Carmen McRae was a good friend of Monk’s, and for my tastes, she sings this song better than anyone. Her tart, unsentimental intellect matches Monk’s own approach to music perfectly. Here she is performing “Round Midnight” in 1962.

Monk wrote his biggest hit back in the late 1930s, but he didn’t have a recording contract at the time and couldn’t get anyone else interested. A few years later, however, his luck changed. His friend Bud Powell was playing piano in a band led by former Ellington Orchestra trumpet star Cootie Williams. Powell convinced Williams to record “Round Midnight” in 1944.

The record made an impact, and “Round Midnight” became Cootie Williams’ theme song. Other musicians became interested in the tune as well. Dizzy Gillespie did a recording in 1947, for which he wrote his own distinctive intro and ending.

Monk himself liked Dizzy’s intro and ending so much that he promptly began including them in his own performances of his tune.

Later in 1947, Monk finally got to record his tune for the first time.

Much as I love Monk’s own playing, this recording is an awkward one, with a lame-sounding film noir arrangement in the horns. Fortunately, Monk recorded “Round Midnight” many more times over the course of his life. He tended to play it quite a bit faster and more abstractly than other interpreters. Here’s a live version from sometime in the sixties.

Monk’s best recordings of the tune were solo piano versions. My favorite is the one on The Composer, which sadly isn’t available on YouTube. The one on Thelonious Himself is good too.

The definitive version of “Round Midnight” is the one by Miles Davis, as recorded on his 1957 album ‘Round About Midnight (a widely used alternate name for the tune.)

Miles honed this arrangement in performances for years before finally recording it. He plays Dizzy’s intro on muted trumpet, in a severely stripped-down form. His take on the melody is similarly minimalist, using many fewer notes than the original. At the end of the head at 2:40, Miles inserts a whole new section of his own invention, a shout chorus that jumps unexpectedly into major tonality, played on unmuted trumpet. The shout chorus sets up John Coltrane’s assertive and energetic tenor sax solo. Then Miles brings the mood back down with his muted take on Dizzy’s ending. This recording was a jukebox hit in black neighborhoods, and it went a long way toward cementing Miles’ iconic status in the jazz world. If you had to explain jazz to a visitor from outer space, you could do worse than this recording.

Every jazz singer has attempted “Round Midnight” at one point or another. To pick one of many great versions, here’s Ella Fitzgerald, accompanied by Oscar Peterson.

As do most singers, Ella omits the intro and ending. The most complete vocal version, and maybe the most beautiful, is by Carmen McRae again, from her highly recommended 1988 album Carmen Sings Monk.

Everything’s here: all the sections, with the melody as written and also as interpreted by Dizzy Gillespie, all with lyrics. This, as far as I’m concerned, is the last word on “Round Midnight” — at least until the next evolution.

Hip-hop might point the way forward. The intro to Luchi De Jesus‘ recording of “Round Midnight” is sampled in “A Friend” by KRS-One.

Want to try playing “Round Midnight” yourself? It’s well worth it, you’ll learn a lot about music that way. The problem is finding a decent chart. Be warned that some of the chords in the infamous Real Book version are wrong, and it also omits Dizzy’s intro and ending. A more accurate transcription can be found in Hal Leonard’s lovingly rendered Thelonious Monk Fake Book, but that chart also leaves out the intro and ending. When I did the tune with my former jazz group, I decided to just transcribe the missing sections myself. Feel free to download my chart here.

Any crucial versions I missed? Leave them in the comments.

The lead sheet writes out the head’s melody and chord progression. The specifics of accompaniment, interpretation and tempo are up to the performers.

Sometimes lead sheets specify intros and endings, but very often they don’t, and it’s up to the performers to come up with them. A few third-party intros and endings are so memorable that they become de facto parts of the original composition. For example, Dizzy Gillespie wrote such a brilliant intro and ending for Thelonious Monk’s “Round Midnight” that Monk himself used them in all of his own subsequent performances of the tune.

