"NICE WORK IF YOU CAN GET IT": THELONIOUS MONK AND POPULAR SONG.

Thelonious Monk is primarily celebrated as a composer, the creator of a unique body of music that counts as one of the cornerstones of modern jazz. When we think of him as an improviser, it is primarily in the context of his own compositions. As Whitney Balliett (1991, 37) once put it, "His improvisations were molten Monk compositions, and his compositions were frozen Monk improvisations." Yet over the years, Monk made numerous recordings of Tin Pan Alley songs, some in small-group settings and others as solo pianist. It may seem odd to single out these performances for special attention because playing popular songs, or "standards," was the basic procedure for a jazz musician of Monk's generation. But these are genuinely odd performances in any case--especially those for solo piano in the stride tradition, which lack the extroversion or virtuosic bravado of that idiom. Some of these performances are curiously out of tempo, as if Monk were fumbling at the keyboard or giving the unfolding of each chord an uncommon weight. Others seem stiffly and mechanically in tempo. Passages that are unnervingly banal are juxtaposed with the most unsettling and inexplicable dissonance. Even stranger, they often sound less like improvisations than faithful, if idiosyncratic, renderings of the songs.

The pop songs that Monk recorded throughout his career were not contemporary, but tunes of a certain vintage. As shown in the appendix, none was composed later than 1945. The majority were originally published in the late 1920s and early 1930s, making them already "standards" by the time that Monk (who was born in 1917) would have first heard them. To be sure, some of the choices are hardly surprising. Tunes such as Fats Waller's "Honeysuckle Rose" or George Gershwin's "Liza" (both from 1929) had long ago been absorbed into the repertory of virtually every gigging jazz musician. More often than not, Monk performed this kind of song with his quartet, trading solos with his saxophonist. But other selections--the ones for solo piano-often seem pointedly archaic. By the late 1950s and well into the 1960s, solo versions of such chestnuts as "Just a Gigolo," "Memories of You," and "(I Love You) Sweetheart of All My Dreams" had become a regular adjunct to his usual stock of original compositions as played by his quartet. When performed (as they often were) as the opening number of a nightclub set, they were triply set apart: as solo piano pieces, as popular songs, and as a repertory that referred several decades into the past.

The application of Monkian dissonance to tunes such as "Lulu's Back in Town" is usually construed as a kind of irreverent nostalgia or cheerful parody, the eccentric humor of an artist who, like the cubist collagists, enjoyed deploying discarded scraps of popular culture in the service of a modernist aesthetic. "There's Danger in Your Eyes, Cherie" was apparently just such a "found object." According to Keepnews (1988, 141), Monk had stumbled across the tune in an old songbook shortly before his "outrageous interpretation" of it on a 1959 recording session. Even songs that were presumably well known to him are treated with a broad, campy humor that is immediately enjoyable. His 1956 version of "Tea for Two" for Riverside is a good example: the familiar melody, verging on triteness, is retrofitted with a bizarre harmonic scheme in which the circle-of-fifths movement of the original seems to have come unhinged.

But as so often with Monk, parody and eccentricity act as a mask concealing deeper levels of meaning. Among other things, one can view these performances as an avenue into Monk's musical autobiography. The repertory, after all, points to a crucial and otherwise largely hidden phase of Monk's creative life: the decade before 1947, when recordings for the Blue Note label first introduced his music to the general public. We know that, from 1940 to about 1943, he worked as house pianist for jam sessions at Minton's Playhouse in Harlem. Although these sessions are now famous because of their role in the emergence of bebop, Monk was in all other respects on the periphery of jazz activity of the time--living at home with his mother, shunning the usual route for professional advancement through the swing bands for the low pay and relative obscurity of the Harlem jam-session scene. During this period, he began writing many of the compositions for which he would become famous. Some, like "Epistrophy" and "'Round Midnight," were performed and even recorded by other artists as early as 1942. But by the very nature of the job at Minton's, Monk was required to play an endless string of jam-session favorites. Surviving recordings from Minton's, captured during 1941 by amateur phonographer Jerry Newman on a disk recording, faithfully document the tastes of the time--tunes such as "My Melancholy Baby," "Sweet Georgia Brown," "Star Dust," and "Nice Work If You Can Get It."

