Thelonious Monk, The Transformer, Explore Records

I was sitting at the bar in a Chicago jazz club one night and heard some guy opine that while Monk was a great composer, he couldn't play the piano: wrong, as this set so aptly shows.

Monk, in fact, was a masterful piano player who could play in any style (as Horowitz and many other pianistic big hitters recognized) and he was particularly good at stride, which underlies, and sometimes not very deeply, so much of what he does.

But he chose to play his way and there was a disciplined methodology behind his rendering of his own compositions and his transformation of standards, pop tunes and songs penned by other people generally.

And so to The Transformer, two CDs on which Monk, for one hour, seven minutes and eight seconds plays exactly one song, I'm Getting Sentimental Over You, while we get a what is to me a fascinating window into his process and a deeper understanding of his musical mind. On the first CD, from home tapes by his wife Nellie, we hear him learning the song (rather quickly, I would add), transposing its key to his preferred E flat and getting a feel for its structure and the tempo he will use. By the fourth track he has it dripping in stride and has begun to improvise on it; then on, over, under and around it in the 28-minute fifth take and the 18-minute sixth.

The sound is quite good and the practice takes are followed by three live performance recordings of Monk's quartet ranging from seven to 12 minutes and offering different perspectives on the finished product. What amazes me, and it probably shouldn't, is just how incredible Monk was even when practicing. I say it probably shouldn't amaze me because what he produced obviously didn't happen by magic. It took a lot of work leading to a lot of finely developed skill.

As an aside, if you want to understand Monk's music and his life, you probably can't do better now than Robin D.G. Kelley's recent Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, which hipped me to The Transformer. The book is an exhaustively researched biography and a great read.