Big band jazz will add quite a bit of additional composition to the head-solos-head structure. There will be written parts accompanying the solos, countermelodies to the head, more elaborate intros and endings, and composed sections between solos called shout choruses. Improvisation can form the basis for a lot of these passages — horn players will improvise a background part onstage, and then if it works it’ll get written down and added to the “official” score. Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman frequently worked improvised ideas by their sidemen into their compositions (some would say they stole those ideas, since the sideman rarely got co-composer credit.)

Like Mark Catoe says, there are some through-composed jazz works. My favorite is Monk’s “Crepuscule With Nellie.”

But even within such a highly structured piece, Monk varied the delivery quite a bit from one performance to the next, especially rhythmically.

There’s been a pretty smooth continuum between through-composed, classical-sounding music and completely off-the-cuff improvisation through the history of jazz, sometimes within a single performer’s work. John Coltrane started his career playing conventional head-solos-head tunes with written intros and endings, and ended it playing completely unstructured free jazz. There was a fascinating middle period where he was playing head-solos-head music but not writing anything down, just giving verbal instructions to the band. That’s actually my favorite music of his — the long, one-chord modal tunes from the early to mid sixties. Miles Davis also ran the gamut from tightly structured big-band jazz to chaotic freeform funk, and everything in between.

Original post on Quora

To understand modes, picture a set of Scrabble tiles. Say you have seven Scrabble tiles that spell the word RESPECT. You can take the first two letters off and stick them on the end to get SPECTRE (the British spelling of specter.) In music theory terms, SPECTRE is a mode of RESPECT; conversely, RESPECT is a mode of SPECTRE.

Now imagine your Scrabble tiles spell ABCDEFG. If you treat the letters as note names, this is a scale called A natural minor. If you take the first two letters off and put them on the end, you get CDEFGAB, the C major scale. C major and A natural minor are modes of one another; learning to play one gives you the other one for free.

This post will walk you through all of the modes of C major. To find a mode, pick any red note on the diagram below and read clockwise to get the mode starting on that note.

Each mode goes with a chord, so I’ve listed those too, along with real-world examples.

C to C – Ionian mode

Ionian mode is just the regular old major scale. You only see the Greek name used in music theory textbooks.

Scale: C D E F G A B
Chord: C E G B D F A -- Cmaj7

Examples include everything from “Jingle Bells” to the William Tell Overture. See my major scale post for more.

D to D – Dorian mode

Same as the D natural minor scale, but with a natural sixth. Dorian is fabulously useful for jazz and funk.

Scale: D E F G A B C
Chord: D F A C E G B -- Dm7

“So What” by Miles Davis uses Dorian all the way through, in D on the main part and in Eb on the bridge.

The ninth, eleventh and thirteenth in D dorian are E, G and B. These notes form an E minor triad. If you play E minor and then D minor, you get the distinctive “So What” riff.

Other examples of tunes in Dorian, from Wikipedia:

• “Greensleeves”
• “Born to Be Wild“
• “Scarborough Fair”
• “Eleanor Rigby”

E to E – Phrygian mode

This mode has a distinctive flamenco vibe. It’s the same notes as E natural minor with a flat second.

Scale: E F G A B C D
Chord: E G B D F A C -- Em7(b13)

Outside of flamenco, Phrygian doesn’t get much action, but Samuel Barber uses it in his Adagio for Strings. Rightly so — with its flatted second, third, sixth and seventh, it’s pretty much the saddest of all scales.

F to F – Lydian mode

This beautiful, somewhat otherworldly scale is the F major scale with a sharp fourth.

Scale: F G A B C D E
Chord: F A C E G B D -- Fmaj7 (#11)

Lydian is great for dream and fantasy sequences. Björk uses it for “Possibly Maybe,” starting on the line “Much as I definitely enjoy solitude.”

G to G – Mixolydian mode

The same as the G major scale, but with a flat seventh.