The few recordings on which one can hear the twenty-three-year-old Monk generally show him in a subsidiary role. His job as pianist at the jam session, after all, was to accompany other musicians in a compatible style. But one recording, featuring "Sweet Lorraine," a 1928 ballad that had gained renewed currency thanks to a recent recording by Nat "King" Cole, puts the spotlight on Monk in what must have been a regular Minton's ritual.

The performance begins with Monk's unaccompanied piano rising above the background clatter at Minton's. As guitarist Danny Barker (1986, 171-172) noted, "Monk generally started playing strange introductions going off, I thought, to outer space, hell knows to where.... Somewhere in Monk's intro there was the melody of the song to be played." Indeed, in the first three bars of the introduction, the melody of "Sweet Lorraine" is easy enough to recognize (see Ex. 1). The disorienting quality of the passage stems instead from the harmony, in which the familiar chords are displaced by tritone subsitutions (A[flat]7 for D7 in measure 1, D[flat]7 for G7 in measure 2) and drifting half-diminished chords in first inversion.

[Example 1 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

For the statement of the tune proper, Monk is joined by his Minton's bandmate Joe Guy and an unidentified bassist. While Monk continues to pursue his idiosyncratic harmonization, Guy takes over the melody on his trumpet. By contrast, the bassist, who seems not to have been "in the loop," struggles audibly for a foothold in Monk's slippery harmonies. Every so often, he seems to have found one. When the harmony arrives in the fourth bar of the A section on the dominant of the relative minor (A7), for example, he plays with the confidence of one who has finally found firm ground. But the unexpected harmonic twists consistently frustrate him, forcing him to retreat to a musical equivalent of mumbling. Only with the entrance of the drummer at the beginning of a new thirty-two-bar cycle is order finally restored.

Monk's "weird chords" are part of the bebop legend. One of their purposes was to challenge and disorient musicians such as the unfortunate bassist. Jam sessions throughout the period routinely contained musical obstacles--fast tempos, unusual keys, reharmonizations--designed to weed out the inept and the unitiated (DeVeaux 1997, 208-217). But critics and historians have also seized upon Monk's fondness for alternative harmonizations as a turning point. For many, the real significance of the revolution at Minton's Playhouse is that jazz finally severed its long and intimate association with popular song. In the wake of bebop, we no longer think of jazz improvisation as a way of playing tunes but as an exacting art form in itself that happens, as a rule, to use popular music as a point of departure. In the hands of a jazz improviser, a copyrighted popular song is less text than pretext. Its crucial identifying feature--melody--is erased in the heat of improvisation, leaving behind the more abstract and malleable level of harmonic pattern. Out of the ashes of popular song comes a new structure, a new aesthetic order, shaped by the intelligence and virtuosity of the improviser; and it is to that structure, and that structure alone, that our attention should be drawn.

This way of thinking about jazz improvisation has typically been linked to the broader project of elevating jazz as art by setting it apart from, and even in an adversarial relationship to, mere commercial music. Jazz criticism had, from its inception, characterized jazz as anticommercial, but such rhetoric became particularly vehement when used in defense of bebop (DeVeaux 1991, 529-530). As Ross Russell (1959, 202) wrote in an essay originally published in 1948:

   Bebop is the music of revolt.... It is especially the intransigent opponent
   of Tin Pan Alley. Indeed the war against the horrible products of the
   tune-smiths ... has been brought to a successful conclusion only by the
   beboppers, who take standard melodies at will, stand them on their heads,
   and create new compositions retaining only a harmonic relationship with the
   original.

