I compare Thelonius Monk’s music to watching a man who has one leg six inches shorter than the other. First you notice how awkward each step appears and how noticeably difficult it is to simply walk with a minor asymmetry. Next, you start to admire just how efficient the guy is and how he’s getting across the room despite the fact that it looks so different. After a few minutes, it occurs to you that he’s not just walking that he’s dancing and that he’s not awkward at all, but as graceful as any ballerina.
I think it was Ralph Gleason who compared John Coltrane’s music to “the sound of a very large man in a very small room”. Coltrane’s music always verged on being energy rather than notes played over a structure. While his music started very much in the bop tradition playing alto like Charlie Parker, even in the 1954 recordings of Coltrane playing with the Miles Davis quintet you can hear how his sound felt almost too big for the darting-linear solo lines of bop. After he left Miles Davis the second time, Coltrane’s music evolved away from the bebop idiom into almost pure abstraction where he began to challenge bar lines, traditional harmonies, and most of the conventions that bound jazz to the European classical musical vocabulary with which it started. At its best, Coltrane’s saxophone bypassed the ear and mind and bonded directly with the soul.
For about seven months of 1957, Coltrane was the featured sax player in the Thelonius Monk quartet. Coltrane had left the Miles Davis Quintet at least partly due to his then still-active heroin addiction. Monk had just regained his cabaret card after losing it for several years to a possibly bogus drug conviction.
Due to recording contract problems, there was only one studio recording of the group. Early this year, Larry Applebaum, a jazz archivist at the Library of Congress, found a reel to reel tape marked T. Monk with no information other than the date in the proverbial unmarked box.
By the way, there’s a lot of this in jazz. I have an old friend who is Art Blakey’s grandson. He tells me that the family has a closet filled with old tapes of the Messangers. The Library of Congress tapes turned out to be a Voice of America radio broadcast (propaganda used to be a whole lot better fifty years ago.
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Article comments
1 - Aaman
Good report - well described. I am looking forward to this CD
2 - godoggo
Good review. Not having heard this, but being familiar with Monk and Trane's studio stuff, as well as some of the other recordings you mention, I think your statements are generally on target.
That said, I happen to have been chewing for a while on some extremely boring thoughts about how Monk's odd chord changes might have influenced Coltrane. Aside from his taste for joltingly dissonant voicings, what makes Monk's changes unusual for his time is that adjacent chords are often unrelated harmonically, in contrast to most standards which flow fairly smoothy around the circle of 5ths through cadences, typified in jazz by 2-5-1, or the bop 2-flat 5 of 5-1.
Monk, in contrast, liked sort of a more sophisticated version of what hardcore punk (I guess the kids leave out the "punk" part nowadays) band does when it builds a song around a series of major bar chords (which would make for some treacherous changes if anybody tried to run them). These sorts of changes tend to make a soloist think more modally - that is, empasizing the intervallic relationships among the notes in the chord-related scales, rather than the relationips between melody notes and the chords.
Based on what I've heard, Coltrane approached Monk's tricky changes more modally than he did Miles's easy modal changes, if that makes sense. This was the foundation for "sheets of sound," which involved superimposing tricky, clashing chord substitutions, which Cotrane would approach modally, over the more traditional changes played by the rhythm section.
The chord substitutions that the "sheets of sound" were based on, though, were different from Monks, though. Some of its basis can be found in Giant Steps, which might be seen it part as an excercise to help Coltrane play outside better. This tune is based upon three radically clashing harmonic centers a major third apart from one another, like the three notes of an augmented triad. I understand that this originated with Monk, but with Coltrane's fellow Philadelphian (I think), Hassan Ibn Ali. I learned the latter from an interview some years ago with another Philadelphian (I think), longtime Max Roach tenor player Odean Pope, who claimed to have developed his Coltrane-like style independently of Coltrane, from the same influences.
I also recall seeing Sonny Rollins claiming that in developing his later outside style, he was inflenced less by Coltrane than is generally assumed, and I've seen a similar claim made by McCoy Tyner of all people, so I tend to think that a lot of this was just sort of in the air at the time, as had been, say, the innovations of the bop era. So I agree that Coltrane likely would have gotten where he was going regardless of his tenure with Monk.
By the way, Coltrane is just about the only topic about which I write stuff like this. Good work as I said. I want to hear this CD.
3 - chancelucky
thanks for the kind comments on the review.
I'm especially interested in your thoughts on the "modal" nature of Monk vs. Miles and how that might have influenced Coltrane's sheets of sound. Let me know, once you hear the album yousrelf.
I've meant to go back to Blue Trane and the albums with Donald Byrd as well to get more of a sense of where he was going sans Miles. In any case, the thing that matters is that the Carnegie Hall tapes are great music, regardless of their significance in tracing Coltrane's musical evolution.