Scale: G A B C D E F
Chord: G B D F A C E -- G7

Mixolydian is one of the defining sounds of blues and rock. Examples:

• Just about every blues tune
• “Tomorrow Never Knows,” “Day Tripper,” the “Nah nah nah nah” section of “Hey Jude” and many other songs by the Beatles
• “Sweet Home Alabama” by Lynyrd Skynyrd
• Björk again! “Big Time Sensuality”

A to A – Aeolian mode

This mode is better known as A natural minor — Aeolian is another one of those Greek names no one really uses.

Scale: A B C D E F G
Chord: A C E G B D F -- Am7

Natural minor is the basis of the whole minor-key universe and is a blog post unto itself. Use it whenever you need tragedy. Example: “Concierto de Aranjuez” by Joaquín Rodrigo (as played here by Miles Davis.)

B to B – Locrian mode

A very dark, strange scale. Like B natural minor with a flat second and fifth.

Scale: B C D E F G A
Chord: B D F A C E G -- Bm7(b5)

The flat second and fifth make Locrian very unstable, and I can’t think of any tunes based entirely on it. The main thing you need Locrian for is a minor-key chord progression that you see all the time in jazz:

Bm7(b5)  E7      Am
ii       V       i

Over Bm7(b5), you play B locrian (or A natural minor, however you prefer to think of it.) Over E7, you usually play A harmonic minor. Over Am, you can play any A minor scale of your choice.

One of my favorite jazz tunes is “Whisper Not” by Benny Golson, which is mostly made up of minor ii-V-i in various keys. Here’s the awesome Dizzy Gillespie big band arrangement:

Learning the modes

The best way to learn any music theory concept is in the context of actual music. “So What” teaches you Dorian mode better than any teacher can. That said, a good teacher can help you connect the various scales to specific pieces of music. Ideally, you should be studying songs that you already know and like.

Music theory takes a lot of memorizing, but it doesn’t need to be tedious. Even if you’re just systematically running the scales up and down, put a good drum machine beat on and try to get them to sound like music. If you’re in New York City, contact me and I’ll be happy to get you pointed in the right direction.

You might also enjoy a more general post about scales and emotions.

“Moody’s Mood” went on to inspire further analog remixing. In 1952, Eddie Jefferson wrote lyrics to Moody’s solo, and King Pleasure recorded them in 1954 with Blossom Dearie. Here’s Moody himself singing the Eddie Jefferson lyrics with Dizzy Gillespie – he sings Blossom Dearie’s part too:

Also, here’s a delightful performance of “Moody’s Mood” from the Cosby Show (sorry, no embedding.)

The vocal version of “Moody’s Mood” inspired a lot of singers, inside and outside of jazz. Jon Hendricks cites it as his central inspiration for the formation of Lambert, Hendricks & Ross. The practice of writing lyrics to jazz solos, known as vocalese, is a geeky fringe of an already geekily fringe music. But for me it has a lot of creative value beyond its hipsterish metacommentary. Artists like Lambert, Hendricks & Ross have been crucial to my deeper understanding of jazz. If you want to learn jazz improvisation, the best method is to memorize solos. It’s a heck of a lot easier to memorize them if someone writes lyrics. If the lyrics are witty and clever, like Jon Hendricks’ are, so much the better, since learning solos becomes a fun word game in addition to an act of musical scholarship.

I hear a strong connection between the virtuoso wordplay of vocalese and contemporary hip-hop. I don’t know how many hip-hop MCs were inspired by vocalese. Queen Latifah cites about “Moody’s Mood” as an influence. I assume there must be others. I know that some of the best MCs have jazz training. Rakim Allah talks about having studied jazz saxophone, which you can hear clearly in his phrasing. Vocalese certainly did a lot to steer my attention toward hip-hop. I love traditional jazz vocalists, but the material they have to work with is increasingly dated and lame. Vocalese is more hip and challenging, but it still tends towards the slang and cultural references of the fifties. Hip-hop might not have the melodic and harmonic intricacies of vocalese, but the rhythms and internal rhymes are of a piece, and hip-hop speaks more to the world I live in. I’m hoping that as time goes on, hip-hop and vocalese will converge, and we’ll have our own generation’s equivalent of “Moody’s Mood.” Let’s get to work on that, my fellow musicians.