Broken Body & Twisted Soul

In his solo interpretation of “Body & Soul,” Thelonious Monk deviated from the original to the point where it became a complete new composition. In the opening, he only played half of a bar of the recognizable melody and drifted off into his own “sphere” and occasionally came back to it. It drove me nuts while I was driving because I couldn’t figure out what the tune was but it has that familiar sound in it. The beauty in Monk’s style is the fractured chords and bent notes (yes he could bend notes on a piano). The way he handled the beat in his left and chords in the right is simply amazing. He’s doing two separate things at once like rubbing your belly while tapping your head.