SCARCE THELONIOUS SPHERE MONK FUNERAL PROGRAM OBITUARY 1982 ORIGINAL VINTAGE
When you click on links to various merchants on this site and make a purchase, this can result in this site earning a commission. Affiliate programs and affiliations include, but are not limited to, the eBay Partner Network.
SCARCE THELONIOUS SPHERE MONK FUNERAL PROGRAM OBITUARY 1982 ORIGINAL VINTAGE:
$3372.02
AN EXTREMELY RARE MEASURING APPROXIMATELY 5 1/2 X 8 1/2 INCH FUNERAL PROGRAM FOR THELONIOUS SPHERE MONK FROM 1982
Scarce memento of Monk's funeral service, which took place on 22 February 1982 at Saint Peter's Church, Manhattan, with "performances by several of Monk's former sidemen in various combinations, some of the most respected interpreters of his music (Barry Harris, Randy Weston, and Tommy Flanagan), and the Rutgers Jazz Ensemble" (van der Bliek, p. 224). The service was conducted by the Reverend John Gensel, "whose church had been a gathering point for the jazz community since the early 1960s" other performing musicians included Muhal Richard Abrams and Gerry Mulligan, alongside long-standing members of Monk's great 60s quartet, tenorist Charlie Rouse and drummers Ben Riley and Frankie Dunlop. "Honorary Ushers" included Walter Bishop Jr and McCoy Tyner. Included is a 2-page biography of Monk and an extensive list of those musicians with whom Monk "felt privileged to be associated". Rob van der Bliek, 4 pp.Original cream-coloured printed wrappers, silhouette image of Monk to front cover
Thelonious Sphere Monk[2] (/θəˈloʊniəs/, October 10, 1917[3] – February 17, 1982) was an American jazz pianist and composer. He had a unique improvisational style and made numerous contributions to the standard jazz repertoire, including "'Round Midnight", "Blue Monk", "Straight, No Chaser", "Ruby, My Dear", "In Walked Bud", and "Well, You Needn't". Monk is the second-most-recorded jazz composer after Duke Ellington.[4]
Monk's compositions and improvisations feature dissonances and angular melodic twists and are consistent with his unorthodox approach to the piano, which combined a highly percussive attack with abrupt, dramatic use of switched key releases, silences, and hesitations.
Monk's distinct look included suits, hats, and sunglasses. He also had an idiosyncratic habit during performances: while other musicians continued playing, Monk would stop, stand up, and dance for a few moments before returning to the piano.[5]
Monk is one of five jazz musicians to have been featured on the cover of Time (the others being Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington, and Wynton Early lifeThelonious Sphere Monk was born two years after his sister Marion on October 10, 1917, in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and was the son of Thelonious and Barbara Monk. His poorly written birth certificate misspelled his first name as "Thelious"[8] or "Thelius". It also did not list his middle name, taken from his maternal grandfather, Sphere Batts.[9] His brother, Thomas, was born in January 1920. In 1922, the family moved to the Phipps Houses, 243 West 63rd Street, in Manhattan, New York City; the neighborhood was known as San Juan Hill because of the many African-American veterans of the Spanish–American War who lived there (urban renewal displaced the long-time residents of the community, who saw their neighborhood replaced by the Amsterdam Housing Projects and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, though the Phipps Houses remained). Monk started playing the piano at the age of six, taking lessons from a neighbor, Alberta Simmons, who taught him stride playing in the style of Fats Waller, James P. Johnson and Eubie Blake. Monk's mother also taught him to play some hymns, and he would sometimes accompany her singing at church. He attended Stuyvesant High School, a public school for gifted students, but did not graduate.[10]
For two years, between about the ages 10 to 12, Monk's piano teacher was Austrian-born Simon Wolf, a pianist and violinist who studied under Alfred Megerlin, the first violinist and concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic. Monk learned to play pieces by composers such as Bach, Beethoven, Liszt, and Mozart, but was particularly drawn to pieces by Chopin and Rachmaninoff. The lessons were discontinued when it became clear that Monk's main focus was jazz music.[11]
1934–1946: Early performing careerAt 17, Monk toured with an evangelist, playing the church organ, and in his late teens he began to find work playing jazz.[12] In the early to mid-1940s, he was the house pianist at Minton's Playhouse, a Manhattan nightclub.[12] Much of Monk's style (in the Harlem stride tradition) was developed while he performed at Minton's where he participated in after-hours cutting contests, which featured many leading jazz soloists of the time. Monk's musical work at Minton's was crucial in the formulation of bebop, which would be furthered by other musicians, including Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Christian, Kenny Clarke, Charlie Parker, and, later, Miles Davis.[13] Monk is believed to be the pianist featured on recordings Jerry Newman made around 1941 at the club. Monk's style at this time was later described as "hard-swinging," with the addition of runs in the style of Art Tatum. Monk's stated influences included Duke Ellington, James P. Johnson, and other early stride pianists. According to the documentary Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser, Monk lived in the same neighborhood in New York City as Johnson and knew him as a teenager.
In March 1943, Monk reported for his Army Induction physical, but was labeled by the Army psychiatrist as "psychiatric reject" and not inducted into the Armed Forces during WWII.[14]
Mary Lou Williams, who mentored Monk and his contemporaries, spoke of Monk's rich inventiveness in this period, and how such invention was vital for musicians, since at the time it was common for fellow musicians to incorporate overheard musical ideas into their own works without giving due credit. "So, the boppers worked out a music that was hard to steal. I'll say this for the 'leeches,' though: they tried. I've seen them in Minton's busily writing on their shirt cuffs or scribbling on the tablecloth. And even our own guys, I'm afraid, did not give Monk the credit he had coming. Why, they even stole his idea of the beret and bop glasses."[13]
In 1944, Monk cut his first commercial recordings with the Coleman Hawkins Quartet. Hawkins was one of the earliest established jazz musicians to promote Monk, and the pianist later returned the favor by inviting Hawkins to join him on a 1957 session with John Coltrane.
1947–1952: Lorraine Gordon
Thelonious Monk at Minton's Playhouse, 1947In 1947, Ike Quebec introduced Monk to Lorraine Gordon and her first husband, Alfred Lion, co-founder of Blue Note Records. From then on, Gordon preached his genius to the jazz world with unrelenting passion. Shortly after meeting Gordon and Lion, Monk made his first recordings as a leader for Blue Note (later anthologized on Genius of Modern Music, Vol. 1), which showcased his talents as a composer of original melodies for improvisation. Monk Blue Note Sessions were recorded between 1947 and 1952.
Monk married Nellie Smith in 1947, and on December 27, 1949 the couple had a son, T. S. Monk (called Toot), who became a jazz drummer. A daughter, Barbara (affectionately known as Boo-Boo), was born on September 5, 1953 and died of cancer in 1984.
In her autobiography, Gordon spoke of the utter lack of interest in Monk's recordings, which translated to poor sales. "I went to Harlem and those record stores didn't want Monk or me. I'll never forget one particular owner, I can still see him and his store on Seventh Avenue and 125th Street. 'He can't play lady, what are you doing up here? The guy has two left hands.' 'You just wait,' I'd say. 'This man's a genius, you don't know anything.'"[15]
For Alfred Lion, co-owner of Blue Note Records, sales were a secondary consideration. Michael Cuscuna relates that Alfred Lion told him that there were three people in his life that when he heard them, he just flipped and had to record everything they did. The first was Monk, the second was Herbie Nichols, and the third was Andrew Hill, where he didn’t care how much money he made or lost. He just had to record this music.[16]
Due to Monk's reticence, Gordon became his mouthpiece to the public. In February 1948, she wrote to Ralph Ingersoll, the editor of the newspaper PM, and described Monk as "a genius living here in the heart of New York, whom nobody knows". As a result, one of PM's best writers visited Monk to do a feature on him, but Monk wouldn't speak to the reporter unless Gordon was in the room with him. In September of the same year, Lorraine approached Max Gordon, the owner and founder of the Village Vanguard and secured Monk his first gig there. Monk was showcased at the club for a week, but not a single person came.[15]
In August 1951, New York City police searched a parked car occupied by Monk and his friend Bud Powell. They found narcotics in the car, presumed to have belonged to Powell. Monk refused to testify against his friend, so the police confiscated his New York City Cabaret Card. Without this, Monk was nominally unable to play in any New York venue where liquor was served. Although this severely restricted his ability to perform for several years, a coterie of musicians led by Randy Weston introduced Monk to Black-owned bars and clubs in Brooklyn that flouted the law, enabling the pianist to play little-advertised, one-night engagements throughout the borough with a modicum of regularity. Monk spent most of the early and mid-1950s composing and performing at theaters, outer borough clubs and out-of-town venues.
1952–1954: Prestige RecordsAfter intermittent recording sessions for Blue Note from 1947 to 1952, Monk was under contract to Prestige Records for the following two years. With Prestige, he cut several highly significant, but at the time under-recognized, albums, including collaborations with the saxophonist Sonny Rollins and the drummers Art Blakey and Max Roach. In 1954, Monk participated in a Christmas Eve session, which produced most of the albums Bags' Groove and Miles Davis and the Modern Jazz Giants by Davis. In his autobiography, Miles, Davis claimed that the alleged anger and tension between them did not take place and that the claims of blows being exchanged were "rumors" and a "misunderstanding".[17]
In 1954, Monk paid his first visit to Paris. As well as performing at concerts, he recorded a solo piano session for French radio (later issued as an album by Disques Vogue). Backstage, Mary Lou Williams introduced him to Baroness Pannonica "Nica" de Koenigswarter, a member of the Rothschild family and a patroness of several New York City jazz musicians. She was a close friend for the rest of Monk's life: she "served as a surrogate wife right alongside Monk's equally devoted actual wife, Nellie"[18] and "paid Monk's bills, dragged him to an endless array of doctors, put him and his family up in her own home and, when necessary, helped Nellie institutionalize him. In 1958, Monk and the baroness were stopped by the police in Delaware. When a small amount of marijuana was discovered, she took the rap for her friend and even served a few nights in jail."[18]
1955–1961: Riverside RecordsSee also: Misterioso (Thelonious Monk album)
Thelonious Monk(Amsterdam, 1961)By the time of his signing to Riverside, Monk was highly regarded by his peers and by some critics, but his records remained poor sellers and his music was still regarded as too "difficult" for more mainstream acceptance. Indeed, with Monk's consent, Riverside had managed to buy out his previous Prestige contract for a mere $108.24. He willingly recorded two albums of jazz standards as a means of increasing his profile: Thelonious Monk Plays Duke Ellington (1955) and The Unique Thelonious Monk (1956).
