He has two left hands,” was how one New York record store owner responded to Monk’s piano playing. Given the radical yet highly stylized characteristics of his music – which he blueprinted on his very first recordings for the Blue Note label in 1947 – Monk met with more opposition from the jazz establishment than Parker and Gillespie. In the main, bebop was a high-octane music driven by Parker and Gillespie’s virtuosic athleticism but Monk, who was the eldest of bop’s holy trinity, created his own distinctive musical universe that was defined by quirky chromatic choruses, disquieting dissonant notes, and, on the whole, much slower tempi. Monk initially rose to fame alongside alto saxophonist Charlie Parker and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie in the vanguard of the bebop movement in New York during the mid 1940s. Although he was a trailblazer who pioneered a uniquely percussive approach to the piano and developed a peculiar musical language that some found difficult to understand, his greatest achievement was writing over 70 memorable songs, several of which became jazz standards. Our chord charts include both versions.Born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, Thelonious Monk is undoubtedly one of the most important – and controversial – figures in the history of jazz. You may encounter musicians that play both of them. It is very important to know both sets of changes. The reasons for this are partly because of Miles Davis’s popular influence on the jazz scene, but also younger generations have looked to the Real Book to learn tunes which includes those changes.
Miles Davis’s version has become more popular to play in jam session situations. There is Thelonius Monk’s original changes which go:Īnd the changes that Miles Davis made popular which are:
Monk wrote the tune and told Beamon he was going to name it after him, to which he replied “Well You Needn’t.” This tune utilizes the use of dominant chords moving chromatically.Ī very important note: There are two sets of different changes to the bridge on this tune. It was written for one of Monk’s students, a singer named Charlie Beamon. “Well You Needn’t” is a tune written by Thelonius Monk in 1944.
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