Billboard : 12/31/1955
Score of 73

The diskery has hit on the all-Ellington gimmick as a method of introducing this pioneer pianist, acknowledged as a prime inventor of the idiom, to a wilder audience than he has enjoyed in the past. Set is interesting and provocative as familiarity of the material affords basis for comparative study and understanding of this original musician. Fine support from Kenny Clarke, drums and Oscar Pettiford, bass. Good cover.

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Audio
Jean Shepherd : March, 1956

Monk is one of the most controversial of present day musicians. He was one of the pioneers of the contemporary forms of music back in the early 1940’s along with Gillespie and Parker, but his personal characteristics prevent his fame from spreading much beyond a small circle. Admittedly very influential among pianists of the present day, he has never been recorded too well. On this disc he appears with two excellent confreres in the persons of Kenny Clark (drums) and the admirable Oscar Pettiford (bass). He plays with a sort of acid poetic humor that always swings and is highly individual. If certain of his stylistic mannerisms remind you of others, it is well to remember who came first. As we said, he has been very influential among younger artists. This is a most enjoyable recording and one worth owning. Technically good, too.

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Virginian-Pilot : 02/19/1956

From Riverside’s modern jazz catalog, no longer merely an adjunct to a living traditional reissue program, comes one of the most intriguing items in some time – Thelonious Monk Plays Duke Ellington. The dust jacket bills this as the “new” Monk, but Orrin Keepnews writes, correctly, that the only novelty is that the controversial member of the bop founding fathers has been given material more likely to broaden his reception. It may be argued that Ellington standards such as Mood Indigo and Solitude demand a more conventional treatment, but that Monk-Ellington product is good jazz and no violence is done to Duke’s melodies. I Let A Song Out Of My Heart sounds as though it might have been written by Monk, as played here. Caravan is spicy, and gives Oscar Pettiford‘s base full range. Throughout, Monk demonstrates his skill and maturity as a pianist. Kenny Clarke is on drums.

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Down Beat : 01/25/1956
Nat Hentoff : 3 stars

This is a reluctant rating since I admire Monk and greatly respect his contributions to modern jazz, both via his personal playing example and via several of his distinctive themes. But Monk has been ill served by Bill Grauer Jr. and Orrin Keepnews in his recording debut for Riverside.

They instructed Monk to do all Ellington music on his first LP. Their motives were laudable in that they hoped this way to win Monk a larger audience than if they had started with an LP of his originals. A similar plan with Randy Weston playing Cole Porter worked because Randy is more adaptable and more of a technician than Monk, and also because Porter is less of a composer than Ellington. One of the impressive qualities of Duke’s writing is the varied nature and moods of his works. To play a representative selection of Duke requires a pianist flexible enough to fit into these varying, rather sophisticated, compositional and emotional requirements. A recitalist of Ellingtonia must also be equipped technically with fairly wide resources so that he can take the initial themes and build thereon organic variations that will achieve climaxes and sustain maximum interest. (And don’t underrate Duke himself in this respect.)

Monk, however, is very much of an original. He is most comfortable and convincing in his own works. His technique pianistically isn’t always adequate for what he wants to express in his own personal language; it is less adequate for this variegated a program.

For his own purposes, however, Monk has almost always had enough technique to get his own ideas and structures across convincingly enough to make a lasting contribution to jazz. It does Monk little good to force him to adapt to a program for which he has little empathy as a pianist-writer, though he may have a large liking for Ellingtonia as a listener.

There are interesting examples here – as in Black and Tan Fantasy – of how Monk’s musical mind transmutes Ellingtonia, but too much of this has a sameness of approach and a limited structural development. I may be wrong, but I don’t think Monk dug this session too much either. Excellent support is given by Oscar Pettiford and Kenny Clarke. Solitude is unaccompanied.

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Liner Notes by Orrin Keepnews

It might seem strange to promise that his album offers a “new” Thelonious Monk (considering that this pianist is one of the founding fathers of modern jazz). Nevertheless, that is, in a sense, exactly what is claimed here.

The many listeners who are quite familiar with Monk’s work will most probably find this LP nothing more (or less) than Thelonious in top form, at his most lyrical, relaxed and inventive best – which, of course, promises a great deal right there.