On Brilliant Corners, recorded in late 1956, Monk mainly performed his own music. The complex title track, which featured Rollins, was so difficult to play that the final version had to be edited together from multiple takes. The album, however, was largely regarded as the first commercial success for Monk.
After having his cabaret card restored, Monk relaunched his New York career with a landmark six-month residency at the Five Spot Cafe in the East Village neighborhood of New York beginning in June 1957,[12] leading a quartet with John Coltrane on tenor saxophone, Wilbur Ware on bass, and Shadow Wilson on drums. Little of this group's music was documented owing to contractual problems: Coltrane was signed to Prestige at the time, but Monk refused to return to his former label. One studio session by the quartet was made for Riverside, three tunes which were not released until 1961 by the subsidiary label Jazzland along with outtakes from a larger group recording with Coltrane and Hawkins, those results appearing in 1957 as the album Monk's Music. An amateur recording from the Five Spot (a later September 1958 reunion with Coltrane sitting in for Johnny Griffin) was issued on Blue Note in 1993; and a recording of the quartet performing at a Carnegie Hall concert on November 29 was recorded in high fidelity by Voice of America engineers, unearthed in the collection of the Library of Congress and released by Blue Note in 2005.
"Crepuscule with Nellie," recorded in 1957, "was Monk's only, what's called through-composed composition, meaning that there is no improvising. It is Monk's concerto, if you will, and in some ways it speaks for itself. But he wrote it very, very carefully and very deliberately and really struggled to make it sound the way it sounds. [... I]t was his love song for Nellie," said the author of the "definitive Monk biography",[12] Robin D. G. Kelley.[19]
The Five Spot residency ended Christmas 1957; Coltrane left to rejoin Davis's group, and the band was effectively disbanded. Monk did not form another long-term band until June 1958 when he began a second residency at the Five Spot, again with a quartet, this time with Griffin (Charlie Rouse later) on tenor, Ahmed Abdul-Malik on bass, and Roy Haynes on drums.
On October 15, 1958, en route to a week-long engagement for the quartet at the Comedy Club in Baltimore, Maryland, Monk and de Koenigswarter were detained by police in Wilmington, Delaware. When Monk refused to answer questions or cooperate with the policemen, they beat him with a blackjack. Although they had authorization to search the vehicle and found narcotics in suitcases held in the trunk of the Baroness's car, Judge Christie of the Delaware Superior Court ruled that the unlawful detention of the pair, and the beating of Monk, rendered the consent to the search void as it was given under duress.[20]
1962–1970: Columbia Records
Thelonious Monk, 1964After extended negotiations, Monk signed in 1962 with Columbia Records, one of the big four American record labels of the day. Monk's relationship with Riverside had soured over disagreements concerning royalty payments and had concluded with two European live albums; he had not recorded an album for Riverside since April 1960.
Working with producer Teo Macero on his debut for Columbia,[21] the sessions in the first week of November had a lineup that had been with him for two years: tenor saxophonist Rouse (who worked regularly with Monk from 1959 to 1970), bassist John Ore, and drummer Frankie Dunlop. Monk's Dream, his first Columbia album, was released in 1963.
Columbia's resources allowed Monk to receive more promotion than earlier in his career. Monk's Dream became the best-selling LP of his lifetime,[22] and on February 28, 1964, he appeared on the cover of Time magazine, being featured in the article "The Loneliest Monk".[23] The cover article was originally intended to run in November 1963, but it was delayed due to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.[12] According to biographer Kelley, the 1964 Time appearance came because "Barry Farrell, who wrote the cover story, wanted to write about a jazz musician and almost by default Monk was chosen, because they thought Ray Charles and Miles Davis were too controversial. ... [Monk] wasn't so political. ...[O]f course, I challenge that [in the biography]," Kelley wrote.[19]Monk at the Village Gate, 1968Monk continued to record studio albums, including Criss Cross, also in 1963, and Underground, in 1968. But by the Columbia years his compositional output was limited, and only his final Columbia studio record, Underground, featured a substantial number of new tunes, including his only 34 time piece, "Ugly Beauty".
As had been the case with Riverside, his period with Columbia contains multiple live albums, including Miles and Monk at Newport (1963), Live at the It Club, and Live at the Jazz Workshop, the latter two recorded in 1964, the last not being released until 1982. After the departure of Ore and Dunlop, the remainder of the rhythm section in Monk's quartet during the bulk of his Columbia period was Larry Gales on bass and Ben Riley on drums, both of whom joined in 1964. Along with Rouse, they remained with Monk for over four years, his longest-serving band.
In 1968, Monk, Gales, Rouse, and Riley played a concert at Palo Alto High School in the San Francisco Bay Area, at the invitation of a 16 year old student charged with organizing school dances. This resulted in the quartet's final recording, Palo Alto (2020).[24]
1971–1982: Later life and deathMonk had disappeared from the scene by the mid-1970s for health reasons and made only a small number of appearances during the final decade of his life. His last studio recordings as a leader were made in November 1971 for the English Black Lion label, near the end of a worldwide tour with the Giants of Jazz, a group which included Gillespie, Kai Winding, Sonny Stitt, Al McKibbon, and Art Blakey. Bassist McKibbon, who had known Monk for over twenty years and played on his final tour in 1971, later said: "On that tour, Monk said about two words. I mean literally maybe two words. He didn't say 'Good morning,' 'Goodnight,' 'What time?' Nothing. Why, I don't know. He sent word back after the tour was over that the reason he couldn't communicate or play was that Art Blakey and I were so ugly."[25] A different side of Monk is revealed in Lewis Porter's biography, John Coltrane: His Life and Music; Coltrane states: "Monk is exactly the opposite of Miles [Davis]: he talks about music all the time, and he wants so much for you to understand that if, by chance, you ask him something, he'll spend hours if necessary to explain it to you."[26] Blakey reports that Monk was excellent at both chess and checkers.[27]
The documentary film Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser (1988) attributes Monk's quirky behavior to mental illness. In the film, Monk's son says that his father sometimes did not recognize him, and he reports that Monk was hospitalized on several occasions owing to an unspecified mental illness that worsened in the late 1960s. No reports or diagnoses were ever publicized, but Monk would often become excited for two or three days, then pace for days after that, after which he would withdraw and stop speaking. Doctors recommended electroconvulsive therapy as a treatment option for Monk's illness, but his family would not allow it; antipsychotics and lithium were prescribed instead.[28][29] Other theories abound: Leslie Gourse, author of the book Straight, No Chaser: The Life and Genius of Thelonious Monk (1997), reported that at least one of Monk's psychiatrists failed to find evidence of manic depression (bipolar disorder) or schizophrenia. Another doctor maintains that Monk was misdiagnosed and prescribed drugs during his hospital stay that may have caused brain damage.[28]
As his health declined, Monk's last six years were spent as a guest in the Weehawken, New Jersey, home of his long-standing patron and friend, Pannonica de Koenigswarter, who nursed Monk during his final illness. She proved to be a steadfast presence, as did his own wife Nellie, especially as his life descended into further isolation.[13] Monk did not play the piano during this time, even though one was present in his room, and he spoke to few visitors. He died of a stroke on February 17, 1982, and was buried in Ferncliff Cemetery (Grave 405, Hillcrest 1 section) at Hartsdale, New York.
Posthumous myth: Monk at JuilliardThere have been numerous published references since the 1980s in Monk biographies purporting he attended the Juilliard School of Music,[30] an error that continues to be disseminated in online biographies of Monk.[31] At Monk’s funeral service in 1982, it was mentioned in his eulogy that he took classes in harmony and arrangement at Juilliard.[32] In the 1988 documentary film Thelonious Monk: Straight No Chaser, Samuel E. Wright narrates that "Monk began playing piano without formal training. Later, he took lessons and studied music theory at the Juilliard School of Music."[33]
The complete lack of documented evidence connecting Monk with attending Juilliard was noted by Monk biographer Thomas Fitterling in the first German edition of his Monk biography published in 1987.[34] The Juilliard canard may have its early source in the fact that Monk’s sister Marion thought that her piano teacher, a Mr. Wolfe (sic), who briefly taught Thelonious around 1930, may have been connected to Juilliard as a teacher or student.[35] In fact, the Monk family piano teacher had been trained by the concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic and has no known connection to Juilliard.[11] Monk biographer Laurent de Wilde believed that the apocryphal Juilliard story may have stemmed from Monk’s late 1950s collaboration with Juilliard instructor Hall Overton.[34] The main source of the Juilliard misunderstanding is probably that Monk participated in a music contest circa 1942–1943 at the Columbus Hill Community Center in his neighborhood, which had a Juilliard scholarship as the first prize. Monk entered the contest but placed second and thus failed to get the scholarship. According to Monk’s wife Nellie, when the prize winner later encountered Monk during a 1958 engagement and told him that Monk should rightfully have been awarded the Juilliard scholarship, Monk replied: "I'm glad I didn’t go to the conservatory. Probably would've ruined me."[36]
Technique and playing styleMonk's music has profound humanity, disciplined economy, balanced virility, dramatic nobility, and innocently exuberant wit.
