Monk Alone at the Keys
Monk strips everything down and lets his own angular logic carry every tune on the record.
Thelonious Himself is Thelonious Monk alone at the piano, and that solitude is the whole point. The sole exception is the final track, Monk's Mood, where John Coltrane arrives on tenor saxophone with Wilbur Ware on bass. Coltrane is the collaborator here, and his presence is brief but noticeable: a tenor voice cutting through Monk's spiky harmonies, adding a different kind of pressure to a tune that otherwise belongs entirely to the pianist.
For the rest of the record, Monk is his own band. The tunes are the familiar Monk material, played with the stops, silences, and off-kilter voicings that make his solo work instantly recognizable. There is no rhythm section to lean on, so every phrase has to justify itself, and he does it with a kind of playful stubbornness. It is not a warm, lush solo piano record; it is a set of sharp, deliberate statements from someone who clearly enjoys being unpredictable.
The album was Monk's fourth for Riverside and his second solo piano studio record, and it carried a notable distinction: it was the first of his solo studio albums made by an American label and distributed in the United States. Disc magazine gave it a full five stars, and The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings gave it four. For a listener new to Monk, this is a good place to hear him without the distraction of a band, though his trio and quartet recordings from the same period will show more of what he can do with others.
Who's playing
Thelonious Monkpiano
