Instead, he trips and stumbles and staggers through the meter, yet somehow he always lands precisely where he intends to. Monk uses a lot of circle of fifths progressions, and often alternates the yin and yang scales over them, but he never plays predictable patterns. If you just take a whole tone riff and alternate it up and down chromatically, listeners will intuit that you’re mindlessly executing a formula, and they will lose interest fast. You play the yin scale on F#7, the yang scale on B7, the yin scale on E7, the yang scale on A7, the yin scale on D7, the yang scale on G7, and so on, simply alternating back and forth. In the recording at the top of this post, remember how Monk starts his solo with that crazy substitute progression that starts on F#7 and then cycles back home to Bb? It’s not as difficult to play as it sounds. You can improvise over any string of dominant chords going around the circle of fifths by just alternating the yin and yang scales.