Thelonious Himself

Solo piano at Reeves Sound Studios in New York, 1957. No bass, no drums — just Monk working out the harmonic logic of his own compositions in front of a microphone. The album includes “‘Round Midnight” developed across 22 minutes of takes: the same tune, several different approaches, the variations revealing how Monk thought about his own material. His comping style — the “wrong” notes that are structurally correct, the pauses that last a beat longer than expected — is one of the most imitated and least understood things in jazz.

Thelonious Himself is the record that shows how that style works from the inside. Without a band, the harmonic decisions are fully exposed. What sounds like idiosyncrasy in ensemble contexts reveals itself as a system — a very particular way of approaching the vertical dimension of a chord that has more in common with Stockhausen’s serial methods than with bebop convention. This is the solo Monk; the solo Monk is the argument in its purest form.