Thelonious

Thinking about the tune Thelonious, by Thelonious Monk. It's fun and unusual, based on a single note riff. I don't believe the form comes from another tune, it's just a little self-contained bebop invention.

It's a famous tune, but not played a whole lot. I guess because there's no chart for it in any of the major fake books. You can get it from Charley Gerard's book Thelonious Monk - Originals & Standards, or the Music Notes site appears to have a good chart for it. Maybe you'll meet somebody who's putting together a recital, or who is serious about learning their Monk repertoire. 

Form is AABA, 8-10-8-10. The 10 bar A sections aren't the same. Going into the bridge is a little gray area— the beginning of the B sounds like a tag on the A section, which is already tagged, so there are about 4 bars in there that feel kind of mysterious. Learning unusual tunes you have to figure out the mystery zones— how do you make sense of them for yourself, what do you play there to make it orderly, definitely how do you not lose your place in the form.  

The A sections have a little clave rhythm to them, that the rhythm section plays off of— with varying degrees of subtlety, if you listen to the different recordings:

There's a rhythm figure at the end of the form that often gets stated pretty strongly, including during the solos. Here's how it's written in Charley Gerard's book: 

It starts differently on the various recordings. On Genius of Modern Music there's an intro with the main riff played twice, with a drum break. On Underground Monk plays the first A solo, and the rhythm section comes in on the second A. On other records everyone starts together, or there's a full chorus of stride piano before the whole group plays the head normally; one version has piano and bass playing the last A up front, with drums and horns coming in on the punches at the end of that, and then the whole band plays the complete head. A lot of versions have unique composed intros.  

On the Genius of Modern Music compilation, Monk solos all the way through the form; on the record Underground, he solos over the AAB, and plays the melody on the last A, for several choruses. 

On the Bud Powell record A Portrait of Thelonious they're apparently playing it from memory, as a straight 32 bar AABA, with a different bridge. The A sections are just the normal first A. Pretty flaky, Bud.  

Tempos on Monk's recordings are 210 on Genius of Modern Music, and 185 on Underground. On the various other recordings tempos range from very slow rubato (Ran Blake), to 170 with a half time funk feel (Gary Versace), to 243 (Gary Bartz), to 295 (Erid Reed).  

Here's a practice loop I made from the first chorus of Monk's solo on Underground. It speeds up a little bit over the course of his solo, so it doesn't loop cleanly if I use more choruses: