After doing “Straight, No Chaser,” I’m now diving into another one of Monk’s greatest hits, “Rhythm-a-Ning,” at the request of Christian Gentry. Monk’s take on the ubiquitous “I Got Rhythm” chord progression has a lot in common with “Straight, No Chaser.” They both use the most generic materials possible to produce something that still sounds fresh seventy years after they were composed. The melodies are catchy enough to whistle in the proverbial bathtub, but when you dig in intellectually, they reveal endless weirdness.
The name “Rhythm-a-Ning” is probably a playful mispronunciation of “rhythm-ing”, and that deliberate stumble sums up the tune’s aesthetic. My favorite recording is the relatively sedate version that Monk did in 1963. But this is only “sedate” by Monk standards. Listen to his comping behind Charlie Rouse’s tenor sax solo; no one else plays like that.
Also, listen to the beginning of Monk’s solo at 2:02. Rather than starting on Bb like he’s supposed to, he leaps unexpectedly out to F#7. He then chases quickly around the circle of fifths through B7, E7, A7, D7, G7, C7 and F7 to finally land back home on Bb four bars later. The effect is like stepping out a window, but then drifting gently down to a safe landing on the sidewalk.
Here’s a live version from the BBC. Monk’s comping behind Charlie Rouse is even crazier.
Monk also recorded this strange alternative version with the Jazz Messengers.
Here’s another alternative version with Gerry Mulligan that I don’t especially like.
The arpeggio riff from the first four bars was apparently common property among jazz musicians before Monk wrote his tune around it. Mary Lou Williams used it in her 1936 arrangement of “Walking and Swinging.” Listen at 1:13.
Al Haig used the riff for “Opus Caprice.”
And Sonny Stitt used it for “Symphony Hall Swing.”
Wenatchee the Hatchet points out that Blue’s Clues also quotes this riff:
Here’s a chart that draws heavily on the one in the superb Thelonious Monk Fake Book.
Here’s the A section as visualized in Ableton Live, run through the GIMP polar coordinates filter.
Here are the B section and final A section in polar coordinates:
And here’s the whole tune.
You might also enjoy hyperspace view.
Let’s dig into this melody. Monk follows the opening arpeggio riff with a nifty bit of rhythmic displacement. In measures four and five, he plays a repeated three-note riff: F, G, A-flat, F, G, A-flat. Then, in measures six and seven, he plays the riff again, but he shifts it two beats later, so the accents fall differently. This kind of displacement is a classic Monk-ism. You can hear similar ideas in “Blue Monk,” “Ba-lue Bolivar Ba-lues-are,” “Criss-Cross,” “Four In One,” “Epistrophy,” “In Walked Bud,” “Played Twice,” “Well You Needn’t,” and uncountably many of his improvised solos.
The B section of “Rhythm-a-Ning” is based on the whole tone scale, which Monk used more often and more creatively than any other jazz artist. Debussy used a lot of whole tone scale too, and there are some overlaps between his harmonic approach and Monk’s. But Monk deploys those harmonies over very different rhythms. We’ll get to that. In the meantime, here are the notes in the B-flat whole tone scale–click the image to play it on the aQWERTYon.
These same six pitches also comprise five other whole tone scales: C, D, E, G-flat, and A-flat. Really, all of them are the same scale. I call this collection of pitches the yin scale.
The grey notes in the diagram form six other whole tone scales: B, C-sharp, D-sharp, F, G and A. I call this the yang scale. A little logic shows that the yin and yang scales are the only two possible whole tone scales.
In jazz, you mostly use the whole tone scale on dominant seventh chords. The duality of the yin and yang scales makes them especially useful for playing the rhythm changes bridge: two bars each of D7, G7, C7, and F7.
- On D7: Play the yin scale for an implied D9(b5 #5) sound.
- On G7: Play the yang scale for an implied G9(b5 #5) sound.
- On C7: Play the yin scale for an implied C9(b5 #5) sound.
- On F7: Play the yang scale for an implied F9(b5 #5) sound.
You can improvise over any string of dominant chords going around the circle of fifths by just alternating the yin and yang scales. In the recording at the top of this post, remember how Monk starts his solo with that crazy substitute progression that starts on F#7 and then cycles back home to Bb? It’s not as difficult to play as it sounds. You play the yin scale on F#7, the yang scale on B7, the yin scale on E7, the yang scale on A7, the yin scale on D7, the yang scale on G7, and so on, simply alternating back and forth.
This idea is easy to misuse. If you just take a whole tone riff and alternate it up and down chromatically, listeners will intuit that you’re mindlessly executing a formula, and they will lose interest fast. Monk uses a lot of circle of fifths progressions, and often alternates the yin and yang scales over them, but he never plays predictable patterns. Instead, he trips and stumbles and staggers through the meter, yet somehow he always lands precisely where he intends to. In other words, he uses organic and asymmetrical rhythms to transform a dry, academic-sounding concept into the funkiest music you’ve ever heard.
Okay, so, back to the “Rhythm-a-Ning” bridge. Measures 17 and 18 are a fragment of the yin scale over D7. When the chord changes to G7 in measure 19, Monk shifts the F-sharp at the end of the riff to F natural, implying the yang scale. On the C7 in measures 21 and 22, he plays the yin scale again. But when the chord changes to F7 in measure 23, Monk keeps playing the yin scale. This is the “wrong” scale! The E and A-sharp are teeth-grindingly dissonant against F7. In measure 24, Monk finally resolves to the expected F7 chord, but with a classic Monk-ian cluster voicing that hammers out B naturals in octaves. It’s so wrong, it’s right!
In general, this is not much agreement between the melody of this tune and the underlying chord changes. Apart from the end of the bridge, the notes don’t conflict with the chords, exactly, but they don’t necessarily imply them either. If you were handed this melody and told to harmonize it without knowing what Monk had intended, there’s no way you’d think to put rhythm changes under it. Usually when Monk writes a melody that only obliquely relates to the underlying chords, it sounds conspicuously far out: think of “Evidence” or “Criss-Cross.” But “Rhythm-a-Ning” doesn’t sound far out at all. It almost sounds like a nursery rhyme. Intellect says that it should sound weird, but intuition says it makes perfect sense. Anybody can match up chords and scales once they’ve put in some time with a jazz theory textbook. Not everyone can deliberately mismatch chords and scales and have it sound good, though.
It’s a mystery where Monk got all his harmonic ideas from. I’m sure he listened to plenty of late Romantic and modern classical music and drew ideas from it, but I believe that the core of his harmonic concept comes straight from the blues. In the blues, you often have melodies that don’t “match” the harmony. You have major and minor colliding, unresolved tritones that nevertheless sound at rest, and blue notes that are “out of tune” by Western standards. When I listen to Monk play a more European-sounding progression like rhythm changes, I hear him infusing it with the spirit of the blues.