Written by Monk and drummer Kenny Clarke in 1941, "Epistrophy" is emblematic of the swing era's avant-garde jazz scene, largely centered around Minton's Playhouse in central Harlem. Along with pivotal guitarist Charlie Christian (an early adopter of the electric guitar who is best known for his stint in the Benny Goodman Sextet), Monk and other forward-thinking musicians strove to develop a new variant of jazz that repudiated the more accessible facets of mainstream jazz in favor of a more meritocratic course that did away with what Scott Knowles DeVeaux has identified as the "racial privilege" of the swing era. Indeed, Anthony Brown has characterized "Epistrophy" as nothing less than "the first classic modern jazz composition."
Because of his famed eccentricities and relatively long ascent to stardom, Monk's seminal contributions to jazz theory (paving the way for bebop and the Sixties avant-garde) are seldom explored by aficionados and scholars. In a 2010 interview with The Atlantic, Monk biographer Robin D.G. Kelly noted that "[Monk] was pissed off about the fact that other artists like Bird and Diz (Parker and Gillespie) got credit for bebop while Monk got placed in the shadows of the movement. He also didn't like the way the jazz avant-garde took credit for harmonic developments he had been working on, and became the darlings of the media."
By the time Monk recorded the song in 1948 during one of several intermittent sessions for Blue Note Records amid the bebop revolution ostensibly augured by Parker and his acolytes, it had evolved into a searing showcase for the underground visionary's harmonically dense, blues-inflected piano style.
Inexorably intertwined with the 1951 revocation of Monk's cabaret license, the composer's recordings for Prestige Records (a boutique label founded by connoisseur Bob Weinstock that catered all too easily to the mercurial whims of its roster, including addiction-exploiting cash advances and a tape-saving predilection for spontaneity) are often overlooked by critics and fans due to their provenance. Still, the results could often be scintillating. On 1953's "Friday the 13th," Monk teamed up with up-and-coming saxophonist Sonny Rollins for a memorable session (augmented by the inclusion of French hornist Julius Watkins) centered around a simple riff that, according to Robert Christgau, "belongs on both guys' life list." Monk and Rollins would go on to collaborate on the former's breakthrough album, Brilliant Corners.
Often eclipsed by Brilliant Corners, Thelonious Himself was Monk's second album for Riverside Records. Another New York-based bastion of connoisseurship, the label was headed by Orrin Keepnews, a self-described "catalyst" who wrote the first profile of Monk in 1948 and blissfully shied away from the technical rigors of the recording process. A new interpretation of "April in Paris" opens the album, Monk's first solo piano collection save for one band track. Standing in stark contrast to the breezy Blue Note rendition, the song is taken to new heights of lyrical introversion in an extraordinary arrangement that veers between magnificent desolation and emotive power.
By the time he graduated to Columbia Records with 1962's Monk's Dream (widely heralded as one of his best albums), he only included one new song, the "Sweet Georgia Brown"-derived "Bright Mississippi." While it fails to channel the baroque splendor of the Riverside era, "Mississippi" is a jaunty jamming vehicle for one of Monk's tightest bands, including longtime collaborator Charlie Rouse on tenor sax, bassist John Ore and drummer Frankie Dunlop.
Rivaled only by "Straight No Chaser" as Monk's most quintessential composition, "'Round Midnight" has been covered by hundreds of artists. However, few covers match the indomitable power of Miles Davis's version, recorded with his "First Great Quintet" (including fellow Special Citation recipient John Coltrane on tenor sax) shortly after he conquered his heroin addiction in 1956. Davis's selection enshrined Monk as an important compositional force in American music following a decade and a half of toil on the fringes of the New York jazz scene.
By Sean Murphy, The Pulitzer Prizes
Non-Hyperlinked Sources: Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original by Robin D.G. Kelley (Free Press, 2010); So What: The Life of Miles Davis by John Szwed (Simon & Schuster, 2004); The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History by Scott Knowles DeVeaux (University of California Press, 1999); "Modern Jazz Drumset Artistry" by Anthony Brown (The Black Perspective in Music, Vol. 18, No. 1/2 [1990], pp. 39-58)
