Straight, No Chaser (composition)

"Straight, No Chaser"
Composition by Thelonious Monk
Recorded 23 July 1951
Genre Jazz
Composer(s) Thelonious Monk

"Straight, No Chaser" is a jazz standard composed by Thelonious Monk. It was first recorded on Monk's Blue Note Sessions in 1951. It has been recorded numerous times by Monk and others and is one of Monk's most covered songs.[1] It is a 12-bar blues in B♭ which, like one of his other B♭ blues, "Blue Monk", makes creative use of chromatics in the melody. Miles Davis recorded a famous version on his Milestones album, in which the tune is played in F rather than B♭. Due to the influence of the Milestones version, the composition is usually performed in F.

Music educator Mark C. Gridley wrote about Monk's composition style: "Monk employed simple compositional devices with very original results. His 'Straight, No Chaser' involves basically only one idea played again and again, each time in a different part of the measure and with a different ending."[2]

Carmen McRae recorded a vocal version of the tune in 1988, with words by Sally Swisher. The McRae version was titled "Get It Straight".[1]

Personnel

The lineup of the original 1951 recording was:

Renditions

By Monk

By others

Notes

  1. 1 2 Straight No Chaser at jazzstandards.com - retrieved on 24 April 2009
  2. ↑ Mark C. Gridley: Jazz Styles: History and Analysis. Prentice Hall, July 31, 2002. ISBN 0-13-099282-8.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Gioia, Ted (2012). The Jazz Standards. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 408–409. ISBN 978-0-19-993739-4.
  4. ↑ "Standards overview". Allmusic.com.
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