Thelonius Monk - Blue Sphere - Piano Sheet Music + PDF and MIDI file
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- Опубліковано 19 вер 2021
- A sheet music transcription of Blue Sphere by Thelonius Monk.
PDF etc. can be obtained thru www.buymeacoffee.com/ElektrikHob or the usual
DropBox link if you've already donated. Please click on SHOW MORE (just below) for more info.
The audio is Thelonius Monk himself playing on a session recorded 15th Nov. 1971 at Chappell Studios, London. The complete session was released as the ’Something in Blue’ album in 1972.
Scoring is guess what… Sibelius 7.5!
This was another commission for Eric B (thanks Eric 🙂) and was fun to do for a change as it’s almost the total antithesis of Tony’s writing/playing!!
Improvised & devil-may-care (yet highly skilled & musical) are what come to mind when I listen to TM. Of course, TB is also highly skilled & musical but in a very different way! 🙂
Some performance notes:
First thing to note is that in Bars 1-24 and 85-108, the left-hand (LH) often has lone quavers (and occasional crotchets) all over the place while other notes are being held; this is due to TM's playing style.
This means I either had to score them as one 'voice' with lots of ties all over the place (yuck!) or, as I've done here, score them as a second voice.
Doing it this way means that there should be lots of 2nd-voice rests (so that each voice has the required number of beats per bar like in bars 100 & 104) but, to my eyes, that looked pretty messy too so I've hidden all these 2nd-voice rests.
Hopefully this won't cause a problem as all the 2nd-voice notes still line up in the right place.
Wherever there are right-hand (RH) grace notes (bars 14, 16, 29, 30 etc.), these are meant to be extremely short. i.e. played almost simultaneously with the note that follows.
It should be noted that I've ignored any LH 'grace' notes as I'm pretty sure they were just slips...
'*' notes are where I've 'corrected' what was played in the LH to what I believe TM intended to play... Of course, I can't be certain of this as TM was renowned for playing unusual notes when he was going for it (like he does towards the end!) so I'm also including (below) the notes that he actually played (numbers are bar numbers):
39 : G 56 : A 67 : G 78 : G
Bars 79, 80 and culminating in the '+' in bar 81.
Having seen a few of his live performances, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that he was beginning to get a bit frustrated with the LH here what with the accompaniment perhaps not going quite as he would have liked, so it feels like he maybe just gave a bit of a 'clump' at the beginning of bar 81; almost like a reset!
This might also explain the rather unusual (compared with the rest of the piece) next section (bars 85-96).
Or, more likely, it could just be that, in these penultimate 12 bars, he was trying to figure out how to get to the main parallel 6ths of the final section...
To sum it up, I feel like I understand Tony Banks' way of composing and playing reasonably well after 45 years of transcribing & playing his material.
However, Thelonius Monk is a completely different kettle of fish!! 😉
Please read the info (SHOW MORE above) to find out "why...??!!" 😂
This will present quite a challenge! Very different from Tony B. who is skilled in other ways. I love Art Tatum, Oscar Peterson and Fats Waller and the pianist who authored this piece! I must say this was a pleasant surprise to see here! I'll give it a shot!
I must say this will present quite a challenge! This was a surprise to see upon coming here to UA-cam. I agree about the difference in songwriting between TM & TB but they're both great within their genres. I've always loved the old traditional off the wall Jazz by TM, Fats Waller, Oscar Peterson and Art Tatum to name a few! I'll take a crack at this even though it's not something I've excelled at.
next time may you do can utility and the coastliners?
I've been asked to do that a couple of times but I'm really not sure that it can be successfully transcribed for solo piano...
I may take another look sometime but I won't be doing it in the near future I'm afraid.
@@ElektrikHob thats ok, have your time, we know that you can do a masterpiece like every time
@@nicomoi9216 Thanks! 🙂