Name Your Favorite Thelonious Monk Album. Please.

I don't believe this. And I'm certainly not going to follow you off that cliff, Captain.

Seems strange to think anyone could know him enough to be able to attribute his music to mental illness and not design or innovation. Sounds quite prejudicial to me. Maybe that's not how you wanted it to come across but it certainly sounds that way.

How do you really KNOW this, Steve?

 

Ya' know, I just can't let this one go. I emailed another forum member about this thread and he said 'I don't know why you argue with those guys'. And he's right. But this stuff about Monk laying out is puzzling to me. I thought at first well, maybe I'm losing my mind. Could I really not remember those recordings or Monk's accompaniment at all? So I cued up Straight No Chaser. There he was, playing the chords behind Rouse in the very first solo. Now the statement that he lays out on the Riverside recordings, particularly behind Coltrane. So I cued up Ba-lue Bolivar (Brilliant Corners)and Ruby My Dear, Nutty, and Trinkle Tinkle with Trane. He's backing the soloists on Bolivar and plays all the chords behind Trane on Ruby. It's true that he does lay out on Nutty after a few chords. He's omnipresent on the first chorus of Trane's solo on Trinkle Tinkle, and then backs off a bit in the second chorus, finally letting Trane have it all to himself for the finish. His feeling for allowing the soloist their space is perfect, IMO.
So I'll admit it, I was wrong. He does lay out. When he feels like it. But it's not like it's some signature thing he did. Maybe he just enjoyed listening sometimes. Now I'll lay out.
Bye-Ya.

 

never mind...didn't read further in the thread. I'll just assume those comments were a joke.

 

Since when is comping behind every note a hallmark of a good pianist? Following that logic, Oscar Peterson would be the greatest player the world has ever seen. Monk had his own style and sound, and he knew what he was doing. I mean, Miles always insisted that the backing for each solo be different; Monk did different things behind different players, just because he wasn't comping in the traditional manner does not make him mentally unstable, which seems to me where the

comment seems to be going.

 

It's well documented that Monk had a real issue with social interaction and facing other people. Nearing the end, he just flat-out refused to play anymore and there were MANY times during his life that he was going a little crazy....over the brink, even during some of the most productive points in his career. Brilliant, yes but he did have mental deficiencies that are documented by history AND his family. He wasn't all there ALL of the time. His son knows better than anyone. Sometimes he wouldn't even recognize his son, and that scared him half to death. It was like a kind of alcoholism without booze. He was a manic person and his wife took care of him through a lot of rough periods, so much so that without her, he would have NOT been able to be much of a musician in the 50s.

If you don't believe me, check out "Straight, No Chaser" on WB video, directed by Clint Eastwood.

If you take offence to the fact he had mental breakdown often in his life, then you honestly don't know that much at all about Monk and should take a good look at this movie (and LEARN about Monk) or keep your opinion to yourself.

 

This is the second time Clint Eastwood is being invoked as a "jazz expert" -- I don't know whether to laugh of cry over that....

 

And to go back to the initial question:

I have a lot of Monk, but most of the times, I'll play Brilliant Corners, like I just did. Thrilling! (and BTW, mine is a OJC 1986... is it the best way to go, as far as digital goes?)

And i love to listen to Ask Me Now on the Hal Willner project, That's The Way I Feel Now... Rouse and Lacy, if I recall correctly. Beautiful.

 

The movie is a documentary with both common and not-so-common footage interviews with his son and people who knew him. It's an excellent movie. I personally wouldn't care of Bozo the Clown directed it.

I have at least two other Monk documentaries that aren't very much different. There's books on him, articles on the net, even Orrin Keepnews knows him more than any of us do.

He did NOT have a normal mind, and like someone else mentioned, it most likely attributed to his brilliance besides.

 

In the midst of all of this, I should list the album that I'm currently enthralled with: The Thelonious Monk Trio, the K-2 version sounds great, and Monk is at the top of his game, with Blue Monk being a standout, and Sweet and Lovely also being very cool. In a month, I'll have a different answer, Monk is someone with endless surprises in his music.

 

IMHO, yes. It's a MONO recording and there are some dings in the master tape. From what I understand the OJC is a pretty organic transfer.

 

I guess I can't prove this, but I've always heard the 'Coltrane! Coltrane!' was too awaken the saxophonist from his drug-induced stupor because it was his turn to solo and he was obviously spaced out.

I do agree with the In Orbit recommendation though I can't quite recommend it as a 'Thelonious Monk album' as the thread title states. Likewise the Miles Davis Christmas Eve session for Prestige with Monk and Milt Jackson is great (though it needs to be listened to as a session, not spread over a couple albums as Prestige liked to do). There, of course, Monk was told to lay out.

Guess I'm in the minority, but I'm not quite as convinced by Monk's Columbia material as others seem to be. If it was all we had, it'd be great, but I'd much rather listen to the Riversides and earlier stuff. For that matter, I might even prefer the later Black Lion material. While Teo Macero might have worked well with Miles Davis, I find his production too sweet, which isn't a quality I want to hear with Monk (or Mingus).

So...my favourite albums? I really like listening to Monk's solo recordings, so any of those (even the Columbias) are great. While thoroughly modern, they connect him to the past in ways his contemporaries and followers avoided.

Group recordings: Five by Monk by Five (Analogue Productions), and the Johnny Griffin live LPs (Mysterioso and In Action), and yes, Brilliant Corners and Monk's Music.

 

I have it too (and Monk's Music and a bunch of others). They were for the Japanese market and were made before the US versions were. The cover is the same as the OJC I believe, just without the OJC logo, though the spines are different, mostly yellow. The right spine is in English and the left in Katakana. Liner notes feature series notes, title notes, and track-by-track notes, all in Japanese of course. I could take a picture but I couldn't upload it because my USB port is doing funny things.

