Monk

Listening to Andrew Hill (R.I.P.) last week led inexorably, as it always does, back to Thelonious Monk, whose angular melodies with their wide intervallic leaps influenced Hill plenty. There are a ton of Monk records out there to choose from: the original Blue Notes from the '40s, which are where it all began, but constrained by the length of a 78 rpm single; the sides he cut for Riverside and Prestige in the '50s, which take full advantage of the longer track lengths made available by the LP medium; and the '60s Columbias, which continued to explore a repertoire that wasn't expanding quite as fast by then as it had in prior years. The Riverside/Prestige sessions are my favorites. On Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane and Monk's Music, you get to hear the future (Trane) and the past (Coleman Hawkins) of the tenor saxophone standing side by side in the studio, trying to figure out Monk's charts. Dig in particular the two men's contrasting approaches to my favorite ballad, "Ruby My Dear." The title tune to Brilliant Corners, with its built-in tempo changes, was so daunting to musicians that it had to be recorded in sections, and the players in involved (Sonny Rollins, Ernie Henry, Oscar Pettiford, Max Roach) were certainly no slouches. That album also includes my fave Monk ballad after "Ruby My Dear": "Pannonica." Those tunes, and others like "Epistrophy," "Crepuscule With Nellie," "Well You Needn't," "Bemsha Swing," "Jackie-ing," are timeless. I can listen to those records back to back, over and over, for days.