I have “Bemsha Swing” on the brain for no special reason. It’s one of Thelonious Monk’s most persistent earworms, and every once in a while it wakens from its dormant state to occupy my music circuitry for a week or two or three. When I am jamming on the guitar, my fingers constantly find their way into it, and I walk around humming or whistling it too. I like to think of my relationship with the tune as more symbiotic than parasitic, but either way, the tune is well and truly embedded in me. I don’t know how it was able to take such firm root, but maybe over the course of writing the post, some ideas will suggest themselves.
Monk co-wrote “Bemsha Swing” with drummer Denzil Best. KUVO explains that they originally copyrighted it under the title “Bimsha Swing”, referring to “Bimshire”, a nickname for Denzil Best’s family home of Barbados. Monk first recorded it in 1952 with Gary Mapp on bass and Max Roach on drums.
Shame on Prestige Records for not bothering to tune the piano! But this happened to Monk a lot in the early days. I wonder how much of his style was driven by the need to make out-of-tune pianos sound good? He always managed to make them sing. In a Yamaha showroom, I saw a demo of their Spirio system, where they had extracted the piano notes from a video of Monk playing live, and they were being played back on a Disklavier. It was uncanny to hear that distinctive Monk-ian touch on a perfectly in-tune brand new grand piano right there in the room with me.