The title track of Brilliant Corners does not exist as a performance. No complete take of it was ever recorded.
What you hear on the album was assembled by producer Orrin Keepnews from 25 incomplete attempts, spliced together into something the band never managed to play from start to finish. A few of the joins are audible if you know to listen for them.
That fact tells you most of what you need to know about the record, and about where Monk was in 1956.
How Monk got to Riverside
By the mid-1950s Thelonious Monk had been recording for a decade and was still regarded, by a large part of the jazz establishment, as a curiosity.
He had no New York cabaret card, having lost it after a 1951 drug arrest, which meant he could not work in the city’s clubs. His Blue Note and Prestige records had not sold.
Orrin Keepnews signed him to Riverside in 1955 by paying off his outstanding debt to Prestige. The sum was $108.27.
Keepnews then made a shrewd decision. Rather than present Monk as the eccentric of his reputation, he put out two albums of other people’s material: Thelonious Monk Plays the Music of Duke Ellington in 1955, and The Unique Thelonious Monk in 1956.
Both were trios, both were well reviewed, and both made the case that Monk was a serious musician working inside the tradition rather than outside it.
Critics noticed what was missing. There were no Monk compositions on either record.
The sessions
Brilliant Corners was recorded across three dates at Reeves Sound Studios in New York: 9 October, 15 October and 7 December 1956. Riverside released it on 4 April 1957.
For the first two sessions Monk assembled a quintet of Ernie Henry on alto saxophone, Sonny Rollins on tenor, Oscar Pettiford on bass and Max Roach on drums.
The choice of Henry was characteristic. He was a largely forgotten alto player struggling with heroin addiction who had recently begun recording for Riverside after being recommended to the label by pianist Randy Weston. Henry recorded three albums as a leader for Riverside before dying in 1957.
Rollins was at the height of his powers that year and had been rehearsing regularly with Monk. Roach and Pettiford had played on the two previous Riverside albums.
The title track
“Brilliant Corners” is built to be difficult. The theme states itself at one tempo, then repeats at double speed, then drops back again. The harmony moves in leaps that give a soloist very little to hold onto.
The band could not get through it. Keepnews’ liner notes record the effort plainly: these men worked hard. After roughly four hours and 25 incomplete takes, he gave up on a complete performance and built one in the edit.
What survives is remarkable precisely because of the strain. You can hear musicians of the highest calibre operating at the edge of what they can execute, and the solos by Rollins, Henry and Monk have an urgency that a comfortable third take would never have produced.
Pannonica, and a celeste in the corner
“Pannonica” is named for Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, the British-born jazz patron who supported Monk for much of his career and in whose house Charlie Parker had died the previous year.
Monk noticed a celeste in the studio and had it positioned at a right angle to the piano, which let him play the melody on the celeste with his right hand while comping on the piano with his left. The two sounds sit oddly against each other, which is plainly what he wanted.
The other Nica-related piece on the album is “Ba-lue Bolivar Ba-lues-Are”, a long blues whose title refers to her difficulties with the management of the Bolivar Hotel, where she lived. It runs past thirteen minutes and contains what may be Ernie Henry’s finest recorded solo.
The December session
By December the personnel had changed. Ernie Henry had left to join Dizzy Gillespie’s band. Oscar Pettiford, after friction with Monk during the earlier dates, declined to return; the two never recorded together again.
Clark Terry came in on trumpet and a young Paul Chambers took the bass chair for one final piece, “Bemsha Swing”, which Monk had written six years earlier with the Barbadian drummer Denzil Best.
Max Roach spotted a timpani in the studio and set it up beside his kit, playing fills and rolls on it through the performance. It is one of the strangest and most effective sounds on any Monk record, and it works because Roach uses it as a drum rather than as an effect.
The album also contains “I Surrender, Dear”, a solo piano performance and the only piece on the record Monk did not write.
What it changed
Brilliant Corners was Monk’s third Riverside album and the first to present his own compositions. It was also the first of his records to be a critical success on release. Nat Hentoff gave it five stars in Down Beat and called it the most important modern jazz LP Riverside had issued.
The timing mattered. Monk got his cabaret card back in 1957 and took a long residency at the Five Spot with John Coltrane in his band. Within a few years he was on the cover of Time magazine. The reassessment that turned him from oddity into major composer starts here.
The album has since been inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame and added to the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry.
What to listen for
Start with “Pannonica” rather than the title track. It is the most immediately beautiful thing on the record and it introduces Monk’s writing without the difficulty.
Then go to “Brilliant Corners” and listen for the tempo change, which arrives without warning and happens twice in each chorus. Once you hear it, the piece stops sounding chaotic and starts sounding constructed.
Finally, “Bemsha Swing”, for Roach’s timpani and for Clark Terry, who sounds entirely at home in music that had defeated better-known players two months earlier.
It is not an easy album and it was never meant to be. It is, however, the record where the argument about Monk was effectively settled.
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