Any number of early bebop recordings can be heard as conforming to Russell's description. One of the most famous is "Ko Ko," the Charlie Parker/Dizzy Gillespie collaboration from 1945 that is based on "Cherokee," the 1938 pop song by Ray Noble. "Cherokee" had been a favorite vehicle for Parker since the early 1940s, but as Frank Tirro (1993, 301-302) notes, "If we compare the opening of Parker's KoKo [sic] with the opening of Noble's Cherokee we find the bebop transformation is complete. No vestige of the original remains visible on the surface of the performance." The listener is confronted instead by a disorienting, lightning-fast introduction, half-composed, half-improvised, that leads directly into Charlie Parker's improvised solo. In Gary Giddins' (1987, 87, 90) words, this "explosion of sound, [this] mad scramble of notes ... helped to confirm jazz's emergence from the shadows of Tin Pan Alley tunesmiths."

But does it make sense to draw from this the conclusion that the beboppers were unremittingly hostile toward popular song? In an earlier, incomplete version of "Ko Ko" from the same recording session, the musicians follow the explosive introduction by quietly intoning the melody to "Cherokee." At this point, the performance is abruptly cut off by whistling, the impatient clapping of hands, and a voice shouting "Hold it!" Was this Charlie Parker, who had just stopped playing a few seconds before? Perhaps, but the credit has also been taken by record producer Teddy Reig. According to Reig (1990, 20), he interrupted the session not out of intrasigent opposition to Tin Pan Alley but for more practical considerations. His boss, Herman Lubinsky, the grasping owner of Savoy Records, had advanced Charlie Parker the sum of $300 for four original compositions. In the subsequent take, "Cherokee" was disguised as "Ko Ko" (the title was apparently Reig's), with composer credit assigned to Parker, who got his 5300. What was in it for Lubinsky? Aside from not having to pay royalties to a Tin Pan Alley composer, each original composition would be "published" by Lubinsky on terms that would bring him substantial royalty income. (Royalty income was also due the composer, but Lubinsky was notorious for evading payment; as one musician said of him, "To Herman, ... if he could beat you out of $5, that was a great achievement" [Reig 1990, 81].) Out of such petty economic incentives did the independence of bebop from popular song arise.

In general, to characterize bebop as a revolt of musicians against popular song misses the point. To be sure, the emergence of bebop as a genre depended on the creation of a new repertory; musicians needed to establish at least some autonomy in the marketplace. But the sensibilities of the bebop generation were still intimately connected to the music of Tin Pan Alley. Playing the music of Gershwin, Kern, and Arlen was "nice work." The purpose of their improvisations was not so much to displace or erase the original but to offer a personal interpretation of it. These interpretations, of course, were designed to display the artistry of the improviser through dizzying displays of virtuosic passagework, ingenious harmonic substitutions, and the like. All of this, admittedly, led in the direction of obscuring the original tune.

Monk's method, however, led in the opposite direction. He preferred, even while improvising, to hold on firmly to the melody. Consider his performance at Minton's in 1941 of the 1935 Gershwin tune, "Nice Work If You Can Get It." The excerpt begins with a vocal chorus (by trumpeter Joe Guy), with a piano obbligato by Monk that is not so much countermelody as a variation on the original tune. In many places, the relationship between his improvised line and the vocal line would be better described as heterophony than polyphony (see Ex. 2). Monk's solo chores, which follows, could similarly be described as melodic paraphrase.

[Example 2 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The solo piano versions of standards from later in Monk's career have an even more exaggerated respect for melodic content. These performances have an introspective mood quite removed from the noisy sociability of the Minton's recordings. They reflect a time when, as manager Teddy Hill remembered, "he'd come in here at any time and play for hours with only a dim light" (quoted in Peck 1948). As Albert Murray (1976, 228) has put it:

   Monk ... is in a sense a very special descendant of the old downhome
   honky-tonk piano player who likes to sit alone in the empty ballroom and
   play around with unconventional chord combinations and rhythms for his own
   private enjoyment. There is something of the empty ballroom etude in almost
   all of Monk's compositions.