— Steve Lacy[37]Monk once said, "The piano ain't got no wrong notes."[38] According to Bebop: The Music and Its Players author Thomas Owens, "Monk's usual piano touch was harsh and percussive, even in ballads. He often attacked the keyboard anew for each note, rather than striving for any semblance of legato. Often seemingly unintentional seconds embellish his melodic lines, giving the effect of someone playing while wearing work gloves. [...] He hit the keys with fingers held flat rather than in a natural curve, and held his free fingers high above the keys. [...] Sometimes he hit a single key with more than one finger, and divided single-line melodies between the two hands."[39] In contrast with this unorthodox approach to playing, he could play runs and arpeggios with great speed and accuracy.[39] He also had good finger independence, allowing him to play a melodic line and a trill simultaneously in his right hand.[39] Monk's style was not universally appreciated. For example, the poet and jazz critic Philip Larkin described him as "the elephant on the keyboard".[40]
Monk often used parts of whole tone scales, played either ascending or descending, and covering several octaves.[39] He also had extended improvisations that featured parallel sixths (he also used these in the themes of some of his compositions).[41] His solos also feature space and long notes.[42] Unusually for a bebop-based pianist, as an accompanist and on solo performances he often employed a left-hand stride pattern.[42] A further characteristic of his work as an accompanist was his tendency to stop playing, leaving a soloist with just bass and drums for support.[42] Monk had a particular proclivity for the key of B flat. All of his many blues compositions, including "Blue Monk," "Misterioso," "Blues Five Spot," and "Functional," were composed in B flat; in addition, his signature theme, "Thelonious," largely consists of an incessantly repeated B-flat tone.[43]
TributesMusic in Monk Time is a 1983 documentary film about Monk and his music that was widely praised by music and film critics.[44]Soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy performed as Monk's accompanist in 1960. Monk's tunes became a permanent part of his repertoire in concert and on albums. Lacy recorded many albums entirely focused on Monk's compositions.Gunther Schuller wrote the work "Variants on a Theme of Thelonious Monk (Criss-Cross)" in 1960. It first appeared on Schuller's album Jazz Abstractions (1961) and was later performed and recorded by other artists, including Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, and Bill Evans.Round Midnight Variations is a collection of variations on the song "'Round Midnight" premiered in 2002. Composers contributing included Milton Babbitt, William Bolcom, David Crumb, George Crumb, Michael Daugherty, John Harbison, Joel Hoffman, Aaron Jay Kernis, Gerald Levinson, Tobias Picker, Frederic Rzewski, Augusta Read Thomas, and Michael Torke.[45]"Thelonious" Repertory Ensemble: Buell Neidlinger's tribute band (1981–1989).Stefano Benni's 2005 Misterioso, A Journey into the Silence of Thelonious Monk was staged as a theatre production featuring Monk's music, directed by Filomena Campus, at the Edinburgh Festival in 2008, at the Riverside Studios in 2009,[46] and at a variety of venues in the following years.[47] In 2017, an Arts Council England-sponsored international Monk Misterioso Tour was launched at the British Library in October,[48] culminating with a new dramatised production of Misterioso: A Journey into the Silence of Thelonious Monk at Kings Place to close the London Jazz Festival's celebration of the centenary of Monk's birth, featuring Campus alongside Cleveland Watkiss, Pat Thomas, Rowland Sutherland, Orphy Robinson, Dudley Phillips and Mark Mondesir.[49][50][51]John Beasley founded the big band group MONK'estra, which celebrates Monk's and other classic compositions with a contemporary twist incorporating Afro-Cuban rhythms, modern jazz playing, hip hop and traditional big band instrumentation, along with originals by Beasley.[52]Jeff Beck's 1975 album Blow by Blow contains the track "Thelonious", a tribute to Monk written by Stevie Wonder.Tribute albumsThe following tribute albums to Monk have been released:
Reflections (1958) by Steve LacyEvidence (1962) by Steve Lacy and Don CherryBennie Wallace Plays Monk (1981) by saxophonist Bennie WallaceFour in One (1982) by Sphere: features former Monk sidemen Charlie Rouse (ten sax), Ben Riley (drums), Buster Williams (bass) and Kenny Barron (piano).Sings Thelonius Monk (1982) by singer Soesja Citroen, featuring the Cees Slinger OctetThelonica (1983), by pianist Tommy FlanaganLight Blue: Arthur Blythe Plays Thelonious Monk (1983) by saxophonist Arthur BlytheThat's The Way I Feel Now: A Tribute to Thelonious Monk (1984), an album featuring different groupings of rock and jazz musicians on each song including Steve Lacy, Donald Fagen, Todd Rundgren, Peter Frampton, Carla Bley, Joe Jackson, Gil Evans and Was Not Was.Monk Suite: Kronos Quartet Plays Music of Thelonious Monk (1985) by Kronos Quartet with Ron Carter on bass.Six Monk's Compositions (1987) (1987) by Anthony BraxtonCarmen Sings Monk (1988) by Carmen McRaeRumba Para Monk (1988), by Jerry GonzalezMonk in Motian (1989) by Paul Motian, featuring Joe Lovano, Bill Frisell, Geri Allen and Dewey RedmanThelonious Sphere Monk: Dreaming of the Masters Series Vol. 2, by Art Ensemble of Chicago with Cecil TaylorEpistrophy (1991) by pianist Ran BlakeMonk's Modern Music[53] (1994) by pianist Rick Roe with Rodney Whitaker on bass and Greg Hutchinson on drumsThe Fo'tet Plays Monk (1995) by Ralph Peterson, Jr.e.s.t. Esbjörn Svensson Trio Plays Monk (1996) by e.s.t.Monk on Monk (1997) by T.S. Monk, featuring Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Wayne Shorter, Grover Washington Jr., Roy Hargrove, Clark Terry, Geri Allen and othersBrilliant Corners: The Music of Thelonious Monk (1997) by Bill HolmanThelonious: Fred Hersch Plays Monk (1997) by Fred HerschGreen Chimneys: The Music of Thelonious Monk (1999) by Andy SummersIn the Key of Monk (1999) by Jessica Williams (musician)Standard Time, Vol. 4: Marsalis Plays Monk (1999) by Wynton MarsalisSchool Days (2002), recorded in 1963, by Steve Lacy and Roswell Rudd, with Henry Grimes and Dennis CharlesThelonious Moog (2003) by Steve Million and Joe "Guido" WelshMonk's Casino (2005) by pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach; a triple CD set that includes every composition by Monk. According to the album's liner notes by critic John Corbett, this is the first comprehensive recording of all Monk's songs.An Open Letter to Thelonious (2008) by Ellis MarsalisIn Monk's Mood (2009) by John TchicaiFriday the 13th: The Micros Play Monk (2010) by The Microscopic SeptetMelodious Monk: A New Look at An Old Master (2011) by Kim Pensyl and Phil DeGregThe Monk Project (2012) by Jimmy OwensBaritone Monk (2012) by The Claire Daly QuartetTalk Thelonious (2015) by Terry AdamsJoey. Monk. Live! (2017) by Joey AlexanderJohn Beasley presents MONK'estra vol. 1 (2016), by John BeasleyJohn Beasley presents MONK'estra vol. 2 (2017) by John BeasleyDuck Baker Plays Monk (2017) by Duck Baker, featuring solo fingerstyle acoustic guitar arrangements of Monk's workThe Monk: Live at Bimhuis (2018) by Miho Hazama and Metropole Orkest Big BandWork: the complete composition of Thelonious Monk, solo guitar (2018) by Miles OkazakiThelonious Sphere Monk (2018) by MASTMonk's Dreams: The complete compositions of Thelonious Sphere Monk (2018) by Frank KimbroughMonk: fifteen piano reflections (2020) by Stefano TravagliniOther references to MonkComedian Felonious Munk and music producer Thelonious Martin both adopted stage names based on Monk's name. Other things named after Monk include punk rock band Thelonious Monster, the 2021 novel Felonious Monk by William Kotzwinkle, and the Cambridge, Massachusetts seafood-and-jazz restaurant Thelonious Monkfish, which later was renamed to The Mad Monkfish.[54]
The North Coast Brewing Company produces Brother Thelonious ale, the proceeds from which go towards jazz music education for young people.
DiscographyMain article: Thelonious Monk discographyFurther information: List of compositions by Thelonious MonkAwards and accoladesIn 1993, he was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.[55] In 2006, he was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize for "a body of distinguished and innovative musical composition that has had a significant and enduring impact on the evolution of jazz".[56]
The Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz was established in 1986 by the Monk family and Maria Fisher. Its mission is to offer public school-based jazz education programs for young people around the globe, helping students develop imaginative thinking, creativity, curiosity, a positive self-image, and a respect for their own and others' cultural heritage. In addition to hosting an annual International Jazz Competition since 1987, the institute also helped, through its partnership with UNESCO, designate April 30, 2012, as the first annual International Jazz Day. It was renamed the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz in 2019.
Monk was inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame in 2009.[57]
Thelonious Monk, in full Thelonious Sphere Monk, (born Oct. 10, 1917, Rocky Mount, N.C., U.S.—died Feb. 17, 1982, Englewood, N.J.), American pianist and composer who was among the first creators of modern jazz.
(From left to right) Thelonious Monk, Howard McGhee, Roy Eldridge, and Teddy Hill in front of Minton's Playhouse, New York City, c. 1947.As the pianist in the band at Minton’s Playhouse, a nightclub in New York City, in the early 1940s, Monk had great influence on the other musicians who later developed the bebop movement. For much of his career, Monk performed and recorded with small groups. His playing was percussive and sparse, often being described as “angular,” and he used complex and dissonant harmonies and unusual intervals and rhythms. Monk’s music was known for its humorous, almost playful, quality. He was also one of the most prolific composers in the history of jazz. Many of his compositions, which were generally written in the 12-bar blues or the 32-bar ballad form, became jazz standards. Among his best-known works are “Well, You Needn’t,” “I Mean You,” “Straight, No Chaser,” “Criss-Cross,” “Mysterioso,” “Epistrophy,” “Blue Monk,” and “ ’Round Midnight.” He influenced the flavour of much modern jazz, notably the work of George Russell, Randy Weston, and Cecil Taylor.
Background: acoustic guitar side view, string, fingerboard, musicBritannica QuizMusic: Fact or Fiction?In 1997 more than 1,700 reel-to-reel tapes were uncovered in a collection of photographer W. Eugene Smith’s work at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona. The recordings, which were made at Smith’s Manhattan loft from 1957 to 1965, serve as a remarkable chronicle of the New York jazz scene in that era. Performers such as Monk, Charles Mingus, Sonny Rollins, and a host of other luminaries can be heard rehearsing, talking, or engaging in free-flowing jam sessions in the 4,000 hours of material. The recordings prompted new critical interest in Monk, and the tapes and accompanying photographs were archived by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Sam Stephenson, the lead researcher on the project, published a portion of the photographs, as well as transcribed conversations from the tapes, as The Jazz Loft Project: Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue, 1957–1965 (2009).
