Cashbox : 01/10/1959
Jazz Pick of the Week

These six performances by Monk – a fella in great disk demand – were cut during a Monk quartet outing at New York’s Five Spot. The work by the pianist and the boys sticks to the uptempo, with Monk’s solo, reflective imprint on Just A Gigolo the only ballad musing here. Tenor saxist Johnny Griffin gets lots of time on the various tracks. Must for jazz shelf.

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HiFi / Stereo Review
Nat Hentoff : April, 1959

Musical Interest: Monk is never dull
Performance: Not the best Monk combo
Recording: Adequate for a club date

Monk’s eighth Riverside album his second recorded on the job at New York’s Five Spot is not one of his best. There is, for one thing, too little space for Monk’s soloing and somewhat too much for tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin. Griffin is impressive by means of his unabashedly emotional “cry” and his excellent timing. He does not always, however, convincingly tie together solos as long as those he takes here. He has improved in that the sustained cohesion of his solo in Misterioso is particularly memorable.

Haynes and Malik are good, but Wilbur Ware and Art Blakey have supported Monk more creatively in several previous albums. Monk is in good form, but he’s been more hypnotic on earlier Riverside albums.

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High Fidelity
John S. Wilson : March, 1959

A continuation of the on-the-spot recording of Monk’s group at the Five Spot Café, started on Riverside 12-262, Thelonious in Action. Monk re-examines four of his early compositions in this disc; and although they benefit from his own piano conceptions and the brisk drumming of Roy Haynes, Johnny Griffin’s long barren saxophone solos detract from what were, in their original forms, much more effective pieces. Monk adds one new work for this set and repeats his short, sly piano solo on Just a Gigolo.

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Providence Journal (Providence, RI)
Philip C. Gunion : 02/22/1959

One of the most unorthodox pianists in the business today is Thelonious Monk. His music is not appreciated by many, but somehow Monk’s ideas filter across to other musicians and somer or later you will have lo listen to them anyway. So you might as well get to like the original source.

An excellent example of his work is his Riverside album, Misterioso, on which he is joined by Johnny Griffin, tenor sax; Ahmed Abdul Malik, bass, and Roy Haynes, drums.

Monk will make you think and Griffin will excite you. Most of the program is made up of originals by Monk who is an excellent arranger and composer as well as a pianist. Recommended for thinkers.

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San Francisco Examiner (San Francisco, CA)
C.H. Garrigues : 01/11/1959
The Dominant Jazz Pianist of the Year
Why Monk is as much an Influence as a Name

Most jazz reviewers (including this one) have taken occasion during recent months to comment on the emergence of Thelonious Monk as the dominant jazz pianist of the year – an emergence and acceptance which, most of us feel, was long overdue.

Most have found, too, that Monk’s dominance has come about because of a general rise in the level of hornmen. Ten years ago when the “jazz greats” of the modern era were at their height, few of them could play with Monk; today your modern hornman has learned to think the way Monk thinks, to hear his harmonies (his own private scale, one might almost say) and to utilize it as Monk does.

Among the hornmen most successfully influenced by Monk is Johnny Griffin, the young Chicago tenor who worked with the Monk quartet at New York’s Five Spot last year and who opens Tuesday at the Jazz Workshop. Until his association with Monk, Griffin was just another fast, modern, hard tenor. Today he would rank, I should say, very near to Coltrane and Stitt among the top tenor men-and there are times when I would place him above “Train.”

One of these times is recorded in a new Riverside release by the Monk Quartet entitled Misterioso (RLP 12-279); at the moment (after some dozen hearings) I am inclined to rate it as one of the best two or three records of the last year. Here, for perhaps the first time in his career, Monk has the advantage of a tenor who thinks as he does and who transmits that thought to his instrument as no other tenor man does. As an illustration, take the track Just a Gigolo: See how Monk transforms the rather dull, overworked tune into something sharp and satiric and a little sad. Then follow it with the title tune Misterioso and see how the two of them do the same thing with the simple piano finger exercise upon which it is based.

This may be the most important album since Bird died.

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Down Beat : 04/16/1959
John A. Tynan : 3 stars

Taped on location at New York’s Five Spot club, this quite un-mysterioso set consists of five blowing tracks featuring tenor-preacher Griffin and one weird un-accompanied piano interlude (Gigolo) in which Monk amuses himself with brash experiments on the chords of the venerable balladirge.

Malik’s bass is raw and spiny in his solo on Bud, after which Haynes authoritatively drums out his solo summary of the proceedings; otherwise the rhythm team restricts itself to the basic business of support, with laudable success.

With Monk mostly hovering in the harmonic background and emerging occasionally to solo intriguingly, it is Griffin who sounds off in impassioned peroration. After the piano climbs into the title tune and is joined by the tenor, Misterioso turns to lie the good ol’ blues during which Griffin takes time out from his hyper-emotional expressionism to blow a long compliment in the direction of Lester Young. What follows is a fine, adventurous tenor solo, ranging from the garrulous to the profound, that is as honest as Abe.

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Liner Notes by Orrin Keepnews

This is Thelonious Monk’s eighth Riverside LP. Like all its predecessors and, undoubtedly, like the recordings still to come from the mind and hands of this remarkable artist, it offers several aspects – though hardly the full picture – of his distinctive talents.

There are re-workings of four of his earlier compositions (it should be axiomatic that Monk is a constantly self-renewing composer-arranger-musician, that each new recording of an “old” number, particularly with different personnel, represents a fresh view of it – almost a new composition.) There is one new piece: Blues Five Spot. As that title emphasizes, this album (like RLP 12-262) was recorded on-the-spot during Monk’s 1958 engagement at New York’s colorful Five Spot Cafe. Thus there is also a brief unaccompanied version of a standard (Just a Gigolo), characteristic of the way Thelonious opens most of his ‘sets’ in a club.

