Prime Cuts #1: “Monk’s Music” (Riverside, 1957), Thelonious Monk

I thought it would be interesting to start a series of write-ups about specific aspects of recordings that I find remarkable, also regarding cinema.  After seeing the new documentary, “Becoming Led Zeppelin”, and listening to Jimmy Page’s insistence that the band’s albums focus on the possibilities of the LP format versus singles, I considered how opposite that attitude was from this age of streaming services, where the focus is on one track selected for a listener by algorithms most certainly derived from payola scams.  I grew up going to concerts by bandleaders like Art Blakey and Johnny Griffin and listening to albums that my father constantly played on the family stereo.  Being exposed to those resources taught me how to organize a set of music when I started performing with my own bands.  So, rather than pick my favorite tracks for different albums I love and write about them, perhaps it would be more engaging to explore the impact two pieces can have when lined up back-to-back.

From my perspective there is no place better to start such a project than with Thelonious Monk’s album, “Monk’s Music”, released by Riverside in 1957, that includes Art Blakey, John Coltrane, Ray Copland, Gigi Gryce, Coleman Hawkins, and Wilbur Ware.  The LP starts with a beautiful horn arrangement of the hymn, Abide with Me, which lasts less than a minute before Monk’s piano jumps in with an introduction to his composition, Well You Needn’t.  It feels like a powerful display of bebop attitude both in terms of the radical left turn the music makes in aesthetics as it shifts from the hymn to Monk’s material, but also in that artistic movement’s wordplay.  Thelonious Monk was an avant-gardist who wouldn’t achieve commercial success until he was signed to his fourth record label, Columbia, in 1962.  Though the title, “Abide with Me”, can be read like a request from Monk to stick with his music despite the challenges, he immediately follows it with the statement “Well, You Needn’t”.  He knew that he was more than fine, as is.

Another detail of certain significance between Abide with Me and Thelonious Monk was pointed out by Ruud de Quay in a comment he sent to me, the composer of this piece shares the same last name: William H. Monk.

“Monk’s Music” is also a great document of Coleman Hawkins’ later period.  An avant-gardist himself, Hawkins started in Fletcher Henderson’s band in 1923 and played alongside Louis Armstrong in that group in 1925.  He defined the sound and approach to the tenor saxophone in jazz in the decade before the arrival of Lester Young on the scene.  Hawkins remained an innovator, being a primary influence and early supporter of the bebop musicians of the 1940s, then continuing to challenge himself with artists like Thelonious Monk, while pushing further to new territory as evidenced by the “Sonny Meets Hawk!” album on RCA Victor released in 1963, that incorporated cutting edge players, Paul Bley and Henry Grimes, and was released a year after one of Sonny Rollins’ most experimental recordings “Our Man in Jazz”, with Don Cherry.  Miles Davis is one of the only other musicians I can think of that was able to successfully navigate so many stylistic developments in their lifetime.