Soloists have no choice but to grip the rollercoaster tightly, but they uncover fascinating secrets along the way. But the music that emerges is still extraordinary: a strange and slow melody that stumbles upon itself before-surprise!-relaunching at twice the speed, only to grind to a near halt again for the next chorus. The story goes that the band played take after unsatisfactory take until producer Orrin Keepnews ended up splicing together a usable one. Look no further than the leadoff title track, “Brilliant Corners,” to hear the kinds of harmonic, rhythmic, and formal demands that Monk’s music could entail. There was something about Monk’s thorny writing that challenged tenor players and brought them closer to realizing their own visions as improvisers. Rollins had made a breakthrough sideman performance with Bud Powell in 1949, and a year or so after this 1956 session, Monk would form a brief but seismic alliance with another great emerging tenor of the time, John Coltrane. Brilliant Corners is one of just a few Monk recordings to feature the pianist-composer in a mentor role to Sonny Rollins, then an emerging tenor saxophone great.
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