Before he began writing his own compositions, Monk reshaped popular songs. Later in life, he enjoyed presenting distilled versions of these private "empty ballroom etudes" in the recording studio, in nightclubs, or on the concert stage. Although Monk never offered any justification for these performances, I hear them as a kind of public confession of the centrality of these songs in the shaping of his aesthetic.

Monk continued to perform "Nice Work" throughout his career, including an extended piano-solo version on his penultimate recording session thirty years later for the London label Black Lion. The most striking aspect of the opening of this 1971 performance is its straightness. The tune statement is almost unsyncopated, the piano texture very conventional. It conveys the feeling of someone sight-reading the tune directly from sheet music; and indeed, the similarity to the published version is striking (see Ex. 3).

[Example 3 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

But the exaggerated straightness of Monk's version is quite deliberate. It makes the few unexpected details stand out with particular clarity. For the most part, these details are matters of dissonant intervals. Monk had a well-known fondness for major and minor seconds, major and minor sevenths, minor ninths, and tritones--intervals that he liked to present in an exposed, unadorned fashion. This, of course, was a trait that he shared with many other twentieth-century composers. Had he grown up in a different environment, he might simply have composed in a non-triadic idiom. Instead, he found ways to arrange popular songs so as to arrive on these sonorities.

A good example is the A-flat major chord in measure 8 (see Ex. 4).

[Example 4 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

When I learned jazz piano, my teacher (bebop pianist Frank Cunimondo) specifically advised me not to harmonize a melody with the major seventh chord in first inversion because too much attention was thereby thrown to the exposed interval of a major second. Apparently, this is exactly why it appealed to Monk. Similar jolts are provided by the at in measure 2 (see Ex. 3b).

These details serve to defamiliarize the familiar; they make the performance simultaneously a faithful rendering and unmistakably Monkian. To an extent, one can regard Monk's fondness for certain sonorities as a "manner" that can be applied to virtually any tune. Every time he gets to a dominant chord, it seems that he cannot resist the temptation to insert a tritone--usually deep in the left-hand voicing, where it fundamentally alters the sound of the chord. And his fondness for whole-tone scales is particularly well known and often deplored as a cliche.

It is important to recognize, however, the extent to which the tunes he chose to play invite these interpolations. "Nice Work," like so many tunes of the period, is built around the sound of the augmented dominant-seventh chord--as a look at the sheet music confirms (see Ex. 3a). It is a short step from there to the tritone-based, whole-tone idiom that Monk uses in the beginning of the second chorus (see Ex. 5). Monk brings starkly out in the open dissonant intervallic relations that in the original were cloaked in a generally mellifluous texture.

[Example 5 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Take, for example, the b[natural] in the melody line in measure 24. In Gershwin's tune, the arrival of this note is both ingenious and coy (see Ex. 6a). For the first time, the interval of an augmented fifth appears in the melody rather than the harmonization, and in a structurally important spot: the half-cadence at the end of the bridge. At the same time, this b[natural] serves as the leading tone for the C chord that sets the circle-of-fifths pattern of the A section in motion once again. Monk's treatment of this dissonance is the opposite of coy (see Ex. 6b). He pounces on it with a relish that has something of the flavor of vindication, as if he were announcing, "This is the sound I like--and look, I found it right in the melody!"

[Example 6 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Some of the most arresting harmonic combinations in Monk's vocabulary can be found in his reworkings of standards. In many cases, they are not so much imposed on the tunes as derived from them through an ingenious reordering of musical materials. A particularly ingenious example is Monk's 1957 version of "(I Don't Stand a) Ghost of a Chance" (released as "Ghost of a Chance"). It is not hard to see why Monk liked this tune; like "Nice Work," it, too, prominently features the sonority of an augmented dominant chord in its second bar (see Ex. 7a). But a more interesting moment comes in measures 3-4, where a lusciously sentimental chromatic descent is accompanied by the harmony of a minor subdominant. Monk's recasting of this passage is elegant, if wholly unexpected (see Ex. 7b). In the third measure, he simply reverses the bass line from f-d[flat] to d[flat]-f. In the next measure, the bass moves up a fourth, as before. The result of this sleight of hand is that the melody note in measure 4 now lands a major seventh away from the root of B-flat minor--a tooth-rattling dissonance heightened immeasurably by Monk's decision to accompany the melody (doubled by an octave) by a left-hand "shell" of a minor seventh.