Jazz piano is a collective term for the techniques pianists use when playing jazz. The piano has been an integral part of the jazz idiom since its inception, in both solo and ensemble settings. Its role is multifaceted due largely to the instrument's combined melodic and harmonic capabilities. For this reason it is an important tool of jazz musicians and composers for teaching and learning jazz theory and set arrangement, regardless of their main instrument. By extension the phrase 'jazz piano' can refer to similar techniques on any keyboard instrument.
Along with the guitar, vibraphone, and other keyboard instruments, the piano is one of the instruments in a jazz combo that can play both single notes and chords rather than only single notes as does the saxophone or trumpet.
BeginningA new style known as "stride" or "Harlem stride" emerged during the 1920s, predominantly in New York, United States. James P. Johnson was a prominent adherent. The left hand was used to establish rhythm while the right hand improvised melodies.[1]
TechniqueLearning jazz piano
Bill Evans performing at the Montreux Jazz Festival.Mastering the various chord voicings—simple to advanced—is the first building block of learning jazz piano. Jazz piano technique uses all the chords found in Western art music, such as major, minor, augmented, diminished, seventh, diminished seventh, sixth, minor seventh, major seventh, suspended fourth, and so on. A second key skill is learning to play with a swing rhythm and "feel". In jazz, the roots are usually omitted from keyboard voicings, as this task is left to the double bass player. Jazz pianists also make extensive use of chord "extensions", such as adding the ninth, eleventh or thirteenth scale degree to the chord. In some cases, these extensions may be "altered" i.e. sharpened or flattened, as in the case of a "sharp 11" chord.
The next step is learning to improvise melodic lines using scales and chord tones. This ability is perfected after long experience, including much practice, which internalizes the physical skills of playing and the technical elements of harmony, and it requires a great natural 'ear' for extemporaneous music-making. When jazz pianists improvise, they use the scales, modes, and arpeggios associated with the chords in a tune's chord progression. The approach to improvising has changed since the earliest eras of jazz piano. During the swing era, many soloists improvised "by ear" by embellishing the melody with ornaments and passing notes. However, during the bebop era, the rapid tempo and complicated chord progressions made it increasingly harder to play "by ear." Along with other improvisers, such as saxes and guitar players, bebop-era jazz pianists began to improvise over the chord changes using scales (whole tone scale, chromatic scale, etc.) and arpeggios.[2]
StylesJazz piano (the technique) and the instrument itself offer soloists an exhaustive number of choices. One may play the bass register in an ostinato pattern, popular in boogie-woogie style, where the left hand repeats a phrase numerous times throughout a song, as performed by Rob Agerbeek in "Boogie Woogie Stomp". The left hand can also be played as a melodic counterline that emulates the walking of an upright bass. In stride piano, (similar to the earlier ragtime) the left hand rapidly plays alternate positions between notes in the bass register and chords in the tenor register, while the right hand plays melody and improvises, as performed in George Gershwin's "Liza". The right hand may play melodic lines, or harmonic content, chordally or in octaves. It may also be played in lockstep with the left hand, using a double melody block chord called "locked-hand" voicing, or Shearing voicing—a technique popularized, though not invented, by the pianist and set leader George Shearing.
Ensemble role
The Original Dixieland Jazz Band, with Henry Ragas on piano.Jazz piano has played a leading role in developing the sound of jazz. Early on, Black jazz musicians created ragtime on the piano. As the genre progressed, the piano was usually featured in the rhythm section of a band, which was typically configured as one or more of piano, guitar, bass, or drums, or other instruments, such as the vibraphone.
Over time, playing piano-accompaniment in ensemble sets, and then bands, changed from primarily time-keeping (consisting of repetitive left-hand figures) to a more flexible role. Ultimately, the skilled pianist was free both to lead and to answer the instrumental soloist, using both short and sustained, chordal and melodic, fragments—a technique known as comping. Good comping musicians were capable of many and different chord voicings, so to match the various moods the different soloists were aiming for. In the early days, not all leading pianists were concerned to provide comping. Others—notably Duke Ellington, who became famous during the Harlem Renaissance at the Cotton Club—earned great esteem among band members as well as other musicians. Ellington comped enthusiastically in support of the soloist and did much to develop the technique.
Jazz piano moved away from playing lead melody to providing foundation for song sets; soon, skilled jazz pianists were performing as soloists. In the 1940s and 1950s, a number of great piano players emerged. Pianists like Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell helped create and establish the sound of bebop. Bill Evans built upon the style of Powell while adding a distinct classical influence to his playing, while Oscar Peterson pushed rhythmic variations and was influenced by the style of Art Tatum, Teddy Wilson and Nat King Cole. Wynton Kelly, Red Garland, Herbie Hancock, and Keith Jarrett were also exceptional pianists who played with Miles Davis. Tommy Flanagan was featured by John Coltrane on his hit album Giant Steps. McCoy Tyner is also an influential player who played with Coltrane.
See also Music portalicon Jazz portalList of jazz pianistsSwing (jazz performance style), a term of praise for playing that has a strong rhythmic "groove" or driveSourcesMark Levine: The Jazz Piano Book. A "how to" book on the subject.Randy Halberstadt: Metaphors For The Musician. Insights into almost every aspect of jazz piano.Luke Gillespie: Stylistic II/V7/I Voicings For Keyboardists. Covers all styles of comping, from basic and fundamental approaches to modern.Hal Galper: Forward Motion. An approach to jazz phrasing.Riccardo Scivales: Jazz Piano: The Left Hand (Bedford Hills, New York: Ekay Music, 2005). A method covering all the left-hand techniques used in jazz piano (and also a study of the history of the left hand in jazz piano), with hundreds of musical examples.David Berkman: The Jazz Musician's Guide to Creative Practicing. Covers the problems of jazz improvisational practice with a focus on the piano, but for all instruments. (Also, it is entertaining and humorous.)"Duke Ellington Biography." Duke Ellington Biography. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 November 2014.Dupuis, Robert. "Contemporary Musicians: Art Tatum." Encyclopedia. N.p., 1997. Web. 15 November 2014
The most important jazz musicians are the ones who are successful in creating their own original world of music with its own rules, logic, and surprises. Thelonious Monk, who was criticized by observers who failed to listen to his music on its own terms, suffered through a decade of neglect before he was suddenly acclaimed as a genius; his music had not changed one bit in the interim. In fact, one of the more remarkable aspects of Monk’s music was that it was fully formed by 1947 and he saw no need to alter his playing or compositional style in the slightest during the next 25 years.
Thelonious Monk grew up in New York, started playing piano when he was around five, and had his first job touring as an accompanist to an evangelist. He was inspired by the Harlem stride pianists (James P. Johnson was a neighbor) and vestiges of that idiom can be heard in his later unaccompanied solos. However, when he was playing in the house band of Minton’s Playhouse during 1940-1943, Monk was searching for his own individual style. Private recordings from the period find him sometimes resembling Teddy Wilson but starting to use more advanced rhythms and harmonies. He worked with Lucky Millinder a bit in 1942 and was with the Cootie Williams Orchestra briefly in 1944 (Williams recorded Monk’s “Epistrophy” in 1942 and in 1944 was the first to record “‘Round Midnight”), but it was when he became Coleman Hawkins’ regular pianist that Monk was initially noticed. He cut a few titles with Hawkins (his recording debut) and, although some of Hawkins’ fans complained about the eccentric pianist, the veteran tenor could sense the pianist’s greatness.
The 1945-1954 period was very difficult for Thelonious Monk. Because he left a lot of space in his rhythmic solos and had an unusual technique, many people thought that he was an inferior pianist. His compositions were so advanced that the lazier bebop players (although not Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker) assumed that he was crazy. And Thelonious Monk’s name, appearance (he liked funny hats), and personality (an occasionally uncommunicative introvert) helped to brand him as some kind of nut. Fortunately, Alfred Lion of Blue Note believed in him and recorded Monk extensively during 1947-1948 and 1951-1952. He also recorded for Prestige during 1952-1954, had a solo set for Vogue in 1954 during a visit to Paris, and appeared on a Verve date with Bird and Diz. But work was very sporadic during this era and Monk had to struggle to make ends meet.
His fortunes slowly began to improve. In 1955, he signed with Riverside and producer Orrin Keepnews persuaded him to record an album of Duke Ellington tunes and one of standards so his music would appear to be more accessible to the average jazz fan. In 1956 came the classic Brilliant Corners album, but it was the following year when the situation permanently changed. Monk was booked into the Five Spot for a long engagement and he used a quartet that featured tenor saxophonist John Coltrane. Finally, the critics and then the jazz public recognized Thelonious Monk’s greatness during this important gig. The fact that he was unique was a disadvantage a few years earlier when all modern jazz pianists were expected to sound like Bud Powell (who was ironically a close friend), but by 1957 the jazz public was looking for a new approach. Suddenly, Monk was a celebrity and his status would not change for the remainder of his career. In 1958, his quartet featured the tenor of Johnny Griffin (who was even more compatible than Coltrane), in 1959 he appeared with an orchestra at Town Hall (with arrangements by Hall Overton), in 1962 he signed with Columbia and two years later was on the cover of Time. A second orchestra concert in 1963 was even better than the first and Monk toured constantly throughout the 1960s with his quartet which featured the reliable tenor of Charlie Rouse. He played with the Giants of Jazz during 1971-1972, but then in 1973 suddenly retired. Monk was suffering from mental illness and, other than a few special appearances during the mid-’70s, he lived the rest of his life in seclusion. After his death it seemed as if everyone was doing Thelonious Monk tributes. There were so many versions of “‘Round Midnight” that it was practically a pop hit! But despite the posthumous acclaim and attempts by pianists ranging from Marcus Roberts to Tommy Flanagan to recreate his style, there was no replacement for the original.
