Thelonious Monk plays the blues

Everything is terrible, but at least we have the blues to help us through it. Blues melody week is my favorite week of pop aural skills class. Last session, after one of my sections worked through some Aretha Franklin and John Lee Hooker, we listened to a couple of jazz tunes, including “Functional” by Thelonious Monk, recorded in 1957.

I love Monk so much that I forget how divisive he can be. A couple of my students visibly flinched at the opening seconds of this recording. In fairness to them, it is definitely intense. 

I transcribed the first chorus, with some help from the invaluable Thelonious Monk Fake Book.

Functional – Thelonious Monk

There are three things that make this sound so confrontational: Monk’s rhythmic touch, his note choices, and the sound of the piano itself. I’ll deal with the piano later. The rhythmic aspect is hard to verbalize, and there isn’t much need to verbalize it anyway, because you can hear it just fine on the recording. The note choices are easier to talk about via symbolic abstraction, and I’ll spend most of this post doing that. Please don’t take it to mean that the notes are any more important than the timing, though.

“Functional” is a twelve-bar blues in B-flat. Here’s the basic harmonic structure.

| Bb7 | Eb7 | Bb7    | Fm7  Bb7 |
| Eb7 | %   | Bbmaj7 | Dm7  G7  |
| Cm7 | F7  | Bb7    | Cm7  F7  |

In “Functional” as in many of his compositions, Monk is confronting the basic problem of playing blues on the piano: you can’t bend pitches to reach the blue notes. The best you can do is to “crush” notes, that is, play the notes on either side of the desired blue note and then quickly release one of them.

Let’s look at the very first chord in the tune, a Bb7. The melody note on top of that chord is D, the major third. However, Monk also plays C-sharp before quickly releasing it. That gives the sense that D is bent flat, a major-ish blue third rather than a simple major one. Monk repeats this crushed third five times before playing a different voicing of the Bb7 chord with A-flat on top. He crushes this note too, briefly playing G to create the sense that the A-flat is bent down to a blue seventh.

In the second measure of the tune, Monk plays the opening idea transposed up a fourth to Eb7. He crushes the third G along with brief F-sharps, and crushes the flat seventh D-flat along with a brief C. 

Monk wrote note-crushing into several of his other blues and blues-related tunes, including “Five Spot Blues“, “Monk’s Point“, “Played Twice“, “Locomotive” and “Bright Mississippi“. He also frequently crushes notes in his solos. I see some online sources describing crushed notes as being a form of acciaccatura, a classical ornamentation technique. They are not the same thing, though. If Monk was using acciaccatura, he would play C-sharp and then release it while playing D. But he isn’t doing that; he’s playing both notes simultaneously and only then releasing C-sharp. Mozart would not approve.

Anyway, there is more to “Functional” than that opening motif. In measures nine and ten, Monk goes into doubletime, keeping his eighth notes straight and swinging his sixteenths. This rhythmic feel sounds more like funk than jazz. You can put a hip-hop breakbeat under any Monk performance and it will sound excellent.

Measures eleven and twelve are a lovely turnaround played in simple quarter notes. Measure eleven is a standard variant on the descending chromatic blues cliche. The chords go Bb, Bb7, Eb, Ab7, supporting the descending line B-flat, A-flat, G, G-flat. Measure twelve is less conventional: Bbmaj7, Dbm7, Cm7, F7#5. That Dbm7 is a chromatic upper neighbor to Cm7, acting kind of like a tritone substitution. It is a wonderfully dark collection of pitches: the minor third D-flat, the flat fifth F-flat, the flat seventh A-flat, and the flat ninth C-flat.

Here are some more events of interest in the track.

• 1:29 A boogie-woogie cliche, a “train” riff.
• 2:17 A massive multi-note crush.
• 3:44 More of the train riff.
• 4:49 The note crushes in the beginning of the tune were major thirds “bent” down toward minor, but here, Monk is playing minor thirds “bent” up toward major.
• 5:10 More excellent minor-ish crushing.
• 5:19 You can clearly hear how wildly out of tune one of the C keys is on the piano. I’ll talk about that in a minute.
• 5:51 This is a remarkably and intentionally awkward rhythm. Monk got here by repeating groups of four eighth notes separated by eighth note rests. By the third time through the pattern, the notes are landing in a super corny spot in the meter, and Monk accentuates that corniness by rushing them.
• 7:46 Monk accelerates and decelerates through this bar. It sounds to me like ringing a dinner bell.
• 8:07 Another version of note crushing, where Monk plays all the notes in a short scalar run at once so they overlap. It reminds me of a cartoon cat running on the keys for some reason.
• 9:06 A classic Monk ending: clanging on a high-register sharp eleventh, maybe to heighten (or conflict against) a very quiet eleventh harmonic that he’s hearing as the final note dies away.

Part of the reason my students flinched at this recording is not Monk’s playing, but the out-of-tune piano that he’s playing on. Monk rarely got to record on an in-tune piano. I wonder how much of his style was an adaptation to the clanging sound of the poorly maintained instruments in the clubs and studios he was working in.

Story time: Steinway makes those weird MIDI-controlled player pianos, and they developed a technology for reliably extracting MIDI data from recordings. I visited one of their showrooms, and they had an immaculately tuned brand-new robot grand piano playing the music from a video of a Monk performance. It was his exact timing and note velocities, which are familiar to me from many hours of listening, but on an ideal piano in an ideal acoustic space, which I had never heard before. It mostly just made me sad that an artist of Monk’s caliber never got this kind of treatment during his lifetime.

Anyway, at the session where Monk recorded “Functional”, he also recorded an alternate take that was included on the album Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane. The outtake version was lovingly transcribed by a gentleman on YouTube with a much longer attention span than mine. There are swing 32nds!

My students have two questions about Monk. The first: was he trying to be off-putting and listener-hostile on purpose? The non-fans in my classroom compare Monk to high modernist atonal classical composers, who none of them particularly like. I love Monk as much as I loathe atonal classical music, so I am inclined to hear him as having different intentions. He was definitely unconventional, but I don’t think he was ever audience-hostile. It seems like he wanted his music to be enjoyed. I certainly enjoy it, on an intellectual level and also on the same bodily level that attracts me to funk and dance music.

The other question I was asked: since Monk was such an intuitive player, should we be analyzing him in drily formal theoretical terms? It’s true that Monk was self-taught aside from some early piano lessons. But he wasn’t naive. John Coltrane describes having detailed conversations with him about music theory, and he was very particular about how his music should be played. You don’t arrive at Monk’s style by randomly mashing keys. I can’t know what was in his head, but my guess is that he would have appreciated our taking his music seriously, listening to it closely and trying our best to understand it.