Interesting note about this new two-disc item, Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane: The Complete 1957 Riverside Recordings, which combines most of the music from two of my favorite discs: Monk’s Music (sextet with Coltrane and Coleman Hawkins) and Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane (quartet with just Coltrane).
“Ruby, My Dear,” one of Monk’s best songs and one of the finest ballads in the literature, appears as a Hawkins feature on Monk’s Music, and as a Coltrane feature on the quartet disc. On the new package, the two versions appear back-to-back. The Trane version is in mono. The bassist on both versions is Wilbur Ware.
The major contrast, of course, is between the two saxophonists. Hawkins came to eminence before bebop; his tone is thick with vibrato. Trane, in ’57, was already laying the groundwork for some of the most advanced concepts of the post-bop era. He plays with no vibrato.
But there’s something else to note here. On the Hawkins version, Wilbur Ware, the bassist, is completely lost. He hits the wrong root notes through much of the take, and it sounds unintentional, like he’s trying to get through it by ear. He probably wasn’t given time to learn the tune. He’s in far better shape on the Coltrane version, recorded the following month. But he’s still hesitant in places, especially at the very end of the form.
Ware is an incredible player, don’t get me wrong: He appears on Sonny Rollins’s A Night at the Village Vanguard, Vols. 1 & 2, one of the epochal tenor trio documents, recorded just a few months after the Monk/Coltrane sessions — and just a few weeks before the Monk/Coltrane Carnegie Hall concert, a recording of which recently came out on Blue Note. (Ahmed Abdul-Malik is the bassist on that, not Ware.)
Ware died in Philadelphia in 1979, one day after his 56th birthday.
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