"Bemsha Swing": The Transformation of a Bebop Classic to Free Jazz

This study compares two performances of Thelonious Monk's “Bemsha Swing,” now a jazz standard. One improvisation is by the composer himself and the other by Cecil Taylor recorded in the early 1950s before the free jazz style developed. A number of major assumptions made both about the style of free jazz and even about the nature of its origins in bebop are either facile or incorrect. Even where common jazz and blues riffs can be heard within a predominantly tonal language, these same riffs may also function as the structural foundation for improvisations that may not seem to be rooted in standard jazz and blues idioms. Techniques that are associated with free jazz (motivic development, textural variation which also may imply structural connections, and pitch-class transformation) exist in the early works of Cecil Taylor and, to a lesser extent, in Monk's own Bebop rendition of “Bemsha Swing.”