Some of Thelonious Monk’s songs became standards early on, most notably “‘Round Midnight,” “Straight No Chaser,” “52nd Street Theme,” and “Blue Monk.” Many of his other compositions have by now been figured out by other jazz musicians and are occasionally performed including “Ruby My Dear,” “Well You Needn’t,” “Off Minor,” “In Walked Bud,” “Misterioso,” “Epistrophy,” “I Mean You,” “Four in One,” “Criss Cross,” “Ask Me Now,” “Little Rootie Tootie,” “Monk’s Dream,” “Bemsha Swing,” “Think of One,” “Friday the 13th,” “Hackensack,” “Nutty,” “Brilliant Corners,” “Crepuscule With Nellie” (written for his strong and supportive wife), “Evidence,” and “Rhythm-a-Ning,” Virtually all of Monk’s recordings (for Blue Note, Prestige, Vogue, Riverside, Columbia, and Black Lion) have been reissued and among his sidemen through the years were Idrees Sulieman, Art Blakey, Milt Jackson, Lou Donaldson, Lucky Thompson, Max Roach, Julius Watkins, Sonny Rollins, Clark Terry, Gerry Mulligan, John Coltrane, Wilbur Ware, Shadow Wilson, Johnny Griffin, Donald Byrd, Phil Woods, Thad Jones, and Charlie Rouse.
With the arrival Thelonious Sphere Monk, modern music—let alone modern culture--simply hasn’t been the same. Recognized as one of the most inventive pianists of any musical genre, Monk achieved a startlingly original sound that even his most devoted followers have been unable to successfully imitate. His musical vision was both ahead of its time and deeply rooted in tradition, spanning the entire history of the music from the “stride” masters of James P. Johnson and Willie “the Lion” Smith to the tonal freedom and kinetics of the “avant garde.” And he shares with Edward “Duke” Ellington the distinction of being one of the century’s greatest American composers. At the same time, his commitment to originality in all aspects of life—in fashion, in his creative use of language and economy of words, in his biting humor, even in the way he danced away from the piano—has led fans and detractors alike to call him “eccentric,” “mad” or even “taciturn.” Consequently, Monk has become perhaps the most talked about and least understood artist in the history of jazz.
Born on October 10, 1917, in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, Thelonious was only four when his mother and his two siblings, Marion and Thomas, moved to New York City. Unlike other Southern migrants who headed straight to Harlem, the Monks settled on West 63rd Street in the “San Juan Hill” neighborhood of Manhattan, near the Hudson River. His father, Thelonious, Sr., joined the family three years later, but health considerations forced him to return to North Carolina. During his stay, however, he often played the harmonica, ‘Jew’s harp,” and piano—all of which probably influenced his son’s unyielding musical interests. Young Monk turned out to be a musical prodigy in addition to a good student and a fine athlete. He studied the trumpet briefly but began exploring the piano at age nine. He was about nine when Marion’s piano teacher took Thelonious on as a student. By his early teens, he was playing rent parties, sitting in on organ and piano at a local Baptist church, and was reputed to have won several “amateur hour” competitions at the Apollo Theater.
Admitted to Peter Stuyvesant, one of the city’s best high schools, Monk dropped out at the end of his sophomore year to pursue music and around 1935 took a job as a pianist for a traveling evangelist and faith healer. Returning after two years, he formed his own quartet and played local bars and small clubs until the spring of 1941, when drummer Kenny Clarke hired him as the house pianist at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem.
Minton’s, legend has it, was where the “bebop revolution” began. The after-hours jam sessions at Minton’s, along with similar musical gatherings at Monroe’s Uptown House, Dan Wall’s Chili Shack, among others, attracted a new generation of musicians brimming with fresh ideas about harmony and rhythm—notably Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Mary Lou Williams, Kenny Clarke, Oscar Pettiford, Max Roach, Tadd Dameron, and Monk’s close friend and fellow pianist, Bud Powell. Monk’s harmonic innovations proved fundamental to the development of modern jazz in this period. Anointed by some critics as the “High Priest of Bebop,” several of his compositions (“52nd Street Theme,” “Round Midnight,” “Epistrophy” [co-written with Kenny Clarke and originally titled “Fly Right” and then “Iambic Pentameter”], “I Mean You”) were favorites among his contemporaries.
Yet, as much as Monk helped usher in the bebop revolution, he also charted a new course for modern music few were willing to follow. Whereas most pianists of the bebop era played sparse chords in the left hand and emphasized fast, even eighth and sixteenth notes in the right hand, Monk combined an active right hand with an equally active left hand, fusing stride and angular rhythms that utilized the entire keyboard. And in an era when fast, dense, virtuosic solos were the order of the day, Monk was famous for his use of space and silence. In addition to his unique phrasing and economy of notes, Monk would “lay out” pretty regularly, enabling his sidemen to experiment free of the piano’s fixed pitches. As a composer, Monk was less interested in writing new melodic lines over popular chord progressions than in creating a whole new architecture for his music, one in which harmony and rhythm melded seamlessly with the melody. “Everything I play is different,” Monk once explained, “different melody, different harmony, different structure. Each piece is different from the other. . . . [W]hen the song tells a story, when it gets a certain sound, then it’s through . . . completed.”
Despite his contribution to the early development of modern jazz, Monk remained fairly marginal during the 1940s and early 1950s. Besides occasional gigs with bands led by Kenny Clarke, Lucky Millinder, Kermit Scott, and Skippy Williams, in 1944 tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins was the first to hire Monk for a lengthy engagement and the first to record with him. Most critics and many musicians were initially hostile to Monk’s sound. Blue Note, then a small record label, was the first to sign him to a contract. Thus, by the time he went into the studio to lead his first recording session in 1947, he was already thirty years old and a veteran of the jazz scene for nearly half of his life. But he knew the scene and during the initial two years with Blue Note had hired musicians whom he believed could deliver. Most were not big names at the time but they proved to be outstanding musicians, including trumpeters Idrees Sulieman and George Taitt; twenty-two year-old Sahib Shihab and seventeen-year-old Danny Quebec West on alto saxophones; Billy Smith on tenor; and bassists Gene Ramey and John Simmons. On some recordings Monk employed veteran Count Basie drummer Rossiere “Shadow” Wilson; on others, the drum seat was held by well-known bopper Art Blakey. His last Blue Note session as a leader in 1952 finds Monk surrounded by an all-star band, including Kenny Dorham (trumpet), Lou Donaldson (alto), “Lucky” Thompson (tenor), Nelson Boyd (bass), and Max Roach (drums). In the end, although all of Monk’s Blue Note sides are hailed today as some of his greatest recordings, at the time of their release in the late 1940s and early 1950s, they proved to be a commercial failure.
Harsh, ill-informed criticism limited Monk’s opportunities to work—opportunities he desperately needed especially after his marriage to Nellie Smith in 1947, and the birth of his son, Thelonious, Jr., in 1949. Monk found work where he could, but he never compromised his musical vision. His already precarious financial situation took a turn for the worse in August of 1951, when he was falsely arrested for narcotics possession, essentially taking the rap for his friend Bud Powell. Deprived of his cabaret card—a police-issued “license” without which jazz musicians could not perform in New York clubs—Monk was denied gigs in his home town for the next six years. Nevertheless, he played neighborhood clubs in Brooklyn—most notably, Tony’s Club Grandean, sporadic concerts, took out-of-town gigs, composed new music, and made several trio and ensemble records under the Prestige Label (1952-1954), which included memorable performances with Sonny Rollins, Miles Davis, and Milt Jackson. In the fall of1953, he celebrated the birth of his daughter Barbara, and the following summer he crossed the Atlantic for the first time to play the Paris Jazz Festival. During his stay, he recorded his first solo album for Vogue. These recordings would begin to establish Monk as one of the century’s most imaginative solo pianists.
In 1955, Monk signed with a new label, Riverside, and recorded several outstanding LP’s which garnered critical attention, notably Thelonious Monk Plays Duke Ellington, The Unique Thelonious Monk, Brilliant Corners, Monk’s Music and his second solo album, Thelonious Monk Alone. In 1957, with the help of his friend and sometime patron, the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, he had finally gotten his cabaret card restored and enjoyed a very long and successful engagement at the Five Spot Café with John Coltrane on tenor saxophone, Wilbur Ware and then Ahmed Abdul-Malik on bass, and Shadow Wilson on drums. From that point on, his career began to soar; his collaborations with Johnny Griffin, Sonny Rollins, Art Blakey, Clark Terry, Gerry Mulligan, and arranger Hall Overton, among others, were lauded by critics and studied by conservatory students. Monk even led a successful big band at Town Hall in 1959. It was as if jazz audiences had finally caught up to Monk’s music.
By 1961, Monk had established a more or less permanent quartet consisting of Charlie Rouse on tenor saxophone, John Ore (later Butch Warren and then Larry Gales) on bass, and Frankie Dunlop (later Ben Riley) on drums. He performed with his own big band at Lincoln Center (1963), and at the Monterey Jazz Festival, and the quartet toured Europe in 1961 and Japan in 1963. In 1962, Monk had also signed with Columbia records, one of the biggest labels in the world, and in February of 1964 he became the third jazz musician in history to grace the cover of Time Magazine.
However, with fame came the media’s growing fascination with Monk’s alleged eccentricities. Stories of his behavior on and off the bandstand often overshadowed serious commentary about his music. The media helped invent the mythical Monk—the reclusive, naïve, idiot savant whose musical ideas were supposed to be entirely intuitive rather than the product of intensive study, knowledge and practice. Indeed, his reputation as a recluse (Time called him the "loneliest Monk") reveals just how much Monk had been misunderstood. As his former sideman, tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin, explained, Monk was somewhat of a homebody: "If Monk isn't working he isn't on the scene. Monk stays home. He goes away and rests." Unlike the popular stereotypes of the jazz musician, Monk was devoted to his family. He appeared at family events, played birthday parties, and wrote playfully complex songs for his children: "Little Rootie Tootie" for his son, "Boo Boo's Birthday" and “Green Chimneys” for his daughter, and a Christmas song titled “A Merrier Christmas.” The fact is, the Monk family held together despite long stretches without work, severe money shortages, sustained attacks by critics, grueling road trips, bouts with illness, and the loss of close friends.
