Brilliant Corners

Five tracks in about forty-three minutes, and the subtractive test finds give in one place. The title track resists it wholly: each chorus at its alternate tempo is required, because the form exists only in the change. “Pannonica” is a portrait in under nine minutes, and its celeste could not be removed without removing the person drawn. “I Surrender, Dear” is the record’s breath and its only view of Monk’s piano unaccompanied, load-bearing as a frame. “Bemsha Swing” closes on an old tune made new. The test bites on the blues: “Ba-lue Bolivar Ba-lues-are” runs thirteen and a half minutes, nearly a third of the record, and some of its long, uneven choruses could go with little loss. That length is permitted, not compelled.

Score: 8.2 / 10

What the record brings into the open can be stated, but only in part as a human condition. First, that what sounds wrong can be law: the minor second struck as a chord, the accent placed where the bar does not expect it, the corner turned where a line should run straight, all held as a coherent grammar rather than as error. Second, in the title track, a band of first-rank players heard working at the edge of what it can do, the strain part of what is shown. Third, in “Pannonica”, regard: friendship and patronage drawn without words. Held well below the gate: the first disclosure concerns how music is made more than how people live, and the second is partly an artefact of a hard session.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Height comes, and it comes as strangeness more than as beauty. The title track’s theme, heavy and lurching, its intervals wide and its corners hard, has a grandeur of its own, and the switch to double tempo is a lift every time it comes. “Pannonica” is beauty: the bell tone of the celeste over Monk’s harmony gives the portrait a glow no other track has. “Bemsha Swing”, with the timpani, ends the record in a kind of comic grandeur. Frequency is the charge. The blues swings and rarely rises, and it is a third of the time; the solo standard is wit and tenderness more than elevation. Height on two tracks and a half of five, below the 9.1 of Kind of Blue.

Score: 8.4 / 10

With no words and no story, the archetypal must be built by the music or not at all, and little is built. The title track can be heard as an ordeal, a passage the company must make and nearly cannot, but that figure belongs more to the legend of the session than to what the music builds; the alternation of tempos is built, and it keeps the figure from falling lower. “Pannonica” draws the patron and the artist, an old pairing evoked by a title and a celeste rather than constructed. “I Surrender, Dear” carries a song of submission into a solo with no words, and the irony of the title is the listener’s. The blues stands as the inherited pattern. Myth is evoked, lightly, and the particular stays particular: the record’s lowest gated axis.

Score: 7.5 / 10

The inherited form is the jazz album of 1956: a blowing session, hard bop on standard changes or on heads made to be gone through quickly. The turn is to composition as the matter of the record. The title track is a piece the band must play rather than a frame it plays over: an irregular head, alternating tempos, intervals and accents that make every chorus a reading of the score. The stake was real and is documented. Monk, barred from New York’s clubs since 1951 and recording for a small label, set down a tune his band could not complete, and the record was saved by the splice. Celeste and timpani are smaller swerves of colour. Held near the gate: the language was Monk’s own, laid down on his Blue Note sides of 1947 to 1952, and the record extends it rather than breaks from it.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Change the form and the title track stops knowing what it knows: that one theme read at two tempos is two things and one, and that the corners are the content. Smooth the head into thirty-two regular bars and the claim goes. “Pannonica” knows its subject through the celeste; on piano alone it would be a lovely ballad, not a portrait. The solo standard knows Monk by subtracting the band. The sequence, counted here once: two new pieces on side one, the hardest first; side two moves from portrait to solitude to an old tune refitted, outward from the most demanding composition toward release. Held: the order reads as a programme of contrasts more than as an argument, and the blues is close to a container, holding whatever its soloists bring.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Evidence is nearly seventy years of return, of two kinds. Musicians return to the compositions: “Pannonica” and “Bemsha Swing” are standards, and “Brilliant Corners” is a test piece that players and ensembles take up to learn whether they can, and in which they keep finding more, in the alternation of tempos and the voicing of the head. Critics and historians return to the making: the splice, the tune that could not be played through, the patronage behind two titles. The depth is formal more than semantic, and much of what keeps yielding is Monk’s language across his whole body of work rather than this record alone. That holds the figure below the 9.0 of Kind of Blue.

Score: 8.7 / 10

The field is jazz of 1956 and 1957. The intrinsic force is real: the record made composition, not the blowing session, the governing matter of a small-group album, and showed that a writer’s idiosyncrasy of harmony, accent and form could bind first-rank players and be heard by a public. The credit is discounted twice: it is shared with Monk’s whole work, so that what was redirected was redirected by Monk more than by this album, and the reorganisation of jazz in its decade belongs more to Kind of Blue and to Ornette Coleman. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Monk’s standing turned, and the residency at the Five Spot with Coltrane followed in 1957; “Pannonica” and “Bemsha Swing” entered the repertory; the title track became the emblem of difficult jazz composition, with later composer-led small groups in its line.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric, over sixty-nine years. The form survives whole as issued, the splice included, which is part of the work. Presence is continuous: the record has stayed in print since its release, it is studied, and its tunes are played by musicians born long after the sessions. That presence is wide among musicians and the jazz public, and narrower than that of Kind of Blue, which reaches listeners of no other jazz. The fabric carries little date: an acoustic group in mono, recorded plainly, the bass recessed in places, small charges against a surface that otherwise does not age. The figure stands two tenths below Kind of Blue at 9.0, at the low end of what works of its years have earned.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Command of the recorded medium; invention is credited elsewhere. The writing is the record’s highest craft: the head of “Brilliant Corners”, voiced for two saxophones over Monk’s chords, is exact and strange, and the harmony of “Pannonica” is fully made. Monk’s piano, in ensemble and alone, places every dissonance and every silence. Rollins is commanding throughout, and Roach holds the tempo changes and colours “Bemsha Swing” with the timpani. The splice is craft of the medium, Keepnews’s, and part of the work. The costs are real: the ensemble heard through the splice is strained, with rough unisons and intonation in places; the bass is recessed and the sound plain for its year; the blues has uneven choruses.

Score: 8.7 / 10

One law governs the record: Monk’s language of displaced accent, the struck minor second, the whole-tone run, space left where it is not expected, and the theme kept present in the improvising. Take the two most distant elements. “I Surrender, Dear” is a popular song of 1931 for solo piano, stride in its ancestry; “Brilliant Corners” is a new composition of irregular length for quintet at two tempos. Both obey the same law: the standard is bent at its corners as the new piece is built from them. The range is wide, a blues, a portrait ballad with celeste, a solo standard, a swing with timpani and the title piece, three line-ups and three sessions under one physics. Held from the top: the soloists other than Monk and Rollins do not always speak the language, and the blues at times relaxes into the common practice of the day.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the form. Consciousness is held: one singular mind, heard most fully alone in “I Surrender, Dear”. The small society of the band is held, and held in strain, which is more than most records hold of it: players meeting a demand and partly failing it. Friendship and patronage are held in two titles and a portrait. The inheritance is carried: the blues, the stride behind the solo, the popular song of 1931, and with them, unstated, African American musical history. What holds the axis lowest is absence: the family, labour, the state, the sacred and the natural order do not appear, and patronage is drawn as affection, not as an order of society. A wordless record of forty-three minutes holds what it holds.

Score: 6.9 / 10