[Example 7 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In the original, the minor IV chord collapses immediately to the tonic. Monk's replacement harmony, by contrast, is unnervingly static; it has nowhere that it wants to go, nowhere that it can go. Our attention is drawn straight to the intervallic combinations that Monk wants us to hear. All of this emerges from a subtle alteration to an otherwise "straight" rendering. One can imagine the "wrong turn" in measure 3 happening accidentally the first time but thereafter becoming part of Monk's conception of the tune--and perhaps adding a new sonority to his vocabulary in the bargain.

An equally unsettling chord figures prominently in "April in Paris," another tune recorded on the same April 1957 session. As before, the sonority--an unusually voiced left-hand chord made up solely of root, minor seventh, and minor ninth--emerges from a collision between melody and harmony. This time, the immediate catalyst is the penchant in modern jazz for harmonic substitution.

In its original sheet-music arrangement, the second eight bars of "April in Paris" begins with a leisurely movement from the subdominant to a gently dissonant second-inversion tonic (see Ex. 8a). Such leisurely, contrapuntal bass lines, while not uncommon in commercial arrangements, were typically discarded by improvising jazz musicians in favor of more vigorous root-position progressions, the better to serve as the basis for new improvisations. Although no two musicians would necessarily recast this passage in exactly the same way, a consensus of sorts is represented by the version printed in The Real Book, probably the most widely distributed "fake book" in circulation (see Ex. 8b). In The Real Book, measure 12 is reinterpreted as a tonicization of the relative minor, A minor. And this, indeed, is the way that Monk plays it--albeit with a singular twist of his own (see Ex. 8c).

[Example 8 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

To see the logic behind Monk's unorthodox harmonization, one must keep in mind that, since at least the 1940s, jazz musicians have been fond of displacing dominant-seventh chords with chords a tritone away--the so-called tritone substitution (DeVeaux 1997, 104-106). In theory, such a procedure should work well enough in measures 11-12 of "April in Paris" (see Ex. 9). But as occasionally happens, the substituted harmony clashes with the melody, in this case resulting in a grating cross-relation (an augmented octave, b[natural] against b[natural] (see Ex. 10). Few jazz musicians--besides Monk--would choose this option. Once again, we are led by Monk to unfamiliar intervals that he manages to "discover" within the framework of the tune.

[Examples 9-10 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Having established this felicitous dissonance, Monk uses it several more times. In measures 17-20, it substitutes for the diminished chords in the original (see Ex. 11a). Here, if anything, the clash between melody and harmony is even more pronounced. Because the b[natural] in the melody is embellished with a lower chromatic neighbor, a single pitch class (a[natural]/b[natural]) is simultaneously the root of the chord and a melodic dissonance (see Ex. 11b)! Finally, in measure 21, where the original harmonization specifies a move to A minor, Monk seizes the occasion for parallel minor ninths--the c in the first chord nicely harmonizing the melody in tenths (see Ex. 12).

[Examples 11-12 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

"April in Paris" is not the only tune in which Monk evinces his fondness for the wrenching dissonance of a minor seventh topped with a minor ninth. It shows up as a passing chord on the last eighth note of measure 2 of the December 1956 recording of "I Surrender, Dear" (see Ex. 13a) and more prominently as part of the harmonization of the melody at the end of measure 4 of "Don't Blame Me" (from 1963) (see Ex. 13b). Probably the most memorable example, however, comes not in a reharmonized Tin Pan Alley standard but as part of one of his best-known compositions. At the beginning of "Ruby, My Dear," also recorded in 1957, one can hear a pair of oddly voiced parallel minor ninths just before the main melody enters, in precisely the same pitch and register as had occurred in measure 21 of "April in Paris" (see Ex. 13c).(1)

