways of approaching a tune.
About Thelonious Monk
Composer, bandleader, and pianist Thelonious Monk was one of the defining architects of modern jazz and bebop, acclaimed for his inventive improvisational style. ∙ Monk got his first big break in the early 1940s as the pianist at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem, where he jammed with such other bebop pioneers as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. ∙ Jazz sax legend Coleman Hawkins hired Monk for the pianist’s first studio recording, and one of bebop’s seminal sessions, in 1944. ∙ In 1947, Monk first recorded his classic “’Round Midnight,” which has gone on to be the most-covered jazz standard of all time, by artists ranging from Miles Davis to Amy Winehouse. ∙ His 1957 Carnegie Hall performance with John Coltrane went unreleased until 2005, at which point it spent 91 weeks on the Billboard Traditional Jazz Albums chart, peaking at No. 2. ∙ TIME magazine featured him on its cover in 1964, following the release of his most commercially successful album, Monk’s Dream. ∙ He won a Lifetime Achievement Award Grammy in 1993 and was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize Special Citation in 2006, for his “significant and enduring impact on the evolution of jazz.” ∙ The BBC ranked Monk at No. 8 on their list of the greatest jazz artists of all time, just behind Billie Holiday.
- GENRE
- Jazz