During the 1960s, Monk scored notable successes with albums such as Criss Cross, Monk’s Dream, It’s Monk Time, Straight No Chaser, and Underground. But as Columbia/CBS records pursued a younger, rock-oriented audience, Monk and other jazz musicians ceased to be a priority for the label. Monk’s final recording with Columbia was a big band session with Oliver Nelson’s Orchestra in November of 1968, which turned out to be both an artistic and commercial failure. Columbia’s disinterest and Monk’s deteriorating health kept the pianist out of the studio. In January of 1970, Charlie Rouse left the band, and two years later Columbia quietly dropped Monk from its roster. For the next few years, Monk accepted fewer engagements and recorded even less. His quartet featured saxophonists Pat Patrick and Paul Jeffrey, and his son Thelonious, Jr., took over on drums in 1971. That same year through 1972, Monk toured widely with the "Giants of Jazz," a kind of bop revival group consisting of Dizzy Gillespie, Kai Winding, Sonny Stitt, Al McKibbon and Art Blakey, and made his final public appearance in July of 1976. Physical illness, fatigue, and perhaps sheer creative exhaustion convinced Monk to give up playing altogether. On February 5, 1982, he suffered a stroke and never regained consciousness; twelve days later, on February 17th, he died.
Today Thelonious Monk is widely accepted as a genuine master of American music. His compositions constitute the core of jazz repertory and are performed by artists from many different genres. He is the subject of award winning documentaries, biographies and scholarly studies, prime time television tributes, and he even has an Institute created in his name. The Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz was created to promote jazz education and to train and encourage new generations of musicians. It is a fitting tribute to an artist who was always willing to share his musical knowledge with others but expected originality in return.
Some days it can seem that jazz has already entered its antiquarianphase—that it is an art form that has entered the era in which all significantforward development has ceased and the true work is now to record evermore accurately and deeply its origin, development, various sub-movementsand heroes. Jazz as a genre has entered a kind of “eternal present.” In this itresembles its near-relation the blues, as well as rock and pop, and most intriguingly for the sake of this argument, classical music. It would seem thatthere are likely no more innovations to be made. After the dense and atonalharmonic, melodic, rhythmic, and electronic contributions of musicianssuch as Ornette Coleman, the AACM Collective, Cecil Taylor, Andrew Hill,Shannon Jackson, John Zorn, and Bill Frisell among dozens of others, it isdifficult to imagine where new directions would emerge from within therealm of what our civilization thinks of and defines as “music.” The mostskilled contemporary jazz musicians—Wynton Marsalis being an exemplar—are, in truth, glossing on the innovations of thirty, forty, fifty, evensixty years ago. And since one of the fundamental pillars of jazz is innovation based upon individual creativity, its present state revives an old question: is jazz over?To even broach such a question is to risk giving offense, or at best toprovoke arguments that cannot be resolved, but it helps to clarify some ofthe challenges faced by a book such as Thelonious Monk: The Life and Timesof an American Original. With the exception of the Big Band era, jazz hasnever enjoyed a mass audience. Since the advent of the bebop phase—spearheaded by Thelonious Monk, among others—jazz has been losing the support of the sort of audiences that were important to its sustainability. Bigrecord companies—now global conglomerates—no longer view jazz as anart worthy of subsidy. They are now more interested in marketing (milking) the catalogs of a few mythic figures—most notably Miles Davis—whilekeeping, to their credit, other catalogs (such as Monk’s) available on iTunesand other internet sources. The contemporary big names of the jazz worldsuch as Wynton Marsalis, Keith Jarrett, and Brad Mehldau now work fromniche labels like Nonesuch or European labels like ECM, and are economically sustained by serious touring.233a n t h o n y w a l t o nIn this climate, Kelley’s book is all the more urgent and timely. Countless biographies have been written about leading jazz musicians and composers like Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Dizzy Gillespie, but Monk, themusician who was arguably the most significant both in his harmonic andmelodic innovations and lasting influence, has remained the least chronicledand the least well-known. Jazz is an American art form, invented and refinedby Americans, then embraced and celebrated by Europeans, Africans, andthe Japanese as a new genre of musical expression and it is crucial that itshistory be rigorously documented for students and researchers of the future.Given the threatened state of the publishing industry one cannot help butwonder if there will be another big biography of a jazz artist published bya New York house, an important issue, given the resources and marketingpower possessed by those companies. If jazz has any hope of remaining ator near the center of American consciousness, these books must be written,and published by the major publishers. There is not a large archive, compared to that of, say, Duke Ellingtonand Miles Davis, on Monk. Earlier books in English include Straight NoChaser: The Life and Genius of Thelonious Monk, by Leslie Gourse, until nowthe best biography, and yet an essentially journalistic account that reliesupon first-person interviews and secondary research; Monk, by Laurent deWilde, useful to Monk fans and jazz aficionados, but narrowly focused onthe music, and perhaps the victim of a breathless translation; TheloniousMonk: His Life and Music, by Thomas Fitterling, a serious and well-executedoverview that provides a brief biographical essay, a very useful study ofwhat makes Monk’s music “Monk,” and a thorough discography and videocatalog to 1996, the date of publication; Monk’s Music: Thelonious Monkand Jazz History in the Making, by Gabriel Solis, an insightful take on howreputations are made and lost in jazz, with specific attention to the life andcareer of Monk; and The Thelonious Monk Reader, edited by Rob Van DerBliek, a valuable survey that collects much of the best writing, journalistic,musicological, and biographical, on Monk to 1996. These books have “heldthe fort” for Monk scholarship. Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of anAmerican Original now advances our understanding of the artist and hiscontext in ways that are essential and unanticipated.There is perhaps no author better positioned than Robin D.G. Kelley totake on the writing of the definitive Monk biography. Professor of Historyand American Studies at the University of Southern California, Kelley is a234N o t r e D a m e R e v i e wdistinguished and award-winning scholar of the African American workingclass and black leftist thought and culture, two fields which are particularlyuseful to the study of Thelonious Monk. (This is not to imply that Monkwas a “leftist” or even “progressive” thinker—he most certainly had his ownopinions and beliefs, even when they cost him dearly, and for a black personin the middle of the last century to be an independent thinker was necessarily to be classed as subversive). Kelley’s previous books include Race Rebels:Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class; Freedom Dreams: The BlackRadical Imagination; Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During TheGreat Depression; and Yo’ Mama’s DisFunktional!: Fighting The Culture WarsIn Urban America.Kelley is also a serious amateur pianist with a lifelong obsession withthe music of Thelonious Monk: “Three decades ago…my new stepfather,Paul, a professional tenor sax player, had me listen to Monk and JohnnyGriffin perform ‘Evidence.’ Soon I memorized everyone’s solo on thatrecord… I became completely obsessed with Monk’s sound, his cling-clangsound of surprise, rich with deafening silences, dissonances, and harmonicambiguities.” Kelley combines a musician’s understanding with his skill asa cultural historian to produce a landmark among critical biographies. Hisbook supplies the who, what, where, when and how of the subject’s personaland artistic development, the less known facts of his private life, the hardwon triumphs and brutal conflicts of any artist whose chosen form requiresparticipation in a commercial, market-based system. But Kelley does muchmore: most notably, he contributes to the current project of filling in thedetails of African-American life and culture in the 20th century. The experiences of the wider Monk family are an exhibit of the successes and tragedies,personal and community-wide, of Great Migration blacks.Kelley’s study also notes the sometimes surprising connections betweenvarious schools and groups of modernist and postmodern musicians, artists and intellectuals in postwar New York, Chicago and the West Coast,exemplified by Monk’s warm, and satisfying partnership with composer andarranger Hall Overton and the hipster “scene” at the Five Spot Café whereMonk’s groups, including Coltrane, were the house band for years.While this is not an authorized biography, the first-time cooperation ofthe Monk family enables Kelley to take us deep into its subject’s personaland family life. Monk in popular journalism and history is often portrayedas an eccentric loner of genius who emerged fully formed from nowhere.Kelley provides context; we see Monk as the member of an extended family,as a child and young man in the neighborhood, we learn about his courtships and private dreams—including his amusing and repeated attempts to235a n t h o n y w a l t o nbecome a pop songwriter in the manner of Harold Arlen or Rodgers andHammerstein. Monk’s life can be roughly divided into four phases, each of which Kelley relates with exhaustive detail and analysis. He begins with a strategy thatseems at first problematic: a detailed discussion of antebellum North Carolina and the remote history of the Monk family, black and white. The readermight ask why any of this matters. But in fact it sets forth the conditions forthe production of a singular and durable creativity. Kelley maps the Monksof North Carolina as they emerge from slavery and Reconstruction andtheir long, grim sequel to create the opportunities that young Theloniouswas able to grasp and utilize as an avant-garde musician in New York. (Hisbrother Thomas became one of the city’s first black police commanders.)This first phase of Monk’s life can be thought of as coming to a closewhen he signed with Blue Note Records in 1947 after difficult, sometimesharrowing slog through the brutalities of the music business. An example isthe “theft” of credit for Monk’s standard “Round Midnight” by bandleaderCootie Williams and lyricist Bernie Hanighen. It was common for leaders toclaim songs written by others as a price for playing them, but this case wasextreme, both because of the roughness with which Monk was treated andbecause the song became one of the most famous and successful in the jazzrepertory: “Thelonious had nothing to do with these lyrics,” Kelley writes,and may not have known they existed. “Hanighen and his estate receive athird of the royalties from every version of ‘Round Midnight’ produced.And in turn the original composer and his estate receive only a third of theroyalties—to this very day.” This sort of rapacity, coupled with a grindingschedule of low-paid club gigs and five-and-ten dollar sideman appearanceswould have deterred almost anyone but Monk.Monk was more fortunate than many musicians in the bebop worldin that he had a family who supported his aspirations and largely allowedhim to go his own way. Both his mother, Barbara, who insisted he get aneducation and bought him his first piano, and his wife, Nellie, who workedlong hours to make sure family ends were met while unstintingly supporting Monk’s career, made it possible for him to survive the drought of the‘40s when he was known as a musician’s musician and little else. Monkwatched Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, among others, achieve recording contracts and fame with ideas and techniques that he had worked outand shared in the jam sessions and tutorials held at his home while he had236N o t r e D a m e R e v i e wdifficulty even recording. The contract with Blue Note would change that,though paradoxically Monk’s life would also enter another stretch of difficulty.The second phase of Monk’s life can be thought of as a movement fromthis initial success to his signing, in 1962, with the largest, most