[Example 13 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

What can one make of this coincidence? The tendency, I think, would be to give priority to Monk as composer: to assume that this innovative stroke was integral to his conception of "Ruby, My Dear" and that his use of it elsewhere amounts to an after-the-fact, probably ironic, application of biting dissonance to bland popular songs. But to my mind, the close fit of harmonic sonority to the indiosyncrasies of "April in Paris" argues, if anything, for the reverse: that Monk may have first uncovered the sonority in the process of working out his own version of the pop song and only subsequently incorporated it into his own composition.

This scenario, of course, is only a hypothesis and, moreover, one impossible to test because by 1957 Monk had been playing both "April in Paris" and "Ruby, My Dear" for at least a decade (he recorded both tunes with a piano trio on his second recording session for Blue Note in October 1947). Were it to turn out to be true, however, it would by no means diminish the importance or originality of Monk's achievement. By raising the issue, I suggest that his aesthetic was forged not in some idealized space, like the backroom of Minton's, shielded from the corrupting influence of "commercial" music, but through an engagement with popular song. One cannot approach this important jazz composer and improviser without acknowledging his deep affinity for the popular songs with which he grew up. That respect and affection, measured in part by fidelity to the original, is more nakedly exposed in Monk's solo-piano performances than elsewhere, but I strongly suspect that it is shared by most other musicians of Monk's generation and that it is more deeply embedded in jazz as a whole than its most ardent champions might care to admit.

(1.) To be precise, these two chords come at the very end of "Ruby, My Dear," serving as a transition into the next chorus or (as in the first recorded performance in 1947) into a repetition of the bridge in an abbreviated AABA-BA performance. In the 1957 recording, this ending is also used as an introduction.

DISCOGRAPHY 

Charlie Parker's Reboppers. Ko Ko. Savoy 597. (Recorded November 26, 1945; incomplete take released on Savoy 5500)

Monk, Thelonious. April in Paris. Riverside RLP12-235. (Recorded April 12, 1957)

--. Don't blame me. Columbia CL2038. (Recorded February 27, 1963)

--. Ghost of a chance. Riverside RLP12-235. (Recorded April 12, 1957)

--. I surrender, dear. Riverside RLP12-226. (Recorded December 23, 1956)

--. Nice work if you can get it. Xanadu 112. (Recorded ca. 1941)

--. Nice work if you cart get it. Black Lion BLP2460.152. (Recorded November 15, 1971)

--. Ruby, my dear. Riverside RLP12-242. (Recorded June 26, 1957)

--. Sweet Lorraine. Xanadu 107. (Recorded ca. 1941)

--. Tea for two. Riverside RLP12-209. (Recorded April 3, 1956)

REFERENCES

Balliett, Whitney. 1991. Goodbyes and other messages. New York: Oxford University Press.

Barker, Danny. 1986. A life in jazz. New York: Oxford University Press.

Bijl, Leen, and Fred Cante. 1985. Monk on records. 2nd ed. Amsterdam: Golden Age Records.

DeVeaux, Scott. 1991. Constructing the jazz tradition: Jazz historiography. Black American Literature Forum 25 (Fall): 525-560.

--. 1997. The birth of bebop: A social and musical history. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Duke, Vernon. 1932. April in Paris. New York: Harms.

--. 1981. April in Paris. In The real book. 9th ed. Syosset, NY: Real Book Press.

Gershwin, George. 1937. Nice work if you can get it. New York: Chappell and Co.

Giddins, Gary 1987. Celebrating Bird: The triumph of Charlie Parker. New York: William Morrow.

Keepnews, Orrin. 1988. The view from within: Jazz writings, 1948-1987. New York: Oxford University Press.

Murray, Albert. 1976. Stomping the blues. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Peck, Ira. 1948. The piano man who dug be-bop. PM (February 22).

