Misterioso: Thelonious Monk

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Misterioso was recorded live in 1958 by Riverside Records, featuring the Thelonious Monk Quartet with Johnny Griffin on tenor saxophone instead of John Coltrane, who at that point in his career decided to go solo and at times work with Miles Davis. The others of the quartet include Ahmed Abdul-Malik on bass, Roy Haynes on drums, and Thelonious Monk himself on the piano. This album is one of Monk’s interesting ones, not only losing one familiar partners but two; the first being John Coltrane and the other being drummer Shadow Wilson, who Monk lost due to poor health. Griffin and Coltrane both had a familiar understanding of how Thelonious Monk enjoyed performing, finding it difficult to stray away from Monk’s original ideas and “one note off” could change the entire piece. In “Nutty,” Griffin can be commonly found reusing the melody to avoid straying away from any mistakes, diminishing the chorus and using it to repeat after Monk who is accompanying him. From there, he ascends and descends into a flurry of scales, playing a sequence down using a fourth before applying it into a series of arpeggios. When his phrases contain less scales, Griffin takes the time to harmonize with Monk, matching his volume at the start of his phrases and elongating the melody, amplifying his sound toward the ends to have them recognizable as his own work. Also, he …show more content…

During his minor improve section, Monk changes the sound into more of a ballad, adding suspensions and elongating his phrases. The swung eighth note melody changes at times to almost a triplet feel for listeners to dance to. At the end, as Monk plays the ending chords, he still gives enough time for himself to play an ascending scale, also taking into account that he is his own accompanist in this piece, before fading off into

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