Bemsha Swing

I have “Bemsha Swing” on the brain for no special reason. It’s one of Thelonious Monk’s most persistent earworms, and every once in a while it wakens from its dormant state to occupy my music circuitry for a week or two or three. When I am jamming on the guitar, my fingers constantly find their way into it, and I walk around humming or whistling it  too. I like to think of my relationship with the tune as more symbiotic than parasitic, but either way, the tune is well and truly embedded in me. I don’t know how it was able to take such firm root, but maybe over the course of writing the post, some ideas will suggest themselves.

Monk co-wrote “Bemsha Swing” with drummer Denzil Best. KUVO explains that they originally copyrighted it under the title “Bimsha Swing”, referring to “Bimshire”, a nickname for Denzil Best’s family home of Barbados. Monk first recorded it in 1952 with Gary Mapp on bass and Max Roach on drums. 

Shame on Prestige Records for not bothering to tune the piano! But this happened to Monk a lot in the early days. I wonder how much of his style was driven by the need to make out-of-tune pianos sound good? He always managed to make them sing. In a Yamaha showroom, I saw a demo of their Spirio system, where they had extracted the piano notes from a video of Monk playing live, and they were being played back on a Disklavier. It was uncanny to hear that distinctive Monk-ian touch on a perfectly in-tune brand new grand piano right there in the room with me.

Anyway, the more canonical version of “Bemsha Swing” is from Brilliant Corners, recorded in 1956.

Max Roach is on drums again, playing a kit augmented with a timpani. Monk is also backed by Sonny Rollins on tenor saxophone, Clark Terry on trumpet, and Paul Chambers on bass.

The first recording I heard of the tune was an uptempo 1963 live version from Japan, also with Rouse, that appeared on a compilation called Thelonious Monk: The Composer. Monk accompanies Rouse on the second time through the head with the melody displaced two beats later, making a nifty canon.

Let’s check out some recordings by other people. First, here’s Miles Davis from 1954, backed by Monk on piano.

This is one of the few recordings to feature these two together. While Miles had evident respect for Monk as a composer, they did not gel personally. The record also has Milt Jackson on vibes, Percy Heath on bass and Kenny Clarke on drums.

Two years later, Cecil Taylor recorded “Bemsha Swing” for his debut album Jazz Advance. 

This is a sublimely weird recording, because bassist Buell Neidlinger and drummer Denis Charles doggedly follow the form and the changes, while Cecil plays… like Cecil. Steven Block argues that this track is “simultaneously free jazz and a bebop version of the blues” (p. 231). Cecil would soon start recording with musicians more closely aligned to his ideas, but there’s something magical about the way this album mashes up far-out and conventional jazz.

In 1960, Don Cherry and John Coltrane included the tune on an album otherwise mostly devoted to Ornette Coleman compositions. Percy Heath plays bass and Ed Blackwell plays drums. Coltrane quotes “While My Lady Sleeps” during his solo.

Is it possible that Coltrane based his tune “Resolution” from A Love Supreme on “Bemsha Swing”? It’s conceivable, though not proven.

Speaking of Don Cherry, here you can see him playing “Bemsha Swing” live with Herbie Hancock on piano, Ron Carter on bass and Billy Higgins on drums. Check out the pocket cornet!

Woody Shaw plays “Bemsha Swing” beautifully on his live album of the same name. Geri Allen’s piano style doesn’t sound much like Monk’s, but she shares his playfulness and sense of surprise.

Dr. Lonnie Smith gives the tune a moody drone, maybe inspired by the Middle Eastern flavor of the melody.

Houston Person and Ron Carter play the tune as a slow, soulful sax-and-bass duet. Ron’s slow upward slides are to die for.

Charlie Haden and Jim Hall do another memorable duet recording, on bass and guitar respectively.

Chano Domínguez plays the tune on piano backed by a palmero (handclapper) and a dancer, and they change up the tempo and feel several times.

Bill Evans plays the tune on three tracks of overdubbed piano.

Medeski, Martin & Wood blend it with “Lively Up Yourself” by Bob Marley.

TJ Kirk play it on three guitars, two regular and one eight-string.

Miles Okazaki plays it on just one guitar, part of his epic project of recording every single Monk tune on solo guitar.

There are lots more recordings of “Bemsha Swing.” Miles Okazaki’s isn’t even the only recent solo guitar version! So what makes the tune so compelling to so many musicians? Maybe music theory can shed some light.

The melody to “Bemsha Swing” is not complicated, but it is unconventional. The first phrase begins with a jump from G up to C to land on the tonic of a C major chord. So far, so conventionally major. From there, it walks down the C natural minor scale back to G. So maybe it’s minor? But then the melody continues down past F to E-natural, putting us back in major. The phrase concludes jumping down to B-natural and resolving up to C, reinforcing the major-ness. Blending major and minor is a cornerstone of blues harmony, but “Bemsha Swing” is coming at this idea from an oblique angle.

The tune shows its blues aspect more clearly in its form. It’s structured like the first two-thirds of a twelve bar blues (but with twice as many bars, so really a twenty-four bar blues.) There’s a four-bar phrase in C, another four-bar phrase in C, a four-bar phrase in F, and a final four-bar phrase in C.

| C | % | % | % | 
| C | % | % | % |
| F | % | % | % |
| C | % | % | % |

Each phrase is a pair of modified I-vi-ii-V turnarounds. Here’s the first phrase using the most basic version of the turnaround:

| C  Am7 | Dm7  G7 | C  Am7 | Dm7  G7 |

If you add secondary dominants for greater chromatic liveliness, it looks like this:

| C  A7 | D7  G7 | C  A7 | D7  G7 |

Monk further livens up these chords with tritone substitutions.

| C  A7 | Ab7  Db7 | C  Eb7 | D7  Db7 |

The second phrase ends differently from the first, with roots walking down the whole tone scale. No one has ever loved whole tone scale more than Monk.

| C  A7 | Ab7  Db7 | C  Bb7 | Ab7  Gb7 |

The third phrase is much the same as the first one but transposed up to F, and it wraps back around the key of C at the end.

| F  D7 | Db7  Gb7 | F  Ab7 | G7  Db7 |

The final phrase ends with a strangely unresolved bII chord.

| C  A7 | Ab7  Db7 | C  Dbmaj7 | Dbmaj7 |

The melody ends on G to F, the fifth and fourth degrees of the C major scale. But rather than putting a C chord under those notes like you expect, Monk uses Dbmaj7, so the notes become the sharp fourth and major third of the chord. This harmonic twist is so effective because the tune is otherwise a simple and predictable one (by Monk standards). This kind of fakeout is only meaningful if you let the listener develop some expectations before you subvert them.

In my chart, I wrote four versions: one with minimal harmony, one with basic cliche turnarounds, one with secondary dominants, and one with Monk’s actual chords.

Not everybody plays all of Monk’s changes. Sometimes people just alternate C and Db for the A sections, and F and Gb for the B sections. Sometimes they use major seventh chords instead of dominant sevenths. There’s a lot of room for customization within the basic framework.

So, have we figured out what makes this tune so compelling? It’s a short, catchy melody that blends major and minor in an unconventional way, organized into two-thirds of the standard blues form, over some moderately weird chords. It ends without resolving and then goes right back to the beginning of the cycle. That describes what you’re hearing, but doesn’t even begin to explain why it’s so gratifying. Maybe there is no language that’s adequate to explaining Monk’s music! Maybe I should stop writing and go pick up the guitar.

Update: Wenatchee the Hatchet wrote a response post that analyzes the tune contrapuntally, check it out.