I've asked before if these were the same masterings as the OJCs and never got a clear answer, though I believe they are the same. Brilliant Corners was transferred by Joe Gastwirt in LA in 1985 (not by anyone in Japan) if anyone wants to break out the OJC and see if it's the same credit or not.

 

My OJC Brilliant Corners (OJCCD-036) is credited to Kirk Felton (Berkeley, 1987). Are we talking about the same one?

 

Okay, looks like they are different after all!
Thanks for help clearing that up.

 

I don't believe anyone here is disputing Monk's mental health and behavioral issues. What I'm disputing is that these were the source of his musical genius, rather than pioneering musical ideas. Please don't go back and regurgitate Steve's exact quote to show me that I got it wrong. It's what he meant.
Charlotte Zwerin directed Straight No Chaser, not Clint Eastwood. Clint Eastwood was the executive producer. It's a great documentary, and it depicts Monk's eccentricities quite well, stating as I recall that they were the byproduct of bipolar disorder.
Get your facts straight and don't make assumptions about what other people know or don't about Monk and his music.
As I said before, statements like yours and Steve Hoffman's in this thread serve only to diminish your own credibility and do nothing to change the beauty of Monk's soul and his music.

 

My fave......Monk's Blues.

I also really dig Brilliant Corners and Monk's Music, especially on the 45RPM sets....and an album that I think everyone should grab, at Carnegie Hall w/Coltrane. Oh my gosh what an absolutely bitchen album that is........

 

Re: Monk not supporting his soloists, I wonder how Charlie Rouse put up with it for so long?

Anyway if I had to pick a single favorite it would prob be Monk's Music, just for the star-studded and varied personnel. But that whole Riverside stretch is probably my favorite run of any musician's career.

 

This opens up quite the can of worms -- if mental stability figures into an assessment of musicality, how does one judge the music of Bud Powell, Syd Barrett, Skip Spence, Roky Erickson, Daniel Johnston (to name musicians who received treatment for mental illness) or, if we extend it to music made by those in the throes of addiction, Charlie Parker, Ray Charles, Amy Winehouse, Elliott Smith, Miles Davis, Julian Cope? Since we can't know the vector at which chemistry (internal or introduced) figures into playing, how can we go there?

 

Exactly, so you shouldn't have gone there.

 

well, i can't speak about his motives. i obviously never talked to him, and i think even people who "knew" him well would have trouble saying anything definitive about why he did certain things. it's possible that he did want the soloists to prove themselves in that way, though no competent jazz soloist should be thrown by the absence of piano comping, as long as the bassist is playing a coherent line. i think a lot of monk's "wrong" notes or "sloppiness" were attempts to get at the notes in the cracks, the notes between the notes so to speak.

i think as someone already noted, his yelling "coltrane" was either because trane was nodding, or because there was some confusion in the solo order. coleman hawkins makes a few wrong entrances during the session, and there is some confusion with the bass/drums & piano solos in off minor. nothing major, and that sloppiness makes the album even better for me at least.

a lot of monk's solos in later years were simply restatements of the theme with maybe some simple variations. why? to assert the primacy of his composition? or maybe he really didn't have a lot more to say, especially since he recorded the same pieces many times over.

like i said i love that clark terry album, with or without monk. i just like clark terry, especially the 1950s version of clark. that was the best thing i discovered in the complete monk riverside box.

 

I believe that those who suffer from these distractions are capable of lucid moments in which they're able to create. Their creativity is in one box, the demon is in another. I guess those who believe differently don't think it's possible. Do you believe, for example, that John Forbes Nash Jr. (the 'beautiful mind guy') concocted his nobel winning economics theories out of the paranoid delusions of a schizophrenic street person (which he was as well)?

 

i often think the less you know about a musician's personal life the more purely you can assess their music. of course these days that's almost impossible.

 

Seriously, are you kidding me? Did you read my post? I do not take any offense to any thing he may or may not have done. I don't care if he ate stale chicken heads while he played Epistrophy. I do not dispute that he may have had mental breakdowns. What does any of this have to do with the statement, "that Monk played that way because he was literally going insane, not for any musical pioneering reason (at least at the end)."

He played that way because he was going insane? Maybe he was going insane AND he played that way. Did his mental make up have a bearing on his creativity, sure. Does that mean his style was not a style but a breakdown in structure, virtuosity, and discipline? I guess he fooled some of the all time greats then.

And lets stop with this "by the end of his life" nonsense. Who cares. I take back what I said in an earlier post. When he died in 1982, it had been almost 20 years since he had produced anything creatively significant. "At the end" he wasn't playing at all. Was he insane then? Maybe. So what. What does that have to do with what he was doing in 1954?

Learn about Monk by watching "Straight No Chaser" or keep my opinion to myself? Maybe I should have told my college professors that I wasted my time at the Library of Congress researching John Coltrane, and that I should have just watched a movie instead.

 

I like the first Columbia album very much Monk's Dream I think it is called.

Monk walked out on Riverside without finishing his obligations. Riverside producer Orin Keepnews was really dissapointed and could not even listen to the Columbia stuff for years. I asked him his thoughts on this period in a forum many years ago, and he had not come to terms with that material in a way he could write about.

Then he was hired to oversee those reissues for Columbia, and while writing the liner notes for this album finally admited that it is rather stunning. I think this later period is rather great as well as the Riverside era. But I am a stereo fan, so that's just me.

Underground is another really great album from the 60s. Kind of a nod to the young kids with their underground sounds and underground radio. See the Jazz cats like Monk and Mingus were totally hip to the Beatles, they knew a hot record and a hot new sound when it jiumped up and slapped them in the face.