successfulrecord company in the business, Columbia. This is perhaps the most purelyenjoyable section of the book. The reader can almost feel the narrative takeflight as Monk grows as an artist, builds a family, and sets a course towardenormous artistic distinction. Watching him persevere through the indifference of the music business, the blockheadedness of critics (some of whomwould become large boosters when things turned around), and the competitive betrayals of “frenemies” like Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, and MaxRoach (all of whom were much better manipulators of the marketplace) ashe composes and records classic after classic, we recognize the archetypalAmerican rags-to-riches story, augmented by fresh streams of biographical information: anecdotes from members of the family, interviews withmusical collaborators, neighbors and friends, government records, companyarchives, and other nonfiction and academic studies of jazz, New York City,African American history, the decades of the ’20s, ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s.Explanations of Monk’s idiosyncratic titles are, for the devotee, a smallexample of Kelly’s skill, as are the histories of the pieces. Monk was notoriousfor cryptic and obscure song titles like “Ba-lue Bolivar Ba-lues Are,” “Crepuscule With Nellie,” “Little Rootie Tootie,” and “Rhythm-a-ning.” Parsingthe title of Monk’s first great composition (with drummer Kenny Clarke),“Epistrophy,” Kelley shows that these can be more than just whimsy: “Thetitle ‘Epistrophy’ or ‘Epistrophe,’ means ‘turning about’ in Greek, and refersto a literary device in which a word or expression is deliberately repeated atthe end of successive phrases, clauses, sentences, or verses. A less commondefinition appears in the 1929 edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary: ‘2. Music. A phrase or section repeated at the end of the divisions ofa cyclic composition; a refrain.’ Combine the literary and the musical andwe have a title that beautifully describes the structure of the melody. Constructed out of repeated phrases, the melodic line turns in on itself.”Kelley also gives a thorough account of the dark side of Monk’s life atthis time, including his struggles with the NYPD and loss of his cabaretcard, without which musicians could not perform in any establishment thatserved alcohol. The true extent of Monk’s drug use has never been determined, but he was once arrested and did time for marijuana possession and,in another instance, took the rap for a friend’s drug possession. These missteps cost him his ability to work in clubs for long stretches of time. Kelley237a n t h o n y w a l t o ncovers these issues fairly and with balance, placing them in the context ofdrug policy at the time and of the popular association of any sort of nonconformity with the “Red Menace.”The third phase of Monk’s life, from the Columbia signing througha frustrating, perhaps ultimately negative, experience with that companyand the concurrent, if ironic, securing of his global fame, exhibits anothertriumph of Kelley’s craft. It is difficult to comprehend, from our perspective,that Monk’s peak as an artist could have proved such a time of difficultyand frustration. Monk never really found a secure place at Columbia; thecompany demanded three albums a year, and wanted more compositionsfrom Monk than he was inclined to produce; Monk was often more motivated to re-examine and re-interpret existing material from his nearly onehundred tunes. The Columbia work does not finally stand with his best Riverside and Blue Note recordings; on the other hand, the Columbia publicitydepartment was able to make Monk as well known as his music deserved.Monk appeared on the cover of the February 28, 1964 issue of Time, anarticle that did more than any other to cement his eccentric reputation. Thewriter portrayed Monk as addicted to prescription drugs, as child-like anddependent on the care of his wife and his friend Pannonica Koeningswarter.Displeased, Monk was quoted as saying, “That’s a drag picture they’repainting of me,” but he did experience a rise in album sales, as well as moreperformances, here and abroad.But something else was also happening. It is difficult to ascertain exactlywhen Monk began to decline as an artist, and more crucially, when hishealth began to fail with devastating consequences, but we can now see thisin hindsight as a clear fourth phase. This final period can be dated fromthe late 60s, and particularly marked by Monk’s release from his Columbia contract in 1970. By then he had been in and out of the hospital withuntreated bipolar disorder, and may have been self-medicating with cocaineand vitamin B12 injections.Kelley does not sugarcoat or romanticize the suffering but providesa blow by blow account of the last ten years of Monk’s life, including thefinal stage when he did not touch a piano and rarely left his room. Somehave attributed this decline to the effects of long-term drug use, others tothe bipolar disorder, yet others to some sort of undiagnosed dementia. It isa grim ending, one that was common among jazz superstars, the outcomeof grinding decades of difficulty, and one can’t help but think that such adecline was the ultimate consequence of those qualities that enabled Monkto create such an original and classical body of work: his unflinching independence, his stubborn and surprising self-confidence, his extraordinarily238N o t r e D a m e R e v i e whigh standards for both himself and his collaborators. Sustaining such anuncompromising posture while living a life on the edges of “bourgeois”society must have been an enormous strain, and it is miraculous that Monksurvived and thrived as long as he did. Independence was the core value ofthe Monk clan: both Monk and his wife Nellie regularly told their children,“Be yourself… Don’t bother about what other people say, because you areyou. The thing is to just be yourself.” It cost them, but they held to it. ToKelley’s enormous credit, he recreates, in depth, the entire story, gloriousand tragic, which will now be available for study and interpretation.The book is, of course, not perfect. At times the reader is left to suspectthat Kelley, even in his honest recounting of the problematic aspects ofMonk’s life, is too sympathetic with his subject. Too often—both as an African American and as a jazz lover—he editorializes in an “insider” stance thatcan mar the book. Also, he openly speculates at times, in ways that don’tseem necessary or helpful to his narrative. There might also be an argumentthat Kelley, if anything, knows too much about the subject and relatedmatters, which can lead to digressions, such as his overly detailed account ofthe teen-aged Monk’s tour with evangelists. Also (and this is not the writer’sfault), the book could have used more rigorous copyediting, a thing hard tocome by in these days of publishing cutbacks and collapsed schedules.Finally, and most simply, the book’s signal achievement is that it succeeds at demythologizing Monk. Jazz has suffered from the projection of thewriter’s (and the audience’s) needs onto the artists. Monk has suffered fromthis projection—the eccentric artist, the mad genius, the idiot savant—asmuch as any. Robin D.G. Kelley has given us a view of Monk as an authentic individual from a real family that faced specific economic and socialchallenges during a particular era in American history. He has gathered andorganized much of what can be known about Monk. Thelonious Monk: TheLife and Times of an American Original stands as a model of the kind ofwork that remains to be done in the study of jazz. Work in which jazz is understood as a living art still has much to teach us, lessons that go beyond thehistory of any individual to the history of the larger society, of ethnic groupsand commercial systems. But it remains, most of all, a book about one ofthe giants of a seminal art form, one which may very well resurrect itself, asart forms tend to do, and become central in the future. With that in mind,what Kelley has achieved comes into focus: All you future Departments ofMonk Studies, you have your foundation document.
With the arrival Thelonious Sphere Monk, modern music—let alone modern culture–simply hasn’t been the same. Recognized as one of the most inventive pianists of any musical genre, Monk achieved a startlingly original sound that even his most devoted followers have been unable to successfully imitate. His musical vision was both ahead of its time and deeply rooted in tradition, spanning the entire history of the music from the “stride” masters of James P. Johnson and Willie “the Lion” Smith to the tonal freedom and kinetics of the “avant garde.” And he shares with Edward “Duke” Ellington the distinction of being one of the century’s greatest American composers. At the same time, his commitment to originality in all aspects of life—in fashion, in his creative use of language and economy of words, in his biting humor, even in the way he danced away from the piano—has led fans and detractors alike to call him “eccentric,” “mad” or even “taciturn.” Consequently, Monk has become perhaps the most talked about and least understood artists in the history of jazz.
Born on October 10, 1917, in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, Thelonious was only four when his mother and his two siblings, Marion and Thomas, moved to New York City. Unlike other Southern migrants who headed straight to Harlem, the Monks settled on West 63rd Street in the “San Juan Hill” neighborhood of Manhattan, near the Hudson River. His father, Thelonious, Sr., joined the family three years later, but health considerations forced him to return to North Carolina. During his stay, however, he often played the harmonica, ‘Jew’s harp,” and piano—all of which probably influenced his son’s unyielding musical interests. Young Monk turned out to be a musical prodigy in addition to a good student and a fine athlete. He studied the trumpet briefly but began exploring the piano at age nine. He was about nine when Marion’s piano teacher took Thelonious on as a student. By his early teens, he was playing rent parties, sitting in on organ and piano at a local Baptist church, and was reputed to have won several “amateur hour” competitions at the Apollo Theater.
Admitted to Stuyvesant, one of the city’s best high schools, Monk dropped out at the end of his sophomore year to pursue music and around 1935 took a job as a pianist for a traveling evangelist and faith healer. Returning after two years, he formed his own quartet and played local bars and small clubs until the spring of 1941, when drummer Kenny Clarke hired him as the house pianist at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem.
Minton’s, legend has it, was where the “bebop revolution” began. The after-hours jam sessions at Minton’s, along with similar musical gatherings at Monroe’s Uptown House, Dan Wall’s Chili Shack, among others, attracted a new generation of musicians brimming with fresh ideas about harmony and rhythm—notably Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Mary Lou Williams, Kenny Clarke, Oscar Pettiford, Max Roach, Tadd Dameron, and Monk’s close friend and fellow pianist, Bud Powell. Monk’s harmonic innovations proved fundamental to the development of modern jazz in this period. Anointed by some critics as the “High Priest of Bebop,” several of his compositions (“52nd Street Theme,” “Round Midnight,” “Epistrophy” [co-written with Kenny Clarke and originally titled “Fly Right” and then “Iambic Pentameter”], “I Mean You”) were favorites among his contemporaries.
Yet, as much as Monk helped usher in the bebop revolution, he also charted a new course for modern music few were willing to follow. Whereas most pianists of the bebop era played sparse chords in the left hand and emphasized fast, even eighth and sixteenth notes in the right hand, Monk combined an active right hand with an equally active left hand, fusing stride and angular rhythms that utilized the entire keyboard. And in an era when fast, dense, virtuosic solos were the order of the day, Monk was famous for his use of space and silence. In addition to his unique phrasing and economy of notes, Monk would “lay out” pretty regularly, enabling his sidemen to experiment free of the piano’s fixed pitches. As a composer, Monk was less interested in writing new melodic lines over popular chord progressions than in creating a whole new architecture for his music, one in which harmony and rhythm melded seamlessly with the melody. “Everything I play is different,” Monk once explained, “different melody, different harmony, different structure. Each piece is different from the other. . . . [W]hen the song tells a story, when it gets a certain sound, then it’s through . . . completed.”
