Billboard : 08/25/1956
Score of 77

Along with his other Riverside release, this rates as the most accessibie of all the Monk LP’s. Instead of the usual heavy emphasis on “originals,” Monk has taken a group of pop standards and treated them in his forthrightly unconventional way. Exercising his wry, insidious sense of humor to the fullest, Tea for Two and Honeysuckle Rose come out devastatingly funny. Oscar Pettiford and Art Blakey provide distinguished backing.

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High Fidelity
John S. Wilson : September, 1956

Riverside Records is of the opinion that Thelonious Monk, a pianist who has been known as “The High Priest of Bop,” is not appreciated as widely as he might be because he has usually been recorded playing his own recondite compositions, and theyhave therefore undertaken to widen his audience by offering his versions of well-known tunes. The first effort in this direction, a disk featuring Monk renditions of compositions by Duke Ellington, backfired largely because Monk’s pattern is too drastically different from the pattern Ellington himself had already set for his own tunes.

This second disk, however, fully justifies the theory chez Riverside. On these tunes Monk’s treatment is not balanced against any set standard. They have been played in every conceivable way in the past, and Monk shows – among other things – that he needn’t borrow from anyone. He plays with an easy beat and is consistently melodic – although his melodies are often sardonic variations of the original (his tantalizingly off-key Honeysuckle Rose is an excellent example of this). Throughout the disk Monk contrives a blend of the familiar and the Monkish that manages to be steadily provocative. He receives superb support from Oscar Pettiford and Art Blakey.

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Saturday Review
Whitney Balliett : 09/15/1956

As subtle, beautiful and curiously satisfying a record as Monk has ever made. Now thirty-five, Monk has had his imitators, and yet, as one of the musicians who upheaved jazz in the early Forties, he is still held to one side, as it were, as a kind of special pickle with a taste that must be acquired. This is, of course, nonsense, for Monk’s style – loose, almost diffident dissonances, wry single-note lines, a laggard-like beat – is easily plumbed. Here he winds his way through and around seven well-known standards, keeping the melody always just below the surface and embellishing it more than reworking its chords, with a wide variety of results. On the solo Memories of You (the only side on which Oscar Pettiford and Art Blakey do not appear), he is raggedy and wistful; Tea for Two gets a kind of Restoration-wit treatment; and Just You Just Me, the longest side, is buried within an ambling, idea-upon-idea escarpment that is fascinating. Blakey and Pettiford are impeccable. An essential record.

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Down Beat : 07/25/1956
Nat Hentoff : 4.5 stars

The Unique Thelonious Monk is backed by the consummate pro, Oscar Pettiford, and the forest fire, Art Blakey. On Memories, Monk is unaccompanied. Monk chose the repertoire and, fortunately, this is one company that is not committed to 12-tracks-look-how-many-tunes-you-get-12-count-them LPs.

Thelonious remains to me one of the insatiably, irrepressibly, and valuably individual jazzmen of our era. It is true that his in-person appearances have at times been uneven and that not all his recordings have been diamonds, even in the rough. It is also true that he sometimes gives the appearance of childishly repetitious showboating, as in the closing section of Tea for Two here.

But it is also true that at his best and near-best, Monk has an intense sense of drama (not melodrama) that can create a reflectively dissonant, almost hypnotic mood (Memories) and a sharply knived penchant for shaping and reshaping a few key phrases into a hail of plunging aural
mobiles (Honeysuckle).

There is a virility and a serious lyricism (Dream and Beautiful) in Monk’s playing as well as a cross-combination of Chaplinesque and Charles Addams-like thrusts of humor (Tea for Two and Just You) and always an underlying, deep pulsation (Liza). Pettiford and Blakey are excellent in their capacity to meet Monk’s far-from-inconsiderable challenges. Pettiford has several first-class solos. All in all, this is one of Monk’s best LPs, for the most part a strangely exhilarating addition to the recorded work of a musical personality to whom the application of the word unique is understatement.

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Liner Notes by Orrin Keepnews

This is the second Riverside LP devoted to the unique and fascinating jazz artistry of Thelonious Monk.

