Thelonious Monk • Brilliant Corners Riverside/Craft Recordings CR00505
Brilliant Corners deserves the Small Batch One Step treatment from Craft Recordings. In promotional materials, Craft points out two convincing infobits: DownBeat’s Nat Hentoff called Brilliant Corners “Riverside’s most important modern jazz LP to date,” and nearly fifty years later, it was among the first recordings chosen for the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry. Craft launched One Step in 2021 with John Coltrane's Lush Life, following that up with titles from Yusef Lateef, Miles Davis and Vince Guaraldi. Craft has offered from 1000 to 6000 copies per One Step release. The label settled on 4000 for Brilliant Corners. As with the earlier One Step releases, Bernie Grundman cut the lacquers for Brilliant Corners from the master tapes. In his biography, Kelly covers in detail Monk's loss of his New York City Cabaret Card in 1951, which made it nearly impossible for him to play live and scrape out a living. Monk's recordings received some critical praise throughout the 1950s, but this didn't pay the bills. His fortunes turned around in 1957, when his Cabaret Card was reinstated and Brilliant Corners, his third release for Riverside, debuted to both critical acclaim and commercial success. It was recorded in three sessions at New York City’s Reeves Sound Studio, with Riverside co-founder Orrin Keepnews producing. Monk recorded with two different quintets. The first featured Sonny Rollins, then a rising star, on tenor saxophone, Ernie Henry on alto saxophone, Oscar Pettiford on bass, and Max Roach on drums. For their first session, this ensemble recorded two Monk originals, “Ba-lue Bolivar Ba-lues-are” and “Pannonica.” The group gathered a few days later to record another Monk composition, “Brilliant Corners.” The final session included Rollins and Roach, along with Paul Chambers on bass and Clark Terry on trumpet. This session produced “Bemsha Swing,” another Monk original co-written with bassist Denzil Best, and a solo performance of the ballad “I Surrender, Dear.”
Craft's One Step process eliminates two steps and two sets of metal parts, putting the stampers closer to the master tapes. Each 180-gram One Step release is pressed at RTI on Neotech’s VR900 vinyl, whose benefits include a noticeable reduction in surface noise. All of this lavish care is audible, the music emerging from a digital-like blackness. "Vivid" say my listening notes, and "This is not a demure recording." Monk's playing is alive with his characteristic juddering creativity, but Sonny Rollins is more prominent in the mix, his fiery runs on "Brilliant Corners," some in tandem with Ernie Henry, steering the tune in demanding directions. “Pannonica,” a tribute to Monk's friend and patron, Baroness Nica de Koenigswarter, is played with aching beauty, especially Monk on celesta, a keyboard instrument that resembles an upright piano and sounds like a glockenspiel. Monk's solo playing of “I Surrender, Dear,” which closes Brilliant Corners, is subtly jarring, given the inventive ensemble playing that precedes it. It is a fitting coda to this prismatic album. Craft's packaging is luxurious: a heavyweight, glossy tip-on sleeve fits into a numbered, linen-backed slipcase. To remove the record, pull on an integral ribbon and the sleeve slides out -- very classy. The large-format printed insert is filled with useful information about Monk and his music, as well as the One Step process. Original pressings of Brilliant Corners are
expensive -- several hundred dollars and up -- and I don't have one or the Analogue
Productions reissue for sonic comparison. But I'm confident in echoing what I wrote about Craft's One Step Jazz Impressions of
Black Orpheus: in music, sound and presentation, this Brilliant Corners
is one of the finest reissues here and now. |
he late 1950s mark the beginning of the golden age of
recorded jazz, and I would argue that it all began with this gem from Thelonious Monk,
jazz's original idiosyncratic pianist. Monk didn't so much influence pianists who came
after him as challenge them. His rhythm and timing remain singular in the history of jazz,
and when modern pianists try to emulate even a minor element of his technique, the playing
often sounds stiff, forced or half-baked. Monk was a unique person (read Robin DG Kelly's
great biography on Monk for voluminous information about this), and this is largely
responsible for the uniqueness of his music -- both as a pianist and a composer. He was
modern in 1957, and he remains modern today.
