Monk's piano part on Miles Davis' Bemsha Swing

Charles Chen is currently working on classic piano comping; you may have already seen his collaborations on Bud Powell's and Fats Waller's (amazing job!). He contacted me to work on the tunes Monk recorded as a member of Miles Davis' band.

Bemsha Swing is a tune composed by Monk and Denzil Best.

I never realized how short the form of tune is (16-bars AABA, each section is 4-bars long!), and how many chords there is in this tune, two per bars. It’s very dense, and there isn’t much room for new ideas: indeed, Monk mostly plays the same voicing again and again, with subtle rhythmic and spacing variations. What a machine!

His solo is perfectly Monkish.

PDF, 15 pages

Video