Tracks: Brilliant Corners//Ba-Lue Bolivar Ba-Lues//Pannonica//I Surrender, Dear//Bemsha Swing
Review:
Ah! An excercise in contrasts! Rambling songs anchored by a single, atonal theme that is improvised on throughout the song. Sonny Rollins, Ernie Henry and Clark Terry on horn and Max Roach on drums. The madman with the hat and beard holds it all together with his demented, clanging pianos that would put Debussy’s teeth on edge. The first song contains a drum solo that sounds like a box full of pilates balls falling down a stairwell, clatters about the place like a room full of beetles and blowflies and then coalesces at the end into a simple but engaging groove. This one track took five takes to get right, and it still sounds like it’s about to fall apart at any moment. But Jesus! The cross-rhythms. There’s a drum kit and a bass there but it almost doesn’t matter – it SWINGS! It’s just the same section repeated half a dozen times at different speeds! It’s madness! Ornette Coleman was lurking just around the corner to take it all perhaps a little too far. Thurston Moore was clutched in is mother’s womb busily detuning his guitar. Bebop has arrived. This is it!
Well, no, Brilliant Corners didn’t invent bebop. I think maybe Charlie Parker did but I can’t remember. That’s pretty bad, that I can’t. Anyway it was about ten years old (though you wouldn’t know it, with all the swing on this list), and not really anything at all like this. This is hard-bop, whatever the hell that means. Anyway, stuff like “Brilliant Corners” is the reason I listen to music. Fifty years on, the track isn’t quite as immediately baffling as it once was. Now, it’s just sort of groovy. But dig in a little. Thelonious Monk was the first jazz artist I ever heard anything by. I listened to “Round Midnight” and “Straight, No Chaser” over and over again and tried with a complete lack of success to emulate the kind of complex rhythmical interplay present in his music. I couldn’t even play guitar – I couldn’t even tell if my guitar was in tune – and I was using Bitches Brew and Thelonious Monk as guiding lights of musical inspiration. I suppose, even at the start, I liked the weirder stuff. But still, a pretty stupid move.
You see, a lot of people listen to modern jazz and think “Ah! This is just noise! You can do whatever you want!” A lot of people read modern poetry and think the same thing. This leads to a lot of crap poetry, but thankfully playing jazz music requires a level of technical prowess which tends to vet a lot of enthusiastic but misguided amateurs. Hey! I’m not elitist. Beboppers were elitist. I say – if you can’t play jazz then grab a guitar and a copy of No Wave New York and see what happens.
I don’t pretend to understand “Brilliant Corners”. I understand “Ba-Lue Bolivar Ba-Lues”. It’s a blues composition, thirteen minutes long, riding a simple, easy structure and taking time out for each of the players to drop a technically-dazzling solo in between recitations of the theme. It's a relatively straightforward track and it's smooth as silk. The other tracks are, for various and individual reasons, just plain weird . The harmonic systems are completely out of sync with convention. I don’t understand on a technical level – I never bothered to learn much harmonic theory beyond some very simple stuff necessary to crank-out rock music. The notes lock together less on direct, one-two connections between each other, like you’d get on a 12 bar blues or a simple solo in a scale, than on the general sense of overlap between notes. I guess if it makes sense to say this, rather than being based around a root note the scales and keys are based around a point of absence which numerous notes abut. OK, so I’ve just made anyone with even a basic understanding of Western tonality very, very angry, but who cares. To put it simply – it’s all out of tune and Thelonious Monk doesn’t really seem to care.
The point of all this is that Brilliant Corners is utterly ramshackle, but holds together beautifully as a cohesive, harmonically balanced album. Thelonious wasn’t as radical as some of his contemporaries – the man wrote pretty melodies and hewed to comprehensible bop structures. This isn’t Sun Ra. Actually, why is there no Sun Ra on this list? Or Ornette Coleman? The only “free” stuff, really, is a bit of Miles Davis in Bitches Brew, which isn’t actually free, and John Zorn’s Spy vs Spy, which is kind of a cheat in that it combines No Wave with Ornette Coleman covers and thus gets the organisers of this list out of having to put too many “avant garde” releases on here. I mean, Brilliant Corners is a brilliant album (how many reviews have said that? I warrant, too many, but perhaps not enough), yet at the same time it’s thoroughly accessible. I have nothing against accessible music – I almost never listen to Ornette Coleman myself; but I do think that either one of his early albums (Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation is both thoroughly accessible and massively important) or Eric Dolphy’s Out to Lunch would be very, very welcome additions Mr. 1001 Albums Big Cheese. Although I will grant that, never actually having read the book, they may in fact devote whole pages to singing the praises of Boredoms, the Contortions and, say, Alice Coltrane. And no, she’s not Free either.
Anyway. There’s nothing worse than a guy who doesn’t no what he’s talking about rambling about people not knowing what they’re talking about. Leave me alone! I’m sleep-deprived. It was this or a four thousand word essay on Feminism in 1950s middle-America that’s now worryingly overdue.
So, some of the other tracks? I wrote, only to have my computer crash, that “Bemsha Swing” shares more than a little in common with John Coltrane’s later “A Love Supreme” (or at least, I think so - it sounds damned like something I've heard before). The principal refrain, as well as the solos, all bear a suspicious resemblance. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course – it just serves further to highlight how good this is. Coltrane borrowed one small element from a shambolic 7-minute masterpiece of stormy dynamic interplay and marvellous rhythmic sax soloing (how the hell does... Ernie Henry I think navigate that ever-shifting beat?) and turned it into one of the most purely beautiful songs ever produced. This album is a watershed – it’s an Aladdin’s cave to be returned to again and again.
“Pannonica”, in contrast to “Bemsha Swing”, is a gentle number with swaying horns spelling out a delicate, shifting melody, a swinging rhythm on the drum and bass and a celeste of all things chiming out eerie accents. The song itself is relatively comprehensible, but the unusual combination of instruments gives it an added element which is utterly otherworldly. It’s simultaneously demented and enchanting, which sums the album up I suppose. Except that I still haven’t mentioned the classically-tinged solo piano piece, “I Surrender, Dear”. Tom Waits once said that Thelonious Monk once said that there are no wrong notes – only how you resolve them. You can hear that above all in this piece – he surveys the rough landscape of the song, plots a straight line to his destination and then clambers erratically about over hills and mountains to the conclusion. Yes, Thelonious Monk invented Parcour.
It’s a strange, fragmentary, angular style that’s quite captivating in its complexity, leaving no dynamic stone unturned. But it’s melodious. He fills-out the bare bones of melodies, or assembles their rough approximations out of scattered nots. This is Modernism, baby! This is cubism of the keys.
The name, to wrap up, is a thus a great and obvious pun. Monk takes a sudden dazzling turn, at the same time as he presents nothing but sharp angles. This is pointy music. It doesn’t seem quite as much, maybe, to modern ears, but back in 1957 this was baffling stuff. The careful, mathematical precision Monk brings to his compositions and playing is brilliant
This is a must-hear album. This is the sort of thing that makes you do some serious thinking. Also, it is a fun time for dancing. People forget that – that you can dance to modern jazz. That was actually one of the major things that pissed-off the Old School (Melle Mel was furious). Well. It’s not called the “Bemsha Swing” for nothing. I can only assume that "Bemsha" means "Stoned Revenant", but anyway. If you'll excuse me, I have a soul train to catch.
*duck-walks away into the distance*
9.5/10
Download: Thelonious Monk - Bemsha Swing [mp3]
No comments:
Post a Comment