The odds are (pretty) good that Thelonious would not have cared for this version. Back in the sixties, I read a Downbeat “Blindfold” column that featured Monk. It was a long-running feature that would have a prominent jazz musician listen to records without knowing who was playing and have him (or her) comment on them. Monk would only agree to listen to recordings of his own compositions, and I’m pretty sure he wasn’t enthusiastic about any of them, but his most emphatic response was to a cut featuring Oscar: Monk simply turned away in disgust and refused to say anything.
That being said, this isn’t bad Peterson. Peterson could play very well, especially when playing a composer he enjoyed, like Gershwin, but he could also play some brutally fake “funky blues,” that sound, well, like a white boy’s idea of jazz, and, fortunately, we don’t get any of that. In his early years he seemed to have worked as an accompanist about 12 hours a day, 7 days a week at Verve, and then became far more commercially successful than Monk. If you look at the comments to virtually any of his videos currently available on YouTube, you’ll see he’s still enormously admired, particularly for his technique, now more than a decade after his death.
Back in the day, jazz critics, especially the purists, often looked down on Peterson, both for his popularity and his “funky blues”. Peterson gives a spoken introduction to this performance, displaying his own pride in his technique, which was in fact far more polished than Monk’s, though the silky elegance is often irrelevant to Monk’s composition—superfluous little runs and flourishes that Peterson probably would play a dozen times a night at a club date.
“He may be playing Monk but he still sounds like Tatum,” snickers one Jacob Zimmerman, meaning all technique and no substance, à la the legendary Art Tatum, which earned him the reply “Genau , so sesshaft Herr Zimmermann und zu hören. Vielleicht denken Sie an einen Haarschnitt,” which translates (roughly) as ‘Exactly , so sedentary Mr. Zimmermann and to hear. Maybe you're thinking of a haircut.” Well, if you value elegance over feeling, this is the take for you. As for me, I probably need a Haarschnitt. File this one under inessential but fun.
