Hello !
99% of the musicians play it wrong
Blue Monk is one of the must-know standards. A blues that gets called at every jam session, it’s also one of the first to be taught because it’s fairly simple… except 99% of the musicians play the wrong rhythm on bar 4.
As always, listen to the recording, the answers are right there, and play with it. Try to record yourself and listen back to hear what you did well and what needs to be improved.
A painter looks at her work and decide what’s next, a musician needs to listen to oneself!
In this lesson (an extract from the complete lesson, join the JVL Standards Studies membership), I want to focus on the rhythm of bars 3 and 4.
Let’s listen:
All the wrong rhythms
If you trust the Real Book or some charts you find on the internet, chances are you play the wrong rhythm in Blue Monk. Let’s look at the chart from the Real Book.
First of all, it has 3 bars per line, which is a terrible way to write music. As much as possible, try to keep 4 bars per line. This way the visual cues are in sync with the natural 4-bar phrases of music.
Now the rhythm on bar 4: it is written as a quarter note on the “and” of 2 and then an eighth note on the “and of 3. But if you listen carefully you realize that the melody lands on the second downbeat, so this chart is wrong!
Let’s look at another example, a chart I found on a Youtube tutorial. Well, again we have 3 bars per line, we know that’s not a good sign… Now on bar 4 the melody does land on the second downbeat, and many people play the melody this way. But again that is not the way Monk played the melody!
Let’s look at a third example before looking at the answer for blue monk. In this chart, well, we got rid of the problem by just not writing anything! This is kind of clever though, if you don’t play it, you don’t play it wrong!
What is the correct rhythm?
The rhythm Thelonious Monk plays is a quarter note triplet, but the problem is he plays it on the fourth beat and you can’t write a quarter note triple across the bar line.
Here I wrote the quarter note triplet version and the eighth note triplet version, on each beat of the measure. The most accurate way to write the melody is the indicated in the red rectangle:
This is a bit cumbersome and we know that swing eighth notes are really coming from those eighth note triplets so the best way to write the melody is this:
Let me show you:
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5 comments on “Blue Monk”
Here I am practicing the Rhythm exercise #2:
Check out this version I just stumbled upon! Jim Hall plays the first motif in quarter note triplets, then the phrase b in straight eights and the quarter note triplet as we saw together 🙂
Hi Alex,
Re: Blue Monk – what does subV mean?
Thanks, Diana
Hi Diana Roy! subV is for substitution of the V, you may have heard it under the term “tritone substitution”. In a nutshell, the characteristic of a dominant chord is the interval of a tritone between the third and the seventh (on G7 the interval between B and F is an augmented fourth = 3 tones = 1 tritone).
We realized that another dominant chord has the same interval with enharmonies (enharmonie is the fact that we can have the same sound but different names: the sound of the note B = Cb = A double sharp).
The other dominant chord is Db7 which has a tritone between F and Cb (that is a diminished fifth = 3 tones = tritone). Db is also a tritone away from G.
This is a very commonly used device to add momentum. On D-7 | G7 | C∆ we very often play D-7 | Db7#11 | C∆ or if you have two bars of a dominant chord you can add the subV, for instance on the bridge of a rhythm changes:
E7 | E7 | A7 | A7 | D7 | D7 | G7 | G7 | becomes E7 | Bb7 | A7 | Eb7 | D7 | Ab7 | G7 | Db7 |
The subV are always with a #11
You can search the videos where I mention this topic on that page: https://jazzvideolessons.net/search-videos/
Just type some keywords and it will bring you right to the moment in the video where I say these words.
Thanks Alex!