Reig, Teddy, with Edward Berger. 1990. Reminiscing in tempo: The life and times of jazz hustler. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press.

Russell, Ross. 1959. Bebop. In The art of jazz, edited by Martin Williams, 187-214. New York: Oxford University Press.

Tirro, Frank. 1993. Jazz: A history. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton.

Yang, Victor. 1932. I don't stand a ghost of a chance. Philadelphia: American Academy of Music.

SCOTT DEVEAUX is Associate Professor in the McIntire Department of Music at the University of Virginia. He is series editor for the Oxford University Press Readers on American Musicians. His recent book The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History (University of California Press, 1997) has received numerous awards, including the American Book Award, ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award, and the Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological Society.

APPENDIX

Popular Songs Recorded by Monk

This appendix (extracted from Bijl and Cant 1985) lists recordings of popular songs commercially released under Monk's name but registered under another composer's copyright. It therefore does not include compositions by Monk based on harmonic progressions that are derived in whole or in part from preexisting popular songs, such as "Evidence" ("Just You, Just Me"), "In Walked Bud" ("Blue Skies"), or "Bright Mississippi" ("Sweet Georgia Brown"). The table also omits the anomalous 1955 Riverside album devoted exclusively to Ellington compositions. With the exception of the 1941 Minton's Playhouse sessions, recordings in which Monk is not the leader (e.g., playing for Charlie Parker or Dizzy Gillespie) are also omitted.

Dates in the left column show years in which the songs were published. Dates following titles in the rightmost column give the years of Monk's recordings (multiple recordings in a year not listed), with those in bold indicating solo piano performances. Dates in brackets [1941] indicate live recordings from Minton's, which are mentioned in the text.

Pub.   Title                           Monk's Recordings

1909   Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland    1971

1912   My Melancholy Baby              [1941], 1971

1924   Tea for Two                      1956, 1963
       All Alone                        1957
       The Man I Love                   1971

1925   Dinah                            1964
       Remember                         1959
       Sweet Georgia Brown             [1941]

1928   Carolina Moon                    1952
       (I Love You) Sweetheart of       1964, 1996
         All My Dreams
       Sweet Lorraine                  [1941]

1929   Just a Gigolo                    1954, 1958, 1961
                                          1962, 1963
                                          1966

       Liza                             1956, 1964
       Just You, Just Me                1948, 1956, 1964
       Honeysuckle Rose                 1956, 1964, 1965

1929   There's Danger in Your Eyes,
        Cherie                          1959
       Star Dust                       [1941]

1930   Memories of You                  1956, 1964
       Body and Soul                   [1941], 1961, 1962
       I'm Confessin'                   1964

1931   Sweet and Lovely                 1952, 1962, 1963, 1964
                                          1966
       I Surrender, Dear                1956, 1964
       Between the Devil and the
        Deep Blue Sea                   1967
       I'll Follow You                  1952

1932   April in Paris                   1947, 1957, 1961
                                          1964, 1965
       Willow, Weep for Me              1951
       You Are Too Beautiful            1956
       (I Don't Stand a) Ghost of a
         Chance                         1957
       (I'm Getting Sentimental)
        Over You                        1957, 1960, 1961, 1963
                                          1964, 1966
       (When It's) Darkness on the
         Delta                          1963

1933   Smoke Gets in Your Eyes          1954
        Don't Blame Me

1935   These Foolish Things             1963, 1964, 1970
       You Took the Words Right out     1952, 1964
        of My Heart
       Lulu's Back in Town              1964

1937   Nice Work If You Can Get It     [1941,], 1947, 1964,
                                         1971
1938   I Hadn't Anyone Till You         1964

1939   All the Things You Are           1948, 1964
       Darn That Dream                  1956, 1965, 1971

1941   Everything Happens to Me         1959, 1964, 1965

1942   Easy Street                      1968
       Lover Man                        1971

1944   I Didn't Know About You          1966

1945   I Should Care                    1948, 1957, 1964