Jazz Basics

 

by Don DeMicheal and Pete Welding

 

Source: Down Beat Music '64 9th Yearbook

 

 

Of the thousands of jazz LPs available, we have chosen 53 that we feel present a true picture of the music's development and of its major figures. In selecting the albums, we attempted to find ones that were representative of styles or of major artists. In a few cases, the record by a certain artist or school finally decided on was not as good musically as others by the same man or school, but it was felt that the album chosen would either give a more rounded view of the man or would offer the listener a variety that would have been unobtainable except by listing a number of records from the same school.

After each listing there are further recommendations for the particular artist or style. This is meant to help guide those who are more interested in one phase of jazz than they are in the others.

 

Thelonious Monk, Brilliant Corners (Riverside 12-226)

 

Of the two pianists developed and identified with the bop movement, Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk, the latter represents a wholly divergent, if not totally opposite, direction and stream of development. While Powell explored to the fullest the horizontal approach represented by his cascading, overspilling, and often brilliant extemporized lines, this was often achieved at the expense of a commensurate harmonic development. (It is interesting to listen to Powell's left-hand chord punctuations in the course of one of his dazzling linear displays; the harmonic element is cut to the very bone.)

Monk on the other hand was ever an exponent of a carefully marshaled and spare melodic line; where Powell was prodigal, he was economical in the extreme. But he was one of the great harmonic innovators and one of the most original and inventive composers jazz has known. His taut, wry, epigramatic compositions are masterpieces of construction, often suprising in their unexpected twists and turns, but always wholly united by a tight, inner logic all their own. The harmonic substructure underlying them represents a wholly original mind at work and is of such a provocative nature as to prod all but the noncreative soloists into stimulating work; they have to respond to the jagged, arresting power of Monk's work.

This disc is a prime example of this process of stimulation. On the LP tenorist Sonny Rollins is the most forceful soloist (after Monk, that is), for he most fully meets the challenge of the music, especially on the blues piece "Ba-lue Bolivar Ba-lues-are." The pianist's music demands strong, individual musicians for its fullest expression, and in this regard Rollins has it well over Ernie Henry, the capable but scarcely individual altoist who is heard with him on three of the tracks. Trumpeter Clark Terry replaces Henry on "Bemsha Swing," and the difference is palpable. Rollins, Terry, and the rhythm team of bassist Oscar Pettiford (who is replaced by Paul Chambers on "Bemsha"), and drummer Max Roach all respond beautifully to the music. "I Surrender Dear" is a Monk piano solo and is, of course, completely remade at the pianist's hands, becoming distilled Monk in the process.

Further recommendations: At present a good number of recordings by the pianist are in print. He recorded extemsively during the 1950s for the Riverside label, and much of his most creative work is available on the discs made for that company. Among the better offerings are "Thelonious Alone in San Franciso" (12-312), a series of 10 unaccompanied piano solos, more than half of them Monk originals; and "The Unique Thelonious Monk" (12-209), a trio disc on which the pianist transforms a sheaf of standard tunes into virtually new compositions, turning up unexpected delights and depths in them. A recent disc on the Columbia label, "Monk's Dream" (1965), offers a highly stimulating sampling of his present quartet with tenor saxophonist Charlie Rouse.