It is, however, our belief that Monk has never reached a sufficiently large audience, that a great many more listeners who might find him most rewarding and very much to their liking have never in the past really listened to him with an open ear and an open mind. They have almost automatically and most inaccurately steered clear of him as being “too difficult” or “too far out” to appeal to them. It’s our feeling that the manner in which Thelonious is presented in this album might very possibly be able to surprise and win over this up-to-now self-depriving audience.

It scarcely need be said that this “new” presentation involves no compromising of Monk’s unique artistry. The newness simply derives from something the writer of these notes has always felt most strongly: that a good part of the problem of the jazz artist who is considered excessively “far out” is tied in with the playing of material that is unfamiliar to the ‘average’ ear. This is not to deny that original tunes are a most important part of jazz creativity. But it can be extremely helpful to know the precise structural and melodic starting point for a musician’s improvisations. It can often mean the difference between following the unfolding of a performance with awe and delight or finding yourself just groping, bewildered and almost inevitably somewhat irritated. Communication between performer and audience is, after all, rather essential; and to perhaps more listeners than might care to admit it out loud, the initial identification of knowing the tune can be something more than half the battle.

To give the album a certain unity of mood, and to be sure of suitable material for Monk to work from, it was suggested that he stick to compositions by Duke Ellington, certainly a man for whose achievements most jazz modernists have more than a little respect. Thelonious readily approved the whole idea. He retired briefly with a small mountain of Ellington sheet music; in due course he reported himself ready for action; and thus this LP was born.

Of course Monk has played and recorded standards in the past. But his primary emphasis has usually been on originals (as well it might, since his own compositions are among the most beautiful, highly-regarded and frequently played of modern jazz instrumentals). Here, for the first time, he sticks entirely to standard ground. He is aided to no small degree by two exceptionally gifted associates. Oscar Pettiford is very probably the finest bass player around today; he has done more than anyone since the pioneering Jimmy Blanton to create and shape the modern bass style. Kenny Clarke was a prominent member of the group that first developed bop; he remains high on anyone’s list of top drummers. These three men begin with the decided advantage of knowing each other and each other’s music so well that fitting together is almost a matter of instinct. With such support, and with the rich fullness of Ellington’s tunes to work from, Thelonious proceeds to display his distinctive and remarkable attributes: a firm, swinging beat; a spare, precise, yet highly lyrical approach; flashes of sardonic humor.

Although Monk remains his usual unfettered musical self, he does not make the mistake of treating Duke’s compositions merely as vehicles. They have too much character and strength for that; they serve in each case to suggest a logical direction for Monk to travel. Thus, Black and Tan is fittingly treated as a ‘funky’ blues, Caravan becomes a weird flight of fancy; Solitude – one of the rare instances in modern jazz of an entirely unaccompanied piano solo – is a mood-piece of almost painful poignancy.

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The story of the group that gathered at Minton’s in Harlem in the very early ’40s is by now largely a matter of twice-told tales and personal opinions that don’t always jibe with each other. Thus it may never be settled to everyone’s satisfaction just who should be given credit for what in the genesis of bop. But it seems clear that Monk was, along with Dizzy and Bird, a key figure from the start. And it is also clear that he has never received the degree of credit and acceptance he deserves.

The possible reasons for this state of affairs are widely varied. Teddy Hill, manager at Minton’s in those days, has said that “Dizzy (got) all the exploitation… Monk seemed like the guy who manufactured the product rather than commercialized it.” At the other extreme is the rather strange dismissal by one jazz critic who wrote, in 1949, that Monk’s “placed in the jazz scene… has been grossly distorted as a result of some high-powered publicity work.”

Actually that publicity – belonging largely to the late ’40s period when bop as a whole was being ‘sold’ to the public mostly in terms of eccentricities of clothing, language and behavior – would seem, quite unintentionally, to have done Monk much more harm than good. For a while a natural showman like Diz thrived on this sort of thing, in the case of Thelonious it served only to over-emphasize how “difficult” both the man and his music supposedly were. You could easily get into lengthy debate on this subject, but our view is basically that the aloofness of a talented artist who demands acceptance on his own terms or not at all has been read as weirdness, and that a degree of disregard for the rules of conventional behavior (an attitude surely shared with many other artists) has been over-stressed until it seems some uniquely wild amount of irresponsibility. As we know quite concretely, at a recording session he is all business and 100% purposefulness.

But Monk doesn’t need (and, I imagine, won’t particularly care for) this sort of “defense.” His fingers and his ideas speak for him; and in this album, I think, they speak most articulately and memorably.