Listening to Thelonious Monk With John Coltrane

Some notes on the record Thelonious Monk With John Coltrane. I've been listening to Monk's Carnegie Hall record a lot this week, let's get into this one. I never owned it, and haven't listened to it much. I always gravitated to the Monk records with the bigger name drummers on them, and we used to be more limited to records a) that we could afford, b) that our friends owned, c) that the record stores carried... second-hand, especially...  

This record is mostly a quartet with Shadow Wilson on drums; two tracks are septet with Art Blakey, apparently from the same session as the album Monk's Music, which also had Blakey and Coleman Hawkins. 

A drummer named Chris Conrade— a very knowledgeable and rather prickly Portland character— once asked me who I thought was Monk's favorite drummer. I said Art Blakey, he told me it was Shadow Wilson. I guessed it was because he was basically a swing drummer; the only thing I knew about him I got from the Dejohnette/Perry book, which mentions him as an example of “updated swing style” playing— swing drumming reflecting bebop innovations, which became the new standard way of playing the drums, with time played on the ride cymbal, less pronounced bass drum, hihat played with the foot on beats 2 and 4, more or less independent snare drum. While generally reflecting a time-keeping, arrangement-playing, big band-like approach to the drums. 

Jon McCaslin @ Four On The Floor has written about Wilson, and given some other examples of his playing, that's highly worth reading.  

Ruby, My Dear
Very famous ballad that doesn't seem to get played as much as it once did. Shadow Wilson playing time on the hihat on the head, with brushes, then on the snare drum during Coltrane's solo, then double time on Monk's solo— notice his left hand is also sweeping the slow 4 feel during that. 

Monk's tunes are so well structured— the tunes, and the background/supporting figures, form a very distinct interlocking structure for you to work with. There'a never any question about where you are, and you always have options for what to play off of.  

Trinkle Tinkle 
There's a classic jazz sounding cymbal for you. Probably an 18" K., and he plays it beautifully. Sounds like a 22" bass drum. He is playing it as part of his time feel (“FEATHERING” it, if you insist), in a fairly pronounced way. The things he plays on the head in support of the tune are very slick— on the head he plays extremely smooth rolls going into the second A section, and the bridge. The tune is quirky, and he plays some quirky stuff in support of it. 

The cymbal is the main voice we hear from him; the snare drum, bass drum, and hihat, all of which he plays pretty constantly/actively, are balanced underneath it. 

Off Minor
Art Blakey here. The triplet thing on the snare drum is real distinctively Blakey, as is the strong 2/4 with the hihat. He's really rocking the hihat here. He doesn't play as ferociously as he does on his own records, but he's more aggressive with his dynamics than Wilson. Drummers get into a macho thing where that's automatically thought the better way to be, but I honestly enjoy Wilson's playing on this record more than Blakey's.  

Nutty
Back to Shadow Wilson. Coming off of Art Blakey, Wilson plays the snare drum and hihat much more discreetly. There's this lovely buoyancy in the way he plays the cymbal. We also get a good picture how he plays the hihats with sticks— another completely classic sounding set of cymbals there. 

It strikes me here how much Coltrane was basically not about swinging. He immediately goes into double time on his solo, and plays a lot of stuff. He would play very lyrically at times, and he did play rhythm, but he wasn't really a groove guy, was he? Compare with Coleman Hawkins's solo on Off Minor. Coltrane's like listening to Bach, he's on some other kind of mission here. 

Epistrophy
Blakey, obviously. Big aggressive drum intro, strong hihat again— the hihats dominate the time feel, the way Blakey plays the ride cymbal is fuzzier than Wilson. There's a driving quarter note pulse happening, but the articulated cymbal rhythm is not what's swinging the time. 

You hear the contrast between Blakey's and Wilson's playing here— Blakey makes bigger statements, that are more distinctively “modern”, and draw more attention to themselves. He's also not always strictly in time with some things— on the head out, he's playing some percussion/rhythm effects that are not perfectly in rhythm. You can hear what he's basically doing, but it floats a little bit. 

Some of the things Blakey plays with Monk are practically part of the arrangement of the tunes, in my mind— at least, they're distinct enough that you can refer to them when you play these tunes, and people will know what you're doing. What he does on the head out here is an example of that. 

Functional 
Solo piano, a blues. Blues is more than just a 12-bar form. Learning to say something real with the form is a major mission for any jazz drummer— everybody should be listening to piano players and copying their moves— however you would make that happen on the drums.