Thelonious Monk - Thelonious Monk Plays Duke Ellington (1982 US Riverside Vinyl LP Mono)

Thelonious Monk - Thelonious Monk Plays Duke Ellington | Vinyl LP Mono - 1982 US Original Jazz Classics Reissue (OJC-024, originally Riverside RLP 12-201

Keepnews had been one of the first writers to take Monk's Blue Note sides seriously, and by 1955 he was running Riverside with Bill Grauer and had a pianist on his books whom critics admired and nobody bought. Monk's Prestige albums had sold badly. The word attached to him was 'difficult'. So Keepnews proposed an album of Ellington tunes, and by his own account in the original liner notes Monk went away with a pile of Ellington sheet music and came back when he was ready. What that account leaves out is how strange the result is. Monk does not soften anything. His touch here is lighter than on most of his own records and Clarke plays brushes through much of it, but the harmonic thinking is entirely his: the cubist introduction to "Sophisticated Lady," the spare big band punctuations he uses to attack "Caravan," the way "I Let A Song Go Out Of My Heart" is taken apart and reassembled as a dancing set of variations. The lineage between the two men is real and Monk makes it audible. Ellington's rhythmic displacement, his harmonic surprises and his stride left hand are all in Monk's playing, and playing Ellington's own material is the clearest way to demonstrate it.

Pettiford and Clarke are not accompanists. Pettiford takes a solo on "It Don't Mean A Thing" that is among the best things on the record, and Clarke's Afro-Cuban accents on "Caravan" set the whole performance up. The three of them had come out of the same 52nd Street world in the 1940s and the interplay reflects it. The plan did not work commercially. Monk's next Riverside album was another set of standards, and it took until Brilliant Corners in 1957 before Riverside let him record his own compositions again. But Plays Duke Ellington has outlasted the reasoning behind it, and it now reads less as a compromise than as one pianist making an argument about where he came from.

This is the 1982 Original Jazz Classics reissue on OJC-024, distributed by Fantasy, presenting the album in its original mono.