Ethan Hein on two classic tunes by Thelonious Monk: "Straight, No Chaser" and "Rhythm-a-Ning"

http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2021/straight-no-chaser/

Since I am a Monk fan I could not resist linking to some of Ethan Hein's recent blogging. Since he chose two of my favorite Monk tunes I kinda have to write something. :)  

Something that strikes me about this one is that, if you make a point of playing it without any swing at all, you can still hear how thoroughly Monk's piece draws on ragtime rhythmic phrasing.  You can literally see it in the first measure, which has fourth eighth notes spanning the measure but with the fourth and fifth eighth notes tied together on that D natural. 

When you add swing into a performance the next thing you'll notice is that because of the shortening of weak beat eighth notes it becomes more apparent that the core riff and the extended riff still both hit D natural in such a way that the E flat in the extended phrase leads to D flat, in other words one of the key elements that makes this Monk composition tricky (but fun, of course) is that despite the 4/4 meter the core melodic riff and its derivations keep behaving as if they're in 3/4.  So there's a persistently polymetric pattern going on within the head tune. No matter what high point of the ascending riff we're listening to the third or the fourth degree ornamentation of the third (whichever, major or minor0 never lands on a strong beat or even on the strong half of a weak beat ... except for the D flat at the end of the "shortened phrase".  

Even in jazz, I am guessing, that E flat can be thought of as an apoggiatura, wherea non-chord tone on a strong beat leads to a tone that is in the chord, whether the D is natural or flat here doesn't much matter since in blues you could play split-third chords until the end of the song and that's fine. In relationship to the basic riff both the E flat and the D flat are interpolations that, as Hein has pointed out, produce the extended riff. The opposite of an interpolative extension would be telescoping, at least as I was taught compositional terms.  So the first four bars of the song would be

basic riff, interpolative expansion, basic riff, basic riff, telescopic diminution

When the second extended riff appears above the dominant chord it appears on beat 2 rather than beat 1 (or 4 as has generally happened so far, excepting the B flat punching in at beat 3 in the truncated basic riff). 

If we use the D natural as the base line from which to map rhythmic arrival points for, well, D natural, then what happens, with or without swing, is that the arrival points create the effect, across the 4/4 meter of:

3+3+2+3+3+2 but the cumulative effect sounds like

3+5 then 3+3+2

across the first four bars.

At the subdominant chord point the D natural is reached on the weak half of beat 3. The E flat and D flat part of that passage reinforces that D flat is the target note, obviously, but the effect is a rhythmic mirror, per Hein's analysis, a return of the extended phrase length. Remembering that the opening F natural of the basic riff is an anacrusis lets us regard it as the END of the basic riff as well as the beginning, which helps elucidate the effect of the metrical pivoting I've outlined above. Treating the F as an anacrusis also means that if we use B flat as the formal entrance of the riff it becomes clearer that  what keeps the rhythm of the melody interesting is how the riff is used to continuously break up the stability of the prevailing meter.

3+5/3+3+2/1/3+3+3+7+4+4

That enumeration won't make sense unless you've looked at the score in the original post.  That /1/ stands in for the fact that the extended riff has the B flat arrive on beat 2 of measure 5. The counting of the basic and extended form of the riffs is, I think, interrupted by that jolt of a rest during which the riff doesn't arrive where we might have expected it to arrive on the subdominant harmony.  It also means that in the second half of the blues form that Monk is going to bring back something "like" the secondary rag/clave 3+3+2 rhythmic grouping for the phrasing of the basic and extended or telescoped riff, but it's now landing a beat later. The chromatic run is where (see "+7+" above, Monk uses the dominant that would traditionally show up in blues as the space within which to chromatically embellish what turns out, after all, to still be the F natural anacrusis to the return of, aha!, the basic riff! Only at the end of the 12 bars does Monk finally grant us the riff in a form that completes a full measure of 4/4 without lurching off as if it wanted to literally waltz away against the prevailing meter.  

It's elegantly composed even if you play the whole thing without the slightest bit of swing.  It also only works the way it does because Monk had so thoroughly mastered sustaining a groove that he could constantly have the arrival point of the ascending blues riff showing up on the weak halves of weak beats throughout a 12-measure composition and have it both sustain the established groove and yet constantly subvert the meter until the last two bars of the form. 

http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2021/rhythm-a-ning/

Because I watched so very many episodes of Blue's Clues with somebody many years ago it's hard for me not to hear this Monk tune without thinking of Steve going "skidoo" to find another clue with Blue.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgrMIYQfXlk

And, yeah, I saw Blue's Big Musical Movie, which had Ray Charles involved.  I gotta say, as kids' shows go, Blue's Clues generally had better than average music for its genre, and I took it for granted (perhaps without good reason) that the music direction team knew a lot of Monk tunes.