The Duke and the Monk Part 2

Please forgive the awkward cuts...I'm making these posts on a mobile device that I'm still figuring out.

Soooooo....Duke uses advanced harmonic devices but all of them are based on extensions of thirds and functional jazz harmony...with some clusters thrown in for color. The sound is sophisticated but still deeply within the jazz idiom. I suspect that this piece and many other Duke piano solos had a profound impact on Cecil Taylor and other early free jazz pianists.

Monk is another pianist who was wildly underestimated in his time...even during the time he was being lionized. Quirky and radical from the get go Monk was also somewhat paradoxically a traditionalist. He was deeply steeped in the stride piano tradition...something most easily seen in his solo performances. Even his more radical playing with ensembles reveals a musician with an orchestral approach to the piano. His left hand most often does more than comp. He creates counterlines and bass melodies against his right hand runs. Thus orchestral approach is most evident when Monk company under horn players. He is not a spare comper. He most often melodically. In fact sometimes Monks comped lines end up more interesting than the horn soloists he is accompanying, which perhaps explains why he was not a very popular sideman during the bop period.

So Monk and Duke represent some of the best adventurous spirits in jazz piano. Neither could be called free jazz pianists in a classic sense, but in the greater sense of free...the one in which a musician conjure up and sound and has the guts to create it and stick with it.....both were truely free players. And I feel that it is from the confluence of these two figures that much of free jazz piano playing flows....with a little Tristano thrown in for good measure. And I'm finding as I get older the need to refresh myself by listening to these great masters...they always give me something to think about.