Thelonious Monk – Brilliant Corners (1957)

What an opening 3 seconds

[Album 571/1001]

There’s a park in Napanee, new in 2017, named Rotary Park.

Though I am not being compensated in any way by the Greater Napanee region for saying this, the park is fantastic.

There’s a swing on a roller coaster track, a splash pad, a couple of huge slides…we’ve made the 30 minute drive a few times and the kids really enjoy it.

In one corner of the park, in a particularly brilliant design feature, there’s a pair of xylophone/vibraphone-esque percussion instruments.

But instead of being noisy, the sound is somehow always somewhat muted, regardless of how aggressively the bars are struck by mallet-wielding youth.

And cleverly, they’ve designed this particular idiophone to always sound pleasing to the ear; semi-tones have been removed, regardless of the combination of notes, they inevitably sound nice together.

Which, for a public park, where the young musicians haven’t necessarily enrolled at the Juilliard yet, is a design feature the rest of the park patrons appreciate 99.99% of the time.

Except of course, on the rare occasion when an aspiring park musician tries to recreate that delicious dissonance from the opening notes of Brilliant Corners.

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It’s just not the same without the dissonance

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I love a good cringe-worthy note.

The chorus of Joni Mitchell’s My Old Man.

The third note in the original Nine Inch Nails version of Hurt.

The opening few seconds of Brilliant Corners.

Talk about immediately getting my undivided attention!

Now, of course, I still had to dutifully listen to the full album a couple of times.

But it was more just to confirm what I already knew that I liked about Thelonious Monk.

He had me at the opening dissonance.

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Fantastic playground!*

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…..

Verbalize the Positive

One of my friends (and weekly quiz participant) Brian helped design the aforementioned Napanne park. Well designed Brian!

*And I’d be doing a disservice to my students if I didn’t acknowledge the “highlight reel” nature of this video. I chose to document & share the playground fun, rather than documenting & sharing the tantrums & fussing from earlier that afternoon. So the clips are unrepresentative of the full day, absolutely, but the swing was just too fantastic to go un-shared 😀