Craft Recordings’ acclaimed Small Batch vinyl series returns with an audiophile pressing of Thelonious Monk’s Brilliant Corners. A landmark title in the pianist’s celebrated catalog, the 1957 album not only introduces several Monk originals, but also features an all-star line-up of talent, including Sonny Rollins, Max Roach, and Paul Chambers.
Written by Emily Morrow on April 1, 2021
If legendary jazz
musicians were collected together in one giant jigsaw puzzle and each musician
was one piece – Thelonious Monk’s individual piece would be impossible to cut
out. As a singular artist, his shape or place in jazz is too uniquely
non-conforming.
From a musical and historical standpoint, he is recognized as one of the first
creators of modern jazz and a major influence on the later development of the
Bebop movement. He influenced all its key players, along with helping mentor
both John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins in his 1940s quartet.
An innate
Born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina,
Thelonious Monk is undoubtedly one of the most important – and controversial – figures in the history of jazz. Although he was a trailblazer who pioneered a uniquely percussive approach to the piano and developed a peculiar musical language that some found difficult to understand, his greatest achievement was writing over 70 memorable songs, several of which became jazz standards.
Monk initially rose to fame alongside alto saxophonist
Charlie Parker and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie in the vanguard of the bebop movement in New York during the mid 1940s. In the main, bebop was a high-octane music driven by Parker and Gillespie’s virtuosic athleticism but Monk, who was the eldest of bop’s holy trinity, created his own distinctive musical universe that was defined by quirky chromatic choruses, disquieting dissonant notes, and, on the whole, much slower tempi. Given the radical yet highly stylized characteristics of his music – which he blu