As in his previous album for this label, which was a collection of Duke Ellington compositions, Monk concerns himself here with “standards” popular tunes that have demonstrated sturdiness and above-average quality by remaining popular for a good many years. The present group of numbers are, like the Ellington selections, decidedly personal interpretations, strongly colored by Monk’s highly individual approach and ideas. But the starting point in each case is a familiar melody.

This is a departure from the procedure on earlier recordings by Monk, where the emphasis was invariably on the pianist’s own compositions. Monk’s ‘originals,’ it happens, are among the richest and most inventive of modern jazz writing. Nevertheless, the decision to by-pass them temporarily is a quite deliberate one. It stems from Riverside’s desire to deflate a myth that has gotten somewhat out of hand. For a variety of reasons, and starting (as most legends do) from a basis of moderately accurate fact, this pioneer modernist has gained the reputation of being a rather forbiddingly difficult-to-understand musician (the “High Priest of Bop” – whatever that might mean). As a result, there are those who tend to shy away from Monk’s music almost automatically, who have decided without really listening that it is something they can’t expect to grasp or enjoy. It is our very strong belief that such people are cheating themselves, and missing out on valuable and compelling musical experiences.

Now, if it were their loss alone, there might be no great desire to divert these people from their self-imposed fate. But some part at least of the measure of an artist’s “effectiveness” must lie in the extent of his impact on an audience. Thus Thelonious – whose influence on fellow-musicians and on the whole basic framework of modern jazz is, by contrast, vast and almost universally recognized – must also be considered as losing something through this situation.

In this album and its immediate predecessor, there is no attempt to “change” Monk. (There would be no possibility of doing that even if anyone wanted to: this is a mature and properly self-confident artist whose fundamental musical concepts are by now quite firmly established.) But Thelonious is highly capable of working with the material furnished by the standard pop composers. More than that, he happens to enjoy (as some jazz artists do, and others do not) the challenge this can present. So it is possible to put into operation the theory that the likelihood of communication is greatly increased if the listener can start from a firm, familiar position. You know the tune of Liza, or Honeysuckle Rose, as well as Monk does. So everyone at least begins even. Thelonious can never be made to seem too “easy”; he is a forthright and uncompromising creative artist whose style and concepts remain non-conventional even by the standards of today’s jazz. He is not easy; but neither is he a mystical or perverse wanderer in a private universe. And when the point of origin from which he moves on out into the areas of his improvisation is clearly known, it should be a lot easier for more listeners to feel that this music, intricate and unusual though it may be, is nevertheless knowable.

So this album is concerned with well-known songs by some pretty fair craftsmen: George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Fats Waller, Vincent Youmans. The choice of repertoire is Monk’s, and in just about all cases he has also chosen to take advantage of the roominess of a 12-inch LP, giving himself time to develop and expand some very intriguing ideas. On such often-played selections as Honeysuckle Rose and Tea for Two, his wry and insidious sense of humor makes itself evident, sharply and sometimes rather devastatingly. Tea for Two is a tune with potentialities of monotony that have trapped more than a few musicians; but Monk turns its repetitious line into a remarkable exercise in cumulative power. Memories of You, played unaccompanied, becomes a mood-piece of almost overwhelming tenderness. Liza is taken at full-speed-ahead pace; Just You, Just Me is the starting point for rich, varied exploration in a swinging medium tempo. The remaining two are introspective ballads, with perhaps a touch of tongue in cheek here and there.

Monk has enjoyed the respect and admiration of a very substantial number of musicians ever since he first made his presence felt as a principal shaper of modern music, back in his early-1940s days of experimentation with Gillespie and Parker at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem. Consequently, he has never had to settle for working with anything less than the best jazz artists. It’s hardly news that Oscar Pettiford and Art Blakey are about the best you could hope to find today on their respective instruments. Both are band leaders in their own right and outstandingly talented soloists, as well as superb accompanists. They were Monk’s choice for these dates; and it’s quite clear that, as always, they were enthusiastic about working with him. Both have a deep-seated understanding of Monk’s music, so that they join with him here in a cohesive and consistently creative unity. Of their individual efforts, perhaps most notable are Pettiford’s handling of the melodic line on the verse to Tea for Two and Blakey’s surging solo on Just You, Just Me.

In total, then, this is Thelonious in top form: swinging, lyrical, provocative, with first-rate support, in an album designed to satisfy those who know and appreciate his work, and perhaps to convert some others.