Monk didn’t mess with preliminaries. In many ways naive, he walked, talked, laughed, danced as the spirit moved him, an honest man in a not-so-honest world, believing, as he once told Colomby, “The truth is not supposed to hurt you.”. —Yank Lawson. The best home on the best block in the best town turned out to be three small rooms on the ground floor of the tenement in which Monk had lived all but seven of the forty-three years of his life, first with his mother, brother, and sister, then with his wife and two children, entangled in a domestic clutter entirely at odds with his reputation as the weird, angry, enigmatic high priest of bop risen from a black lagoon. It wasn’t the personality of Lewis H. Lapham he heard playing Beethoven’s Piano Sonata no. The chords to “Round Midnight” in the current edition of The Real Book are closer to Monk’s original intention that the ones in the “old” Real Book. Though not an actor by trade, Gordon brings forth a lot of charisma and what I can only assume is the true weariness of a carreer Jazz musician. The pianist Jonathan Biss remembers his first encounter at the age of thirteen with Beethoven’s Piano Sonata no. 2) Chet Baker did a (live) version of 'Round Midnight on the album 'Round Midnight 79 - I can't … His manager, Harry Colomby, had said of him, “He’s so straight, it makes you nervous”—married to the same woman for seventeen years, careful father of two children, despite his various troubles with authority, convinced that he was a citizen of the best country in the world, lived on the best block in the best town, drove the best car, had found the best wife. "Round Midnight" - Part II. One needn’t be Christian, periwigged, and German to hear in the music of J.S. Background. 'Round Midnight' is in Ebm. The band on the live recording is one of the high watermarks of the bebop era, as well as a representative example of what pianist Ethan Iverson calls “High Bebop.” It just takes a while to “make it your own.”. No organ or piano in the households in which I’d grown up, not even a ukulele or harmonica, but books everywhere on tables, shelves, and chairs, and by the age of ten I was adept at booking passage to far, far better worlds in the novels of Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Walter Scott, in books of archaeology and astronomy by authors whose names I now forget. Seated at the piano, Monk was utterly possessed by the music, his whole body following the rise and fall of the melodic line, the expression of openmouthed surprise on his kind and trusting face like that of a child watching a magician changing oranges into rabbits. ), Typically with Monk, the chords don’t always go where we think they should go, and this can take a while to get used to. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mary Griggs Burke Collection, Gift of the Mary and Jackson Burke Foundation, 2015. All of us knowing ourselves born of mortal flesh and therefore condemned to die, we also know the music goes on without us, “uniquely expressive of the highest states of human consciousness,” says Steiner, because “it functions outside truth and falsehood, good and evil. Please email me at rondrotos@keyboardimprov.com if you're interested in Skype lessons. Lawson had been asked to account for his presence in New York in 1954, at Eddie Condon’s on West Third Street, sitting in on trumpet with Ralph Sutton at the piano, Jack Teagarden on slide trombone. He talked the way he played the piano, fixing upon a theme and running it through numerous variations, taking it apart and putting it back together until he got it right. (It’s certainly the most widely-played ballad by a bebop composer.). Friedrich at the Post was proposing assignments requiring long-form, out-of-town travel, and Lipsky was unwilling to continue his lessons if I missed two of them in a row. As I went back through my LP/CD collection before closing out this analysis, I was reminded that Wes Montgomery had recorded yet another version of "'Round Midnight" with organist, Jimmy Smith in September of 1966 on their 2nd LP together, which was titled, "FURTHER ADVENTURES OF JIMMY AND WES" and the performance features a very brassy arrangement by the great Oliver Nelson. Based on the story of Bud Powell and Francis Paudras’ friendship with him, … Discovering the infinite universe. I didn’t have the talent to entertain ambitions as lofty as Bernhard’s novice virtuoso (wasn’t present on West Sixty-Third Street to climb a stairway to Birdland or Carnegie Hall), but I know what he means when he says he no longer wanted “to paw at my instrument.” He quit playing on short notice; I did so gradually, to work at reading and writing as my best chance of moving up and out of the valley of self. How and why is music the most powerful and liveliest of the arts, the utmost reach of human expression, the stuff of which dreams are made, and, if ancient philosophers and modern physicists are to be believed, also the stuff that binds body with soul? "Round About Midnight", by Thelonious Monk, Jazz Piano Tutorial. Lipsky was Eaton’s teacher, once-upon-a-time student of Leonid Kreutzer in Berlin and not a man to be trifled with. It was covered by Miyanoue-Oka Quartet, Sandy Weltman and the Carolbeth Trio, Shuji Atsuta meets Yoshiaki Miyanoue, Never Mind Jazzband and other artists. includes chord progression analysis from the Miles Davis recording. A lot of people still think I’m nuts or somethin’...but I dig it, man; I can feel the draft.”, An imposing figure elegantly dressed in a sharkskin suit, Monk carried himself with the dignity of a man who knows his own mind and doesn’t countenance fools. Time passed, and as my face became more familiar, Monk stopped by more often to voice an