Ba-lue Bolivar Ba-lues-Are is a Thelonious Monk composition that appears on his 1957 Riverside album Brilliant Corners. It was recorded in 1956 during three sessions for the album, with Monk on piano, Ernie Henry on alto, Sonny Rollins on tenor, Oscar Pettiford on bass and Max Roach on drums on October 9, and later sessions for the rest of the record. The title is a phonetic rendering of Monk's exaggerated pronunciation of Blue Bolivar Blues, a nod to the Bolivar Hotel in Manhattan where jazz patron Pannonica de Koenigswarter lived. The piece is notable for an unconventional form with an eight bar A section, a seven bar B section, and a modified seven bar A, plus a double time feel in the second chorus. The recording of Brilliant Corners was famously arduous, with about twenty five takes of the title track, and Pettiford allegedly pantomimed playing when the bass line was not audible to the engineers, with the final album version assembled from multiple takes. The tune sits in the hard bop genre and helped establish Brilliant Corners as a landmark Monk recording.
