Description

In this video Duck Baker teaches "Blue Monk" by the great Thelonious Monk.

Transcript

How to Play Blue Monk with Duck Baker Oh we have Blue Monk, Steve basically pointed out that, a lot of monk’s tunes were recorded and it didn’t have names for them. And we were sort of there's Dane, they put names on these tunes. So a lot of times there were named by producers, a tune like Monks Mood was certainly not a name by him nor was Blue Monk. I'm very sure. In fact, there was one record that came out that had all these titles like Think of One and Let’s Call This was obviously when they asked them, what the tuning was called then that’s what he told them something like that. In the case of Blue Monk, I guess they had to the part where they’d stop even asking him, so they just came up with this. In any case, a logical enough name for the tune, that’s a 12 bar of blues in the key of E, something that the chorus says a very popular for finger pickers to do anyway and I would stress that the jazz players of any strive, are you really do want to spend sometime learning to play 12 bar blues tune, the same thing that Charlie Parker said years ago. In fact, when he said, all you have to know how to play jazzes, blues, and I got rhythm, rhythm and blues which of course got placed and got picked up and turned around where even got his genre of music called rhythm in blues which isn’t bad but never mind. But look at what we’re going to do here and we start with this sort of simplest form or basis of improvisation. This is really not a tune that’s going to take too much dispositions on the left hand. I don’t think it would give you any trouble to the speaker. A fairly standard chord shapes were the most part. When we get to the part where were going to the B7th chord, there's a very odd sort of thing. And that’s where we have our little finger down there and our index finger down there. But the main thing is what's happening on the right hand now. We’re picking with our thumb and ring finger, the second and fist string. And then the other two fingers index and middle by the two strings in between. The thing about it is you don’t really want to get, so that the emphasis is always with your thumb and that says you don’t always want to be doing with the rhythm as this. So at sometimes it would be; it’s like we’re doing a triplet figure. So the first time the emphasis was with those two fingers on the second time with the thumb. And I don’t think there's anything else much in there that should flip you up, so let’s go ahead and do a split screen. Now you can look at both hands little carefully and I’ll play it through real slowly once. And then I’ll do a little bit of improvisation just sort of standard always improvisation that maybe at that speed you can find something you want to use. So let’s take a look at the split screen, slow down version of Blue Monk. I'm on in now and now beat your finger. Walk up an A chord, there's our little bit ascending phrase, walk up here and walk up again to the behind this. Second time with that phrase on the B7, and the last one out, back to the tune right here and here we go again and the B and the ending.