opinion. B 7 Cm7 5 B7 5 B 7sus4 2. He is the tenor sax player called Dale Turner. So, 'Round Midnight, or some draft of it, dates back to 1936. ' Round About Midnight is an album by jazz composer and trumpet player Miles Davis that was released by Columbia Records in March 1957. Nellie and the baroness sat upright and attentive on the small blue sofa they shared with a rag doll and a rocking horse. Monk had a truly unique outlook on music and it can take a while to enter his world. Children’s toys, shopping bags, steam irons on the floors, clothes hanging from nails in the walls, soup dishes stacked on the baby grand piano. During sophomore year Eaton often conducted me to New York City to hear Charles Mingus at Birdland, Rud­olf Serkin at Carnegie Hall, Marian Mc­Partland at the Hickory House, by A train to Harlem to hear Miles Davis play Monk’s “ ’Round Midnight.” By the time we showed up at Condon’s in 1955 to find Lawson’s note on the mirror above the bar (Ralph Sutton still there at the piano, Cutty Cutshall on trombone, Wild Bill Davison sitting in on cornet), I was on the same page with Friedrich Nietzsche (“Without music life would be a mistake”) and Dr. Samuel Johnson, “Had I learned to fiddle, I should have done nothing else.”. Then abandon it all and only play short step-wise phrases, leaving plenty of space in between each to give yourself enough time to mentally “hear” the next notes before you play them. But yes, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Billie Holiday and radio DJ Symphony Sid were part of a living, vibrant musical scene during the 1940s and 50s that we now know as he golden age of bebop. In any and all event in accord with the thinking of Pythagoras, the Greek philosopher who in the sixth century BC conceived the cosmos and the whole of its creation (apes and butterflies, seas and stones and stars) as works of music, the vibrations of energy in motion instinct with life in all its forms and fancies. Click HERE to begin my well-sequenced, step-by-step video course, or email me at rondrotos@keyboardimprov.com for Skype piano lessons. Round midnight is a song where you can often find the melody actually being the chord tones played in an arpeggio manner. I played Beethoven’s Piano Sonata no. It is believed that Williams may have changed the composition slightly but regardless, his name remains on the copyright. I can’t now remember if she spoke more than four words in my direction, either in the car or after we arrived at Monk’s apartment on West Sixty-Third Street at Eleventh Avenue. ‘Round Midnight: Wikipedia, A transcription of a Thelonious Monk solo piano recording of the tune, A transcription of Bud Powell’s amazing piano solo on ‘Round Midnight, Here's why Thelonious Monk's music is so hard to play, How To Learn Jazz Piano A beautiful woman of uncertain age, wrapped in fur and wearing pearls, the baroness smiled, pointed me toward the seat in front. At four AM on a Thursday in late March, the Five Spot’s waiters stacking chairs on tables, Monk stood up from the piano, snapped his fingers, thrust his palm in my direction. Coming out of a long depression, Miles went from working with small independent record companies to a very large firm. Whilst the recent 'Whiplash' and 'Miles Ahead' were moderate commercial successes, they were subject to withering criticism in some quarters – I was with the… It was with his interpretation of “’Round Midnight” in the presence of its composer Thelonious Monk at the1955 Newport Jazz Festival that Miles Davis convinced George Avakian to include him in the Columbia catalogue. The essayist George Steiner and the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer carry the thought a step further. All the theory in the world won't be of any help until you can hear and feel that. In New Haven I learned to play Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach, a few of the Two-Part Inventions, and a fair number of Elizabethan songs and dances. Eaton supervised what was to become the lux and veritas of my college education, introducing me to Bach’s Partita for Keyboard no. Monk at the time was appearing at the Five Spot Café in the East Village, his presence pictured in the trade press as “the weird and enigmatic genius of modern jazz” surfacing like the Loch Ness monster from the sloughs of despond, “the perfect hipster,” fond of wearing an Ottoman fez or a Chinese coolie hat, “high priest of bop” playing “zombie music” and given to whimsical and cryptic statement. “It is common knowledge,” says Boethius, that song “has often worked great wonders on the affections of bodies or minds. (for international readers who may not have access to these YouTube links, I’ve indicated the original album names wherever possible so you can listen to them on music streaming services, etc.). He says this into the mic and mentions that she once told him that she’d like to sing “Round Midnight.” Sid wistfully says something like, “Someday I hope she will.” Well, Holiday never did record the tune and I’ve never heard of her singing it at all. with your head full of stuff to remember. Ultimately, you dont want ot go into this gig (onyl a week away?) As a piano teacher, I 'll share with you what I learned from my own piano teachers, including jazz legend Billy Taylor. Handy, American composer known as the Father of the Blues, learned his notes by listening to the sounds of nature. After a while it gets easier, I promise!!! Invitation to so august a concert stage calls for a word of further explanation. The past giants of jazz sometimes get mythologized, and a live recording of “Round Midnight” reminds me that Monk and his contemporaries were real people. 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