Despite his contribution to the early development of modern jazz, Monk remained fairly marginal during the 1940s and early 1950s. Besides occasional gigs with bands led by Kenny Clarke, Lucky Millinder, Kermit Scott, and Skippy Williams, in 1944 tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins was the first to hire Monk for a lengthy engagement and the first to record with him. Most critics and many musicians were initially hostile to Monk’s sound. Blue Note, then a small record label, was the first to sign him to a contract. Thus, by the time he went into the studio to lead his first recording session in 1947, he was already thirty years old and a veteran of the jazz scene for nearly half of his life. But he knew the scene and during the initial two years with Blue Note had hired musicians whom he believed could deliver. Most were not big names at the time but they proved to be outstanding musicians, including trumpeters Idrees Sulieman and George Taitt; twenty-two year-old Sahib Shihab and seventeen-year-old Danny Quebec West on alto saxophones; Billy Smith on tenor; and bassists Gene Ramey and John Simmons. On some recordings Monk employed veteran Count Basie drummer Rossiere “Shadow” Wilson; on others, the drum seat was held by well-known bopper Art Blakey. His last Blue Note session as a leader in 1952 finds Monk surrounded by an all-star band, including Kenny Dorham (trumpet), Lou Donaldson (alto), “Lucky” Thompson (tenor), Nelson Boyd (bass), and Max Roach (drums). In the end, although all of Monk’s Blue Note sides are hailed today as some of his greatest recordings, at the time of their release in the late 1940s and early 1950s, they proved to be a commercial failure.
Harsh, ill-informed criticism limited Monk’s opportunities to work—opportunities he desperately needed especially after his marriage to Nellie Smith in 1947, and the birth of his son, Thelonious, Jr., in 1949. Monk found work where he could, but he never compromised his musical vision. His already precarious financial situation took a turn for the worse in August of 1951, when he was falsely arrested for narcotics possession, essentially taking the rap for his friend Bud Powell. Deprived of his cabaret card—a police-issued “license” without which jazz musicians could not perform in New York clubs—Monk was denied gigs in his home town for the next six years. Nevertheless, he played neighborhood clubs in Brooklyn—most notably, Tony’s Club Grandean, sporadic concerts, took out-of-town gigs, composed new music, and made several trio and ensemble records under the Prestige Label (1952-1954), which included memorable performances with Sonny Rollins, Miles Davis, and Milt Jackson. In the fall of1953, he celebrated the birth of his daughter Barbara, and the following summer he crossed the Atlantic for the first time to play the Paris Jazz Festival. During his stay, he recorded his first solo album for Vogue. These recordings would begin to establish Monk as one of the century’s most imaginative solo pianists.
In 1955, Monk signed with a new label, Riverside, and recorded several outstanding LP’s which garnered critical attention, notably Thelonious Monk Plays Duke Ellington, The Unique Thelonious Monk, Brilliant Corners, Monk’s Music and his second solo album, Thelonious Monk Alone. In 1957, with the help of his friend and sometime patron, the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, he had finally gotten his cabaret card restored and enjoyed a very long and successful engagement at the Five Spot Café with John Coltrane on tenor saxophone, Wilbur Ware and then Ahmed Abdul-Malik on bass, and Shadow Wilson on drums. From that point on, his career began to soar; his collaborations with Johnny Griffin, Sonny Rollins, Art Blakey, Clark Terry, Gerry Mulligan, and arranger Hall Overton, among others, were lauded by critics and studied by conservatory students. Monk even led a successful big band at Town Hall in 1959. It was as if jazz audiences had finally caught up to Monk’s music.
By 1961, Monk had established a more or less permanent quartet consisting of Charlie Rouse on tenor saxophone, John Ore (later Butch Warren and then Larry Gales) on bass, and Frankie Dunlop (later Ben Riley) on drums. He performed with his own big band at Lincoln Center (1963), and at the Monterey Jazz Festival, and the quartet toured Europe in 1961 and Japan in 1963. In 1962, Monk had also signed with Columbia records, one of the biggest labels in the world, and in February of 1964 he became the third jazz musician in history to grace the cover of Time Magazine.
However, with fame came the media’s growing fascination with Monk’s alleged eccentricities. Stories of his behavior on and off the bandstand often overshadowed serious commentary about his music. The media helped invent the mythical Monk—the reclusive, naïve, idiot savant whose musical ideas were supposed to be entirely intuitive rather than the product of intensive study, knowledge and practice. Indeed, his reputation as a recluse (Time called him the “loneliest Monk”) reveals just how much Monk had been misunderstood. As his former sideman, tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin, explained, Monk was somewhat of a homebody: “If Monk isn’t working he isn’t on the scene. Monk stays home. He goes away and rests.” Unlike the popular stereotypes of the jazz musician, Monk was devoted to his family. He appeared at family events, played birthday parties, and wrote playfully complex songs for his children: “Little Rootie Tootie” for his son, “Boo Boo’s Birthday” and “Green Chimneys” for his daughter, and a Christmas song titled “A Merrier Christmas.” The fact is, the Monk family held together despite long stretches without work, severe money shortages, sustained attacks by critics, grueling road trips, bouts with illness, and the loss of close friends.
During the 1960s, Monk scored notable successes with albums such as Criss Cross, Monk’s Dream, It’s Monk Time, Straight No Chaser, and Underground. But as Columbia/CBS records pursued a younger, rock-oriented audience, Monk and other jazz musicians ceased to be a priority for the label. Monk’s final recording with Columbia was a big band session with Oliver Nelson’s Orchestra in November of 1968, which turned out to be both an artistic and commercial failure. Columbia’s disinterest and Monk’s deteriorating health kept the pianist out of the studio. In January of 1970, Charlie Rouse left the band, and two years later Columbia quietly dropped Monk from its roster. For the next few years, Monk accepted fewer engagements and recorded even less. His quartet featured saxophonists Pat Patrick and Paul Jeffrey, and his son T. S. Monk, took over on drums in 1971. That same year through 1972, Monk toured widely with the “Giants of Jazz,” a kind of bop revival group consisting of Dizzy Gillespie, Kai Winding, Sonny Stitt, Al McKibbon and Art Blakey, and made his final public appearance in July of 1976. Physical illness, fatigue, and perhaps sheer creative exhaustion convinced Monk to give up playing altogether. On February 5, 1982, he suffered a stroke and never regained consciousness; twelve days later, on February 17th, he died.
Today Thelonious Monk is widely accepted as a genuine master of American music. His compositions constitute the core of jazz repertory and are performed by artists from many different genres. He is the subject of award winning documentaries, biographies and scholarly studies, prime time television tributes, and he even had an Institute created in his name, to promote jazz education and to train and encourage new generations of musicians. – Robin D. G. Kelley Ph.D.
Robin D. G. Kelley, a Professor of Anthropology, African American Studies and Jazz Studies at Columbia University, has published several books on African American culture and politics. His most recent book is Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (2002). His articles on music have appeared in the New York Times, Black Music Research Journal, The Nation, Lenox Avenue, Rolling Stone, American Visions, among others. He is currently completing two books: Thelonious: A Life (The Free Press, forthcoming 2009), and Speaking in Tongues: Jazz and Modern Africa (Harvard University Press, forthcoming 2006)
f the era of the generally acknowledged classic jazz recording – a genre stretching from Louis Armstrong's West End Blues to John Coltrane's A Love Supreme – was brought to an end first by the passing of the great 20th-century innovators and then by the overwhelming profusion of recordings produced by the musicians of subsequent generations, it would be wrong to assume that no contemporary work is worthy of a place in the pantheon.
When historians come to assess the jazz created in the first decade of the 21st century, for instance, they should not overlook Monk's Casino, a recital of all 70 of the compositions attributed to Thelonious Sphere Monk Jr, interpreted by a quintet under the leadership of the distinguished German pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach. Performed in a nightclub and cast in the form of a continuous medley lasting three and a half hours, this prodigious achievement invites the listener to revel not just in the musicians' extraordinary inventiveness but in the ceaselessly surprising nature of the material from which they draw their inspiration.
Schlippenbach's project was original only in its attempt to provide a complete catalogue raisonnée of Monk's tunes. During the composer's lifetime a number of prominent musicians dedicated albums to his compositions; the soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy went further and gave over a great proportion of his career to the deep exploration of Monk's music, like some medieval scholar engaged in a study of theological texts. But still, as Schlippenbach and his colleagues so amply demonstrate, the well is far from dry, and every night in jazz clubs around the world musicians who were unborn when Monk died in 1982 can be found grappling with the melodic, harmonic and rhythmic subtexts of such masterpieces of musical cryptology as "Well You Needn't", "Epistrophy" and "Straight, No Chaser", and exploring the luminous beauty of his ballads, including "Round Midnight", "Crepuscule With Nellie" and "Ruby, My Dear".
If Monk's compositions, with their unexpected angles, abrupt rhythms and astringent dissonances, are full of mysteries, then so was their creator. Initially derided by all but the inner circle of the bebop revolution, eventually he was embraced by the vanguard of the beat generation, to whom he symbolised the postwar shift of jazz from popular entertainment to intellectual exercise. Monk was the jazz equivalent of free verse or abstract expressionism, wrapped in a suitably enigmatic presence. He never lost his ability to create controversy, whether it was provoking Miles Davis into complaining of his unhelpfulness as an accompanist, or leading influential critics to accuse him of staleness after the effects of a bipolar disorder had begun to undermine his powers.
The jazz of the last century was peopled with extraordinary characters, but even by those standards Monk was a fascinating and often unreadable figure. The perceived outlandishness of his music seemed to be mirrored by his appearance and behaviour, from his bamboo-framed sunglasses and a variety of exotic headgear to the strange little dances he performed while other musicians were taking their solos. A decade and a half of research into his life and work has probably brought Robin Kelley, a professor of history and American studies at the University of Southern California, as close as anyone will ever come to finding out what made him tick with such an eccentric but compelling rhythm.
The name, which seemed to have been confected by some beat generation marketing genius, was real. The surname was conferred on his family by one Archibald Monk, a plantation owner who, in the mid-19th century, enslaved Thelonious Jr's great-grandfather. The Christian name came from a Benedictine missionary saint of the seventh century, bestowed first on his father by sharecropper parents with an imaginative cast of mind (there were siblings called Squire and Theodoras). "Sphere" was Thelonious Jr's own subsequent addition, adapted from a