Since this is Monk in “live” performance, there is apt to be a somewhat more vivid, less introspective quality to his piano work than in at least some studio recordings. And this is also Monk reacting to the enthusiasm of the capacity crowds he drew nightly to the Five Spot, and Thelonious at the high level of performance that had, at just about this time, won him first honors among jazz pianists in the annual Down Beat International Critics Poll.

The title selected for this album – Misterioso – is more than just the name of one of its numbers. It is an extremely Monk-like song title, evoking by its mild play on words (linking “mist” and “mystery”) another basic characteristic of his music at this or any other time, that feeling of challenge and depth that leads a writer like Gunther Schuller (as quoted below) to describe Thelonious quite aptly as “enigmatic and wonderful.”

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Having written quite frequently in the past few years on the inexhaustible subject of Thelonious Monk and his music, I (for one) think it a good idea to inject someone else’s point of view into a set of notes on Monk. The provocative paragraphs that follow are by Gunther Schuller, who is composer, critic and both a classical and jazz French horn player. These comments on Monk’s technique and influence are taken from an article that appeared in the first (November, 1958) issue of Nat Hentoff and Martin Williams’ magazine, Jazz Review, and are reprinted by permission:

“… Monk uses his fingers, not in the usual arched position pianistic orthodoxy requires, but in a flat horizontal way. This determines a number of characteristics in Monk’s music. Aside from the tone quality it produces, it makes, for instance, the playing of octaves very hazardous. In playing an octave of two E’s, let us say, it would be easy to also hit by accident the D (a tone below the upper E) and the F (a tone above the lower E). I imagine that Monk soon discovered that he could exploit his unorthodox finger positions, and began to make use of these “extra” notes which others would have heard as “wrong” and tried to eliminate. The old tradition of approximating blue notes by playing a minor second also fit in here. In this respect Monk went even further. The clash of a minor second became so natural to his ear that on top of one blue note he began to add another right next to it, as in Misterioso where the D-flat – already a blue note – has another blue note, the C, attached to it, like a satellite.

“Also, Monk plays more large intervals in his right hand than most pianists. Again this is traceable, physically, to the way he plays. His fingers reach these intervals very naturally; an while this is true of half a dozen other pianists, I think this factor takes on added importance for Monk because of one striking feature of his talent. Where many pianists less original than Monk are concerned exclusively with playing the “right” (or acceptable) notes, Monk, at his most inspired, thinks of over-all shapes and designs or ideas. His hands to a large extent determine these shapes and, because he is a man of great talent, or perhaps even genius, he does play the right notes, almost as a matter of course. This is to make a fine distinction – a distinction, however, that we need in order to separate the genius from the good musician.

“(As for) the point of Monk’s belated influence, first let it be noted that this influence affected almost entirely instrumentalists other than pianists. Monk’s music, engendered largely by his unorthodox pianistic approach, resists effective imitation, always the starting point for any overt influence. To play on the piano some of the things Monk does the way he does them – even his whole-tone scales, not to mention his more adventurous flights – is virtually impossible for anyone else. Especially in regard to the tone quality Monk gets – a rich, full-bodied, “horn”-like sound, not unlike Ellington’s tone. (It should go without saying, but is often forgotten, that a man’s tone on his instrument is inseparably related to the nature of his music.) It is therefore natural that he influenced primarily ‘horn’ men, like Rollins and Griffin, who could absorb his musical ideas without coming to grips with his technical idiosyncrasies – such men could simply transfer the essence of these ideas to their instrument.

“That this occurred years after Monk first set forth these ideas is not only normal but fitting. His ideas were both advanced and unorthodox. They would have been neither had they been immediately absorbed by dozens of musicians. Originality is rare and precious and resists easy assimilation. And in these times of standardization and bland conformism we should be grateful that there are still talents such as Thelonious Monk who remain slightly enigmatic and wonderful to some of us.”

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The featured sideman on this recording, as he was during virtually all of Monk’s mid-1958 Five Spot engagement, is the exciting young Chicago-born tenor man, Johnny Griffin. Griffin, who was first brought to Riverside’s attention by Monk (who had worked with him briefly in Chicago a few years ago), has two albums of his own on this label, and is featured on a number of others, including –

Johnny Griffin Sextet: with Donald Byrd, Pepper Adams (RLP 12-264)
Way Out: Johnny Griffin Quartet (RLP 12-274)
Chet Baker in New York (RLP 12-281)
Big Six: Blue Mitchell (RLP 12-273)
Blues for Dracula: Philly Joe Jones (RLP 12-282)
Branching Out: Nat Adderley (RLP 12-285)

Ahmed Abdul-Malik, the strong bearded bassist, can be heard with the Randy Weston Trio on Riverside RLPs 12-214 and 12-232. Drummer Roy Haynes is with Sonny Rollins on Riverside RLP 12-241.

Monk’s other albums for this label are –
The Thelonious Monk Orchestra at Town Hall (RLP 12-300)
Thelonious in Action: Thelonious Monk Quartet (RLP 12-262)
Mulligan Meets Monk: Thelonious Monk and Gerry Mulligan (RLP 12-247)
Monk’s Music: Thelonious Monk Septet; with Coleman Hawkins, John Coltrane, Art Blakey (RLP 12-242)
Thelonious Himself: solo piaao (RLP 12-235)
Brilliant Corners: Thelonious Monk, with Sonny Rollins, Max Roach (RLP 12-226)
The Unique Thelonious Monk (RLP 12-209)
Thelonious Monk plays Duke Ellington (RLP 12-201)