aworks :: "new" american classical music

Bemsha Swing (1953). Thelonious Monk, Denzil Best /jam-session rules/

I don't think I've heard the John Coltrane/Don Cherry version of Monk's Bemsha Swing. It's spacious and low-key (for Coltrane anyway). Burning Ambulance:

To my ear, “Bemsha Swing” is the heart of the record, and a perfect complement to the four Ornette and inspired-by-Ornette pieces that precede it. Throughout the album, Coltrane is willing to be Cherry’s equal, never swamping the trumpeter under waves of notes (as he surely could have done) or blasting him flat with raw power. Coltrane in 1960 was still very much under the sway of Prestige jam-session rules, wherein solo statements were made in a form as strictly organized as a university debate.

Bemsha Swing (1952). Thelonious Monk/Denzil Best

lichtconlon’s posterous points to that version of Bemsha Swing by Cecil Taylor from the Sweet Sound of Jazz album. One of John Fordham's fifty great moments in jazz.

Bemusha Swing - Cecil Taylor, ...