Tag: theloniousmonk

Miles Davis, Bags Groove

Album of the Week, August 24, 2024

When we began listening to Miles over two years ago, we touched on the heroin addiction that nearly derailed his career just as it was starting. We then jumped ahead to 1955 when he began recording a series of pivotal albums for Prestige that led to his fame and fortune (and a bigger contract at Columbia). But starting at the beginning of 1954, Miles was coming back, having gotten clean from his addiction and recording newly disciplined and interesting music. Prestige released the results on 10″ LPs, and then, following Miles’ departure for Columbia, reissued them on 12″ records.

Two of those sessions, recorded June 29 and December 24, 1954 in Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in Hackensack, make up Bags Groove (the brilliant typographic album cover by Reid Miles omits the apostrophe, ducking the question of how to do a proper possessive, and I reluctantly follow suit). The players are a pretty significant who’s who. The first session (on side 2 of the record) includes Sonny Rollins and Horace Silver, while the second (side 1) features Thelonious Monk and “Bags” himself, Milt Jackson, on vibes. All tracks feature Percy Heath on bass and Kenny Clarke, a year away from expatriating to Paris, on drums.

“Bags Groove” comes in two versions, marking the first time in this blog series that we’ve run across a classic jazz LP that actually includes an alternate take. Both takes lean toward the “cool” side of Miles’ early repertoire, thanks to Jackson’s modal introduction and Miles’ Harmon mute. The liner notes by Ira Gitler say that Miles asked Monk to lay out during his solo, which must have aggrieved Monk to no end! But Monk does as asked; in the second take he drops out for the entirety of Miles’ solo, re-entering behind Milt Jackson, where he subversively adds different and unexpected chords until Bags himself drops out and Monk takes over. Hearing Monk do his thing has to be the principle pleasure of this arrangement, in fact, aside from the fluency of Miles’ solo over what would otherwise be a pretty straightforward 12-bar blues.

The numbers with Sonny Rollins are a different story. Sonny was apparently writing compositions on scraps of paper during the June 29 session, and three of his most enduring and most-covered compositions are the result. “Airegin” (“Nigeria” spelled backwards) has more than a little of the feel of “A Night in Tunisia” in the introduction, but it pretty swiftly shifts to its own thing—not yet as volcanic as it would be in another year with Miles and Trane on Cookin’, but a pretty hot groove nonetheless. The tempo is ever so slightly more relaxed here, perhaps in part due to Percy Heath, whose walking bass line sounds like it doesn’t want to be hurried.

That same sense of relaxed groove permeates the Charlie Parker-like “Oleo,” which again is a much more laid back take than that which the First Great Quintet would record on Relaxin’. But don’t tell Sonny; he and Monk get into some understated interplay during his solo, and there’s even a great moment where he single-handedly alters the chords on his way out of the solo with just one note. Monk is a little less demonstrative in this number, perhaps because no one told him not to play!

The sole standard on this session, “But Not For Me” appears in two takes, with take 2 first. Thanks to Monk, we don’t get a straight ballad, but a sort of wink at one; he doesn’t seem to accompany the other players as much as he comments on them. Rollins’ solo is a rollicking one, with more than a little swagger in its swing as he works in bits of “Doxy” into the second verse of his solo.

Speaking of “Doxy,” the third of the great Rollins standards here, Gitler calls out the “funky” character of the music; I’d prefer to call it “suggestive,” in a slightly exaggerated Mae West-style “come up and see me sometime” spirit. Interestingly, Rollins’ own solo is the only one that doesn’t feature any intimations of either hanky or panky.

We close with “But Not For Me (Take 1)”; are we suggesting that the doxy is not for us? Here the repetition of the performance is OK with me as the solos are anything but repetitive. Miles in particular takes a unique approach to the rhythm of his solo, playing a sly hemiola before dropping completely out of the last bar before Rollins picks things up. Monk is less oblique here than on Take 2, playing an unusually straight ahead solo before he develops into the idea of commenting on the other players on the last chorus. It’s a solid ending to a solid session.

Bags Groove gives us a great window into Miles the bandleader before he put his first great band together, as we get a fascinating glimpse of what an alternate quintet might have looked like (imagine Thelonious Monk on Milestones!). Next time we’ll check on some of the players that did become part of that quintet, and the one who made it a sextet, in a live setting.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

PS – A note on collecting vinyl: Sometimes you get lucky. I didn’t set out to find a copy of the 1958 second pressing of this early Miles set earlier this summer, but when I walked into the antique shop in western Massachusetts it was right there, and to my delight it was gorgeous and beautifully playable.

Thelonious Monk, Monk’s Music

Monk’s Music

Album of the Week, March 19, 2022.

Today’s #albumoftheweek may seem like a detour from our exploration of Miles Davis’s recording career (via my record collection), and it is, a bit. But in other ways it picks up where we left off last week, with Miles’ band mostly leaving as they fell prey to their addictions. Today we explore what happened next to the most famous of those sidemen.

What happened to John Coltrane was that he found God.

This is not an inference or an exaggeration. In 1964, Trane wrote in the liner notes to A Love Supreme that “During the year 1957, I experienced, by the grace of God, a spiritual awakening which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life.” The newfound spirituality enabled Trane to quit heroin, though not before it irrevocably marked him; there is good reason to suppose that the drug, along with the alcoholism that accompanied his addiction, contributed to the liver cancer that was to kill him just ten years later.

Trane also found Monk, or vice versa, in 1957, and their collaboration made a substantial difference to their respective careers. Thelonious Sphere Monk himself had been struggling for years, after the discovery of narcotics (likely belonging to his friend Bud Powell) in his car led to the revocation of his cabaret card. His ability to perform in public limited and his eccentric composition style granting his music an unfair reputation for difficulty, his record sales for Prestige were relatively meager. In fact, when he sought to go to Riverside, the latter label was able to buy out Monk’s contract with Prestige for only $108.24.

But somehow Trane and Monk found each other in mid-1957 and began performing together at the Five Spot Cafe. Because Trane was still under contract to Prestige Records, he was not able to record widely in the studio with Monk’s group, but somehow the label managed to secure the rights to include him in this recording, which featured exclusively Monk’s compositions—plus, in a note of irony, a horns-only performance of the hymn “Abide with Me,” written by William Henry Monk (no relation).

The inclusion of the hymn takes us back to the evolution of Trane during this period, and spotlights the substantial and lasting difference that his spiritual conversion made in Trane’s music, almost from the very beginning. The single verse of the hymn is played solemnly and straight, with harmonies straight from the hymnbook. Structurally it serves as a prelude to the next track, “Well, You Needn’t,” which features an astonishing solo from Coltrane in full on pentecostal mode.

In fact, “Well, You Needn’t” is an astonishing track from start to finish. Monk’s piano opens by itself, swinging the rhythm and stretching it into something like 6/4, before being joined by the full band. Monk remains gnomic in his solo, approaching the chords of the melody obliquely rather than playing into it, before calling for his tenor saxophonist: “Coltrane! Coltrane!” And Trane enters, blowing leaps of fifths and sevenths across two choruses in something like a holy shout. He then yields the floor to Ray Copeland for a turn at the melody on trumpet, before Wilbur Ware and Art Blakey pick it up. Ware’s exploration of the melody evolves it into a pattern of descending fifths that is then picked up by the redoutable Blakey, who then takes the pattern across all the elements of his drum kit. Coleman Hawkins and Gigi Gryce take the last solos, with more conventional but no less fierce approaches to the melody, before the full band comes back in to close the track. It is nothing short of a master class in jazz improvisation.

The third track, “Ruby, My Dear,” is the one track on which Coltrane doesn’t play, but that is not a reason to skip it. It’s a remarkably tender ballad and on any other record would be the romantic highlight. But not here. On Monk’s Music the second side goes through some gnarly territory with the one-two punch of “Off Minor” and “Epistrophy” before it lands on a new composition, “Crepuscule with Nellie.”

The tune, dedicated to Monk’s wife, was originally to be titled “Twilight with Nellie,” before the countess Pannonica de Koenigswarter, a staunch advocate of American bebop musicians, suggested the use of the French word. The performance is through-composed, meaning that Monk wrote out the entire track rather than sketching the melody and chords as a basis of improvisation. It also means that what we hear in the recording is an unusually true representation of Monk’s original intentions—notable since this version, unlike most covers of the work, keep the rhythm straight rather than ”swinging” the eighth notes in the original melody. Indeed, throughout the album Monk plays with expectations of rhythm, often turning them on their heads, such as the off-center chordal interjections that run through “Well, You Needn’t.” However it happens, “Crepuscule” stands as a romantic highlight, not just of the recording but perhaps of all of 1950s jazz.

Trane’s time in Monk’s group would be brief, yielding this one studio recording and a handful of live appearances that have since popped up on record. He would soon reenter the studio as a leader, recording Blue Trane later in 1957 for Blue Note Records, and an immense amount of material—some 37 sides, released over many albums—for Prestige Records in 1958. In fact, 1958 was a pivotal year for Trane, who rejoined Miles in the January of that year. By that time the quintet had become a sextet, with the addition of another saxophonist who we’ll meet next week.

I first found Monk’s Music at Plan 9 Records in Charlottesville, Virginia. It was a happy accident brought on by my habit of rifling through all the Original Jazz Classics CD reissues and buying the ones that had the most interesting liner notes (a habit I wrote about some years ago). The copy shown in the photograph above was a reissue on translucent red vinyl courtesy of Newbury Comics some years ago. Listen and enjoy.