Track Listing

1. Brilliant Corners
2. Ba Lue Bolivar Ba Lues Are
3. Pannonica
4. I Surrender Dear
5. Bemsha Swing

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #78802 in Music
• Released on: 1999-05-17
• Number of discs: 1

Amazon.co.uk Review
Few composers or improvisers can match the originality of pianist Thelonious Monk. Quirky yet rigorously logical, Monk's playful but always purposeful choice of skewed melodies and interrupted rhythm patterns gave the bebop movement, and jazz in total, a new sound that was totally modern. Although he created a surprisingly limited body of compositions, his impact on the vocabulary and canon of jazz is second to none, including such prolific giants as Duke Ellington. Brilliant Corners is a triumph of both performance and conception: the two small-group sessions, anchored by Monk, drummer Max Roach, and the bass work of either Oscar Pettiford or Paul Chambers, feature superb front-line performances by saxophonists Sonny Rollins and the tragically under-recorded Ernie Henry, as well as trumpeter Clark Terry. The title track, which centres the collection, is one of Monk's most unconventional pieces, skirting whole-tone, chromatic and Lydian scales; a version of "Pannonica" finds Monk doubling on celeste, while the band stretches out on "Bemsha Swing" and the blues "Ba-lue Bolivar Ba-lues-are". --Fred Goodman

CD Description
By the fall of 1956, Riverside was finally primed to unleash Thelonious Monk upon the jazz world--straight, no chaser. Two superb piano trio albums of covers had set the stage forMonk the composer to re-emerge with horns, and the pianist responded with BRILLIANT CORNERS, one of his greatest recordings, featuring three classic new tunes and two formidable studio bands.
The Sonny Rollins featured on BRILLIANT CORNERS is a far more imposing presence than the young acolyte of previous Monk sessions--just witness the title tune. With its multiple themes, quirky intervallic leaps, idiomatic rhythmic changes and tricky transitions in tempo, it is one of Monk's masterpieces--a miniature symphony. So daunting were its technical challenges, that the final ending was edited on from another take. Rollins begins his solo with swaggeringcomposure, boldly paraphrasing Monk's vinegary intervals and trademark trills, before navigating the swift rapids of the double-time chorus with deft syncopations. Monk plies dissonance upon dissonance in his first chorus, playing rhythmictag with Max Roach on the out chorus. Ernie Henry's slip-sliding bluesiness is followed by a brilliant rhythmic edificefrom Roach, who maintains melodic coherence at a drowsy tempo, then explodes into the final chorus.
Elsewhere, "Ba-Lue Bolivar Ba-Lues-Are" is a soulful, easygoing blues, and Monk's solo is a compendium of pithy rhythmic devices, bent notes and calculated melodic abstractions, played with enormous relaxation and swing. He concludes with heckling big-bandfigures that form the basis for Rollins' expressive rhythmic testimonies. Monk employs the bell-like timbre of a celeste to stunning effect on "Pannonica", one of his loveliest melodies and improvisations. And in closing, "Bemsha Swing" isa hard-swinging, conversational performance, with fine contributions from trumpeter Clark Terry, bassist Paul Chambers and Roach on drums and timpani.

Customer Reviews

�Brilliance� is just one of its attributes
Brilliant Corners is remarkable for bringing together musicians who had established themselves as major jazzmen in their own right and yet gave everything on this date to make an album that from the outset would reflect Monk's peculiar musical world. Perhaps it is Monk's most enduring masterpiece.

The title piece is one of the single major works in the jazz canon. It proved so difficult to play that 25 separate cuts had to be spliced together to produce the final piece. Sonny Rollins was the tenor saxophonist on the date and leading guest musician. As a teenager, Rollins had rehearsed alongside Monk. His contribution to "Brilliant Corners" was devastating: he acquired a feel for the unusual structure of the piece -abrupt changes of tempo, bombast followed by bathos, sudden diabolical runs, jumps into double time- and became Monk's voice through a horn, while retaining the unmistakeable Rollins attack. And all this drama was held together by the polyrhythmic adaptability of Max Roach, who had played so magnificently with Rollins a few months earlier on Saxophone Colossus.

The rest of the album contains the eccentric blues "Ba-lue Bolivar Ba-lues-are" (which appears on numerous early 1960s discs, including Monk's Dream, Columbia, 1962), the first recording of "Pannonica", written for the wealthy jazz-lover Pannonica "Nica" de Koenigswarter, in whose New York apartment Charlie Parker had died the year before, "Bemsha Swing", first recorded by Monk in 1952 and on this occasion featuring Duke Ellington's chief trumpeter Clark Terry, and a solo reading of "I Surrender, Dear". This is an essential modern jazz album.

Music to think about
This is a very mysterious CD. Thelonious Monk is a revered jazz musician and composer, he is an influence of gigantic proportions, The Rough Guide to Jazz recommends this album but for all that, somehow, I cannot bring myself to like it. Perhaps it is too intellectual for me, I like my music to swing and this does not and yet most of the personnel can and do swing on other recordings.

The strangest thing of all is I have to keep listening to it and perhaps in an odd way I am coming to appreciate it. Is it possible to appreciate music without enjoying it? Could it be that appreciation, understanding and enjoyment follow one another? I hope so because these are top jazz musicians playing music I don't really understand but I feel in re-listening my time will be well spent and rewarded; for that reason alone this CD deserves its place in my collection.

Oh Monk, ye deity, how you torment me still...
There's a big fat poster of Thelonious Monk hanging over my desk as I type this, and do you know how hard it is to type and bow at the same time? His 'brilliant corners' is, strangley, comprised of inspired lines. And there's no doubt that he was loopy, so it all adds up to some kind of impossible shape...