Brilliant Corners - Thelonious Monk

If Thelonious Monk’s piano playing were architecture, it would not be a symmetrical classical colonnade. It would be a crooked wall built by a genius: somehow it does not fall down, and it looks wonderful.

The title “Brilliant Corners” contains the secret of Monk’s music. He inserts an unexpected note at a turn in the melody, pauses where you do not expect, and goes west when a chord seems to call for the east. Yet every “wrong” note is exactly right. You begin to feel that Monk did not play incorrectly; your ears had simply been spoiled.

The making of this album was a mixture of disaster and legend. The title track is extraordinarily difficult: Monk wrote a piece that required saxophone and piano to proceed at different tempos. Sonny Rollins later recalled recording it at least twenty-five times before they assembled a usable take. Listen closely and you can feel the tension of something that might fall apart at any moment. Max Roach’s drums seem to dance on the edge of a cliff, while Clark Terry’s trumpet carefully answers the riddles Monk throws at him.

What makes Monk truly fascinating is not technical complexity, but the profound loneliness in his music. Even in a full ensemble, his piano sounds as if it is talking to itself. “Pannonica,” dedicated to jazz baroness Nica, is gently strange in its solo-piano setting, as though Monk were talking late at night to a cat that does not exist.

In the 1950s, people who left the room after hearing this album probably felt they had survived an auditory accident. Seventy years later, we hear that Monk had simply arrived in the future before everyone else. He never explained his music, just as he never explained why he danced so strangely onstage. He did not need you to think he was normal.