Thelonious Monk has already had two at-bats during Fifty Weeks of Jazz, neither of which (I'm sorry to say) terribly excited me. Moreover, while we've heard from many of the greatest female jazz vocalists of all time, I still find myself more often reaching for instrumental albums. So I approached Carmen Sings Monk—which, unsurprisingly, features Carmen McRae singing vocal covers of Monk tracks—with some trepidation. But after having spent a week with the album, I can only imagine the curt response McRae might've had for my initial hesitation: "Well, You Needn't."

Yep, this one's a certified banger. But that's a bit perplexing: we've heard some of these tracks directly from Monk before (such as "Monk's Dream" and "Ugly Beauty"¹)—they didn't fully enchant me then; what's different this time around? This is one case where the obvious answer happens to be the correct one: I think I just prefer McRae's pipes to Monk's plonking. I had previously assumed that there was something about Monk's compositional style that didn't jibe with me, but McRae quickly disproved that. At the risk of seeming unsophisticated², McRae's greatest success is in making Monk's melodies catchy to me: musical motifs that I would have been hard-pressed to quote before have become phrases hummed while ambling about. While Monk's playing is frequently described as "angular" and "percussive," McRae is lively, witty, and charming. The liner notes describe McRae as a "consummate storyteller," and I'm inclined to agree. For some singers, I get the sense that lyrics are arbitrary phonemes conjured into existence solely to limit the listener's daydreaming—not so with McRae. She has a knack for spinning the words into one-sided conversations, creating performances that are certainly exceptional musically, and even edge towards becoming dramatic works in their own right.

This is also an album with some serious depth—I knew I was keen on it overall when I realized that my favourite track had shifted around several times. I came into this thinking "Suddenly" (aka "In Walked Bud") would be the easy winner, but it didn't take long before "It's Over Now" (aka "Well You Needn't") climbed to the top, and "Man, That Was a Dream" (aka "Monk's Dream") still isn't far behind.

Oh right; I haven't yet explained those weird duplicate titles and "akas." Even though each track on this album is a cover of a Monk composition, the titles here are totally distinct from the originals (e.g., "In Walked Bud" is called "Suddenly" on this album, even though they're clearly the same song) This confused me, and the explanation from the liner notes—"the reason for these title changes is simply insistence by the music publishers"—failed to sate my curiosity. So here's your mini-lesson on intellectual property law: in general, you can't copyright the title of a creative work; if you want to call your nü jazz album Kind of Blue, so be it. However, adding lyrics to an existing instrumental track (as McRae is doing here) creates a new "derivative work" that must be blessed by the original rights holder. Clearly the rights holders of Monk's compositions approved in this case (otherwise we wouldn't have this album), but presumably only on the condition of changing the titles. Why would they bother to ask for that? Alas, simply to please the bean counters: having distinct titles makes tracking performances/royalties/etc. simpler and heads off any ambiguity. While these revised titles have largely functional origins, they also seem to be thematically cohesive; I found myself sliding them around like those poetry magnets. So join me in sticking it to the suits with an exercise in found poetry:

GET IT STRAIGHT

SUDDENLY

IT'S OVER NOW

LOOKING BACK

MAN, THAT WAS A DREAM

HOW I WISH…

YOU KNOW WHO

LISTEN TO MONK

DEAR RUBY

LITTLE BUTTERFLY

MONKERY'S THE BLUES

STILL WE DREAM

ROUND MIDNIGHT

Favourite track: It's Over Now