Comedian Dave Chapelle knows only two songs on the piano- one of them is Round Midnight by Thelonious Monk (the other is Misty).  He tells us this and plays Round Midnight in his movie ‘Block Party‘ that came out a few years back.

Chapelle talks about Thelonious Monk’s timing being so ‘ill’.  Which is pretty true.

The other day I was working on learning ‘Round Midnight’ – it’s a tune I had played a while back, but had somewhat forgotten.

The chord changes are not easy to play over!  Even Miles Davis has trouble when he was playing the song at first.

One thing I tried, actually by accident, was reading off of a part in C.  So I mostly learned the melody in that key and then realized that it was in fact in C and I was playing a tenor sax.

After that, I looked back at a Bb version, but saw it was slightly different.  The C version seemed closer to the unembellished melody.

So I started learning it in the original key by looking at the version in C and transposing as I went along.  For tenor sax and soprano this isn’t too bad, since you just go up a whole step.  A bit trickier for alto and bari.

As I played Round Midnight like that, I saw that I was mostly looking at the shape and not the notes themselves, so it seemed like it could help me in memorizing tunes as a sort of intermediate step.

Ideally, you want to know songs in all keys, so this process forced me to pay attention to the intervals.

Any thoughts on this?