Brilliant Corners

Thelonious Monk recorded Brilliant Corners in three sessions spread between October and December 1956, a record that ended up being his third work for Riverside Records and the first on the label where all the songs were his own. The album's sound was crafted with two different quintets: the first, in October, featured Sonny Rollins and Ernie Henry on saxophones, Oscar Pettiford on bass, and Max Roach on drums. From those takes came tracks like Ba-lue Bolivar Ba-lues-Are —a title Monk pronounced as "Blue Bolivar Blues" to refer to the Bolivar Hotel in Manhattan, where his friend and patron Pannonica de Koenigswarter lived— and Pannonica, where Monk played celesta. But the most tense moment came on October 15, when they tried to record the song that gives the album its name. The piece has an unconventional structure: eight bars in the first section, seven in the second, and another modified seven-bar version in the third, with rhythmic changes that even challenged Henry and Pettiford themselves. In one take, producer Orrin Keepnews noticed the bass wasn’t coming through well and discovered that Pettiford, frustrated, was moving his fingers without touching the strings. In the end, Keepnews had to edit the final version by splicing together fragments from multiple takes.

Year

1957

Songs

5

Duration

42 min 50 seg