Скачать или смотреть Thelonious Monk & Gigi Gryce - Shuffle Boil, 1955

Gigi Gryce, alto sax;
Thelonious Monk, piano;
Percy Heath, bass;
Art Blakey, drums.

Van Gelder Studio, Hackensack, NJ, October 15, 1955

In this Gigi Gryce session, Monk is at the piano along with Art Blakey on drums, Percy Heath on bass, and Gryce on sax. The tune starts with the characteristically Monk bassline, before the whole band comes in to state the theme. The drums and sax drop out for the bass and piano to play the bassline here. After moving through the head, Gryce takes a very, very strong sax solo starting about a minute in. Monk’s comping here is more “traditional” than what it would become somewhat later in his career (Miles Davis somewhat famously objected to Monk’s comping and asked him to lay out during his trumpet solos). In his later playing, Monk seems to play behind the soloists more on his angular melodies than on the chords underpinning the tune. Here, he seems to be more content to add a harmonic cushion to Gryce’s solo (real musicians, feel free to correct me here or to provide counterexamples). After Gryce’s solo, Monk takes a solo starting around 1:45. Monk’s genius is in keeping his solos so melodic and very strongly relating to the song that he is currently playing; he has his favorite licks, but even those are in the service of the overall structure of his solo. A fairly sparse Monk solo, recorded with a lot of reverb that is somewhat distracting in places, almost sounding electronically-treated. Around 3:30 there are some open spaces for Blakey’s drum fills, always welcome. The song’s head comes back around 4:15 and continues until the song’s end, again with the bassline played solo by Percy Heath. This is just another incredible bit of work from Monk… the biggest surprise for me was his comping behind Gryce’s sax solo. It is definitely Monk, but very different from the way that he comped behind Charlie Rouse later in his career.