Monk's "Ringing" Notes: Overtones and Voicing

I'm currently about 350 pages into Robin D.G. Kelley's biography of Thelonious Monk, Thelonious Monk: Life and Times of an American Original. The research and level of detail is pretty incredible and there are plenty of fascinating anecdotes and historical minutiae that I'll likely come back to in the near future. Of these anecdotes, a description of Monk teaching an arranger how to play his chords properly is particularly interesting. I recall Vijay Iyer mentioning at Banff the precision with which Monk would voice his chords, how he would deliberately emphasize or vary the lengths of certain notes in chords he played so as to produce the desired balance of overtones. The point being made was that Monk was not a careless "mad genius"—instead, he was a thoughtful, deliberate player who didn't just work off of innate intuition or raw talent, but instead approached the piano with rigorous specificity and discipline. 

Here's the passage:

On "Thelonious," Monk provided Hall [Overton] with a precise delineation of his harmonies, movement, and rhythm. They spent at least fifteen minutes on the first two bars alone, all the while explaining how the song should sound, what notes ought to be there and how the overtones are meant to suggest the key of Bb throughout the song. On "Monk's Mood," for example, it took Overton—an excellent pianist in his own right—forty minutes to get through one chorus. Monk was exacting.

Rigor and discipline. And patience! Here's the really cool bit:

He even showed Overton how to create a "ringing" note, in this case D natural, by holding down the key until it fades out while playing other note.

 One instance that comes to mind for distinctively Monkian voicing is the ending of "Everything Happens to Me," from Solo Monk (1964). At the end of the master take, Monk plays a major seven voicing with the root placed on top and the seventh a half step below. This isn't too unusual, particularly since Monk makes the Bb root sing out over the dissonant half step below. What happens next is stranger: he adds a dominant 7 an octave below, followed by another diad made up of the b9 and natural 9 voiced a minor 9th apart, then he adds a trill between the 6th and 7th way up top.

I recently acquired a copy of the complete Solo Monk sessions on Columbia, which includes the alternate takes—on take 1, Monk doesn't include the trill; on take 2 and 3, he does (take 3 is apparently the master). It's a bit confusing because the track listing includes one master-length "Take 3" and another 5 minute "Take 3" that's also labeled as a "Retake." I don't have the CD and the booklet on hand, unfortunately, but listening to each version of the ending, it's clear Monk was changing the way he voiced the chords each time slightly—one one take, the 3rd is heard more clearly; on others, the major 7th stands out more; etc. 

The way the chord works harmonically is also interesting: the dominant 7th actually sounds consonant (it sounds like the major 7th and root decay rather quickly and leave space for an added 7th), although the minor 9th diad doesn't. When I hear the trill on top, the resolution note I'm expecting seems to be C, rather than the root Bb—maybe the minor 9th suggests the II superimposed on the I, without any defining 3rd (?). But I think how Monk plays the chord is still key, both the precise spacing between intervals and across registers, and the way that he weighs and holds out certain notes. Pretty amazing.