Did Monk ever play with a guitarist?

[raymoan]

Charlie Christian, i presume. Anyone else?

And did he hold any particular view of the guitar and/or guitarists?

[Christian Miller]

You can hear Monk with CC on the Minton’s sessions. Monk at this stage sounded like a fairly straightahead swing pianist though…

[Jimmy blue note]

His life and output are pretty well documented. He, for a large part, preferred the company and conversation with players he felt close to, to the point that during his live he evolved towards players who could understand and play with his own concept of time, harmony, oblique phrasing, space and playing around the beat. A lot of his playing is about accents and avoiding the obvious. There really weren't many guitarists who thought that way; who had that percussive sense of play and his own unique spacial balance.
Maybe it would take until guitarists became more rhythmically adventerous that he would've found a musical peer, or maybe it was social circles he moved in. There are very few players that understood Monk's swing and the guitarists of the day had their own sense of (guitaristic?) swing.
Compatible swing is why he found kinship with Charlie Rouse, or Ben Riley, or even Blakey, but if you listen to the time feel on something as "standard" as Bright Mississippi, you'd be hard pressed to find a guitarist of his day who felt that play with the beat.
Now if Monk were alive today, I could hear Frisell or Bernstein working with him, or maybe even James Emery, but even Jim Hall at the time had a thoughtful rhythmic concept but not the quirky playfulness of Monk.
I think Monk was also a family man of sorts too. He found musicians who felt familiar and comfortable and he didn't often venture outside that comfort zone.
That's the way it seems to me. Maybe it would have been interesting for him to meet Ted Dunbar or Bern Nix, but that's not in this history line.
Or so it seems to me.

[Christian Miller]

Peter Bernstein is incredibly simpatico with Monk's music for sure, as is Miles Okazaki (who is also a Charlie christian buff)

In both cases it feel like these are players channeling or interpreting monk in both cases. It would have been interesting to see how their approach might have to change if they were playing with the man himself.

One thing that occurs is during Monk's early period it was extremely common for pianists to play with a guitarist. Even Ahmad Jamal did this. The fact that Monk never did (as far as I know) this speaks volumes.

[Endaro]

You can hear Monk with CC on the Minton’s sessions. Monk at this stage sounded like a fairly straightahead swing pianist though…

I've read a lot of speculation that we don't actually have any recordings of Monk and Charlie playing together; that the recordings we have at Mintons of Charlie all feature either Kenny Kersey or Al Tinny and have just been mislabeled for decades.

Leo Valdes of soloflight.cc is a proponent, but I suppose it's impossible to know now. Is it Monk playing differently than the Monk we're used to, or does he sound different because it's someone else entirely? I definitely don't have the ear to figure it out.

Did Monk ever play with a guitarist?

Charlie Christian, i presume. Anyone else?

And did he hold any particular view of the guitar and/or guitarists?

I think for one answer you can look to Monk himself. It's terse as expected, but Monk did one of the blindfold tests for Downbeat Magazine. Leonard Feather played him a recording of Herb Ellis with Oscar Peterson and specifically asked Monk what he thought of the guitarist:

LF: How about the guitar player?
TM: Charlie Christian spoiled me for everyone else.

I speculate Monk knew Charlie pretty well from their time together, and Charlie's early tragic death was probably hard on him. As much as I enjoy other jazz guitarists of the era, there was only ever one Charlie Christian. From Monk's perspective, why play with a pale imitation that just reminds you of the friend you lost. How do you replace Charlie Christian?

Christian (Miller ) is on point with the recommendations; I think Miles Okazaki's Work is your best intersection of Monk and guitar; he recorded a solo guitar interpretation of every Thelonious Monk composition and it's well worth checking out.

[mr. beaumont]

Bobby Broom's Monk record was great too.

Re: Monk not being on the Minton's session, that's a tough one to call...the next earliest Monk on record isn't til what, 6-7 years later? A player, especially a young one, can change a lot in that time...but then the question becomes, how did Monk turn into Monk? Because if it is him on those recordings from '41, something magical happened over the next few years.

I think I lean more and more towards the "probably not him" camp. But maybe it's just because I can't imagine Monk not being Monk, literally, the most instantly identifiable pianist in jazz history.

[Christian Miller]

Yeah so it’s impossible to prove about Monk being on those recordings. But I would say why not?

I mean how the hell do you think a pianist was going to play for money in the early 40s?

People sometimes seem to assume Monk was only capable of doing the Monk thing. In fact he was a highly accomplished Harlem Stride pianist who studied with James P Johnson and there’s no reason he wouldn’t be able to play in that style consummately. That’s where he came from; the tenths, sixths, whole tone runs… they date back to the 20s pianists… reimagined

He’s *telling us* in this recording, after the Monk A sections, that is…

(Many of the whole tone - isms etc here would not be out of place in 1930s piano…)

And if you want examples of wonderful things happening compare early 40s Bird to late 40s Bird.

[sgcim]

Yeah so it’s impossible to prove about Monk being on those recordings. But I would say why not?

I mean how the hell do you think a pianist was going to play for money in the early 40s?

People sometimes seem to assume Monk was only capable of doing the Monk thing. In fact he was a highly accomplished Harlem Stride pianist who studied with James P Johnson and there’s no reason he wouldn’t be able to play in that style consummately. That’s where he came from; the tenths, sixths, whole tone runs… they date back to the 20s pianists… reimagined

He’s *telling us* in this recording, after the Monk A sections, that is…

(Many of the whole tone - isms etc here would not be out of place in 1930s piano…)

And if you want examples of wonderful things happening compare early 40s Bird to late 40s Bird.

n that recent bio of Monk, he's quoted as saying something like, "You won't get anywhere if you play like everybody else" and that's when he started working on own style.
He might've been crazy, but he wasn't nuts.

[Jimmy Smith]

Looks like I have to eat my words. That's Monk on the first track for sure. The rest either have no piano or the other pianist I believe.

[Litterick]

Howard Roberts plays on every track of Monk's Blues, the 1968 album on which the quartet is augmented by studio missions under the direction of Oliver Nelson. Downbeat awarded it three stars but described it as 'disgraceful.'