Giant Steps by Kenny Mathieson

Author:Kenny Mathieson [Mathieson, Kenny]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857866172
Publisher: Canongate Books

The pianist’s tribute to Bud Powell, the ebullient ‘In Walked Bud’, is arguably the closest thing to a conventional bebop chord progression in the Monk repertory but even it is immediately and unmistakably stamped with his distinctive trademark. One of the musical elements which marked Monk off in consistent fashion from the bebop mainstream was his refusal to indulge in the breakneck tempos favoured by Bird and Dizzy. Monk’s favoured tempo lay somewhere between mid-tempo and brisk (generally in the range of 150–200 beats per minute) and even here, in a quintet setting on his third Blue Note session and with one of his sprightliest tunes, the tempo is markedly lower than the bebop norm. The little whole-tone run which depicts Bud’s bouncing entrance is a favourite device and the whole thing is entirely characteristic of Monk, even though it is one of his compositions which is a contrafact of a standard tune, being based on ‘Blue Skies’, albeit with the expected drastic re-think. (Monk’s modifications often remove such contrafacts so distantly from their source that even seasoned musical ears cannot identify the underlying structure.) He recorded the tune again on his Underground album for Columbia in 1968 at an even more deliberate pace and with a vocal by Jon Hendricks, a combination which made it something of a rarity in his output.

Economy of expression is one of the pianist’s greatest assets and few of his compositions illustrate that point as effectively as ‘Misterioso’, first recorded in his next Blue Note session, with a quartet featuring Milt Jackson on vibes. The theme chorus is a simple step-wise ascending and descending motif with a rhythmic feel which suggests an angular derivation of a walking boogie-woogie bass line. It is built in eighth notes moving through a blues scale, employing intervals of a sixth until the last note, when he flicks to a seventh to launch Jackson’s lithe solo chorus, which the piano subsequently supports with spare, darkly dissonant punctuations. Monk takes two probing choruses, building the first from the harmonies sketched in behind the vibes solo and returning to material derived from the theme in the second, all the while exploring a daring harmonic colouration and rhythmic accentuation. It is a masterpiece conjured up out of the sparest of elements and one to which he returned many times in concert.

Although Monk played these tunes throughout his life, he did not simply regurgitate set interpretations of them in his soloing. He occasionally re-invented at a more fundamental level as well. Take, for example, two treatments of what is one of his greatest compositions, ‘Criss Cross’. His first studio version of the tune was a quintet version from the Blue Note session of 23 July 1951, in a band which featured Sahib Shihab (alto sax), Milt Jackson (vibes), Al McKibbon (bass) and Art Blakey (drums). This is a quintessential Monk theme, manipulating a basic three-note phrase in typically angular, quirky fashion, allowing the material to suggest its own development from phrase to phrase

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.