CD: Thelonious Monk: Criss Cross

Anyone who ever witnessed this unique pianist and composer's famous stage antics (stumbling around when not soloing like a man in a dark room, or revolving on the spot like a battered weathervane) soon appreciated that these were not the self-conscious devices of a showman but indicative of mental equipment only loosely plugged into conventional life on this planet. Yet Monk's music was certainly not divorced from the vibrant life of the jazz world that raised him. He is widely regarded as the jazz composer whose work is least affected by any traditions other than the music's own.

Much of the material here is drawn from Monk's Blue Note sessions of the late 1940s and early 1950s, but it begins in 1941 with the famous live takes from Minton's Playhouse in New York, the hothouse of the emerging bebop movement. Those early tracks sound more like the swing that bebop was detaching itself from than a musical revolution, but in guitarist Charlie Christian's harmonically daring solos the seeds of the new growth are clear - and though Monk himself is distantly recorded, his characteristic mix of percussive chording and spiky stride-derived phrasing is already distinctive. There are some 1944 takes with Coleman Hawkins' band (one of the most prominent swing-era players to get the point of bop) and then a selection of wonderful Blue Note takes from 1947 to 1951. On Thelonious, the pianist doggedly jams repeated single-note patterns against restlessly shifting chords and grumbling low-register sounds. He is almost vivaciously bluesy on Well You Needn't, and themes like Epistrophy, Misterioso, Evidence and Straight No Chaser sound as contemporary as ever. There are far more comprehensive packages of this Monk era available of course, but as a starter it's invaluable.