"‘ROUND MIDNIGHT" (1944)

The "High Priest of Bebop," Thelonious Monk, composed the most recorded jazz standard written by a jazz musician, "‘Round Midnight. Even though it is his best-known composition, he was not the first to record it. Charles "Cootie" Williams, long-time trumpeter with the Duke Ellington band, and his orchestra recorded it first in 1944 and used it as their theme song. In 1946 Dizzy Gillespie made an arrangement for his big band in which he added the introduction and cadenza that have become standard to the song. Monk finally recorded the song in November of 1947 in his first session as leader on the Blue Note Records label, and used an altered version of Gillespie’s introduction in his own recording. In 1955 one of the most famous performances in the history of the Newport Jazz Festival and in the history of "‘Round Midnight" was by Miles Davis; his electrifying solo performance began the festival. Davis had battled drug addiction for several years, managing to overcome it, but it had damaged his career as a rising jazz star. After this comeback performance he re-emerged on the jazz scene, forming his famous sextet and landing a recording contract with Columbia Records; his Newport performance started "‘Round Midnight" on its journey to becoming one of the best known and most recorded jazz ballads of all time.
In 1949 Bernie Hanighen added lyrics to "‘Round Midnight" and singer Jackie Paris made the first vocal recording. Although nearly unknown to jazz fans today, in the 1950s and 1960s Paris was well respected by other musicians as an uncompromising jazz artist who hadn’t sold out to pop music. He was bassist Charles Mingus’ favorite vocalist, for whom Mingus wrote several songs, and he was the only singer to travel with the Charley Parker Quintet. Will Friedwald, writing in the Village Voice, described the testimonial written by comedian Lenny Bruce, with whom Paris had shared a bill for a few months in 1959. Bruce wrote the following, "(My last gig in) New York was a gas, and the biggest thrill was working with Jackie Paris… I know he could be a star. I've never seen a singer that could talk and command the audience attention like this kid, except Sinatra or Dean Martin, and they talk about booze and broads. This kid [actually Bruce and Paris were both 33 at the time] is a hip Pat Boone." A 2005 film, ‘Tis Autumn: The Search for Jackie Paris, tried to get at the mystery of why lasting fame was denied to Paris, settling on a combination of bad luck, mismanagement and his own intractable ego. However, at the time his reputation was such that he was selected by record producer Leonard Feather and, presumably, by Monk himself, to introduce the now standard lyrics of "‘Round Midnight." Variations on the original lyrics have been recorded as well; in Carmen McRae’s 1988 album Carmen Sings Monk she sang additional verses written by Jon Hendricks that were stitched onto the original lyrics.
In 1986 a critically acclaimed Warner Brothers film, ‘Round Midnight, starred Dexter Gordon as a fictitious expatriate tenor saxophone player living in Paris. Although the film borrowed its name from Monk’s composition, which was included on the soundtrack of the film along with another Monk tune, "Rhythm-a-Ning," it wasn’t related overtly to the song.
As with so many areas of Thelonious Monk’s life, mystery shrouds his writing of "‘Round Midnight." Harry Colomby, who became Monk’s manager in 1955, said that Monk had written a first version of "‘Round Midnight", titled "Grand Finale," as early as 1936 when he was eighteen years old . However, others say that Monk wrote "‘Round Midnight" in the early 1940s when he was playing at Minton’s Playhouse in New York City. Henry Minton, the club owner and one of the first black jazz entrepreneurs, had the idea of holding nightly after hours jam sessions at which young black musicians could escape the regimentation of white-dominated swing bands and work out their own musical innovations in front of an audience. He hired Teddy Hill, a former bandleader, to organize a music policy that would promote the club. To attract up and coming young musicians, Hill hired an in-house rhythm section with whom they could jam for free; the club offered good, cheap food and on Monday nights dinner was offered gratis to established musicians to induce them to sit in on the jam sessions. When Hill hired pianist Monk and avant-garde drummer Kenny Clarke for the in-house band, the musical nucleus of what was to become, as Thomas Fitterling describes in his book Thelonious Monk: His Life and Music, the "eye of the bebop hurricane" was in place. Barry Farrell in his 1964 Time Magazine cover story about Monk said, "All the best players of the time would drop by to sit in at Minton's. Saxophonist Charlie "Bird" Parker, Trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, Drummer Kenny Clarke and Guitarist Charlie Christian were all regulars and, in fitful collaboration with them, Monk presided at the birth of bop. His playing was a needling inspiration to the others. Rhythms scrambled forward at his touch, the oblique boldness of his harmonies forced the horn players into flights the likes of which had never been heard before. "The Monk runs deep," Bird would say, and with some reluctance Monk became "the High Priest of Bebop." The name of the new sound, Monk now says, was a slight misunderstanding of his invention; "I was calling it bipbop, but the others must have heard me wrong."
Another mystery is the role Cootie Williams played in the writing of "‘Round Midnight." Although Williams received full credit as co-composer on the copyright, the degree to which he actually contributed is not known. One explanation was that Monk built the tune from a phrase played by Williams, another that Williams used his own B section in the recording so he could claim royalties. But, according to Colomby, Williams wanted to record and publish the composition, and he offered Monk $300 as an advance. It may have been part of the agreement that he would be listed as co-composer. At that time it wasn’t uncommon for the bandleader to be included in the song credits in exchange for recording it.
A final question involves the title; the song also has been known as "‘Round About Midnight." Orrin Keepnews, producer for Monk’s recordings on the Riverside Record label, said that although he never heard a direct comment from Monk regarding the two titles, all the Monk recordings with which he was involved bore the title "‘Round Midnight," per Monk’s instructions. The second title may have come from a 1957 Miles Davis album entitled "‘Round About Midnight" that included a cover of "‘Round Midnight."
Monk’s compositions attracted favorable attention from the Minton Playhouse clientele and the club’s regular players liked them because their difficult harmonies kept "unqualified" players from jumping in at the jam sessions. In Scott DeVeaux’s book the Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History, jazz guitarist and author Danny Barker described the scene at Minton’s when Monk began to play, " [Monk] generally started playing strange introductions going off, I thought to outer space, hell knows to where…Somewhere in Monk’s intro there was the melody of the song to be played. In Minton’s there was complete quiet: very little talking, no glasses clinking, no kinds of noises. [Note: This is contradicted by the few existing recordings, which contain a good deal of background noise.] Everybody intense in observing and figuring out the music and the behavior of the players, especially of the musicians who dared to jump into the arena. Those who dared and played were now free to talk and join the small but gradually building bebop fraternity." Monk, with his black beret, goatee and dark glasses, became the prototype for the bopper image and its reputation for a subversive and anti-establishment outlook.
Orrin Keepnews summarized the paradoxical relationship between Monk and his most famous song: "‘Round Midnight" could easily be described as the national anthem of jazz....But there is a remarkable irony in its popularity, which surely must have pleased the supremely nonconformist Thelonious: this universally loved ballad, most beautiful of jazz songs, is the legacy of one of the leaders of the bebop revolution, a pianist whose work was generally regarded as harsh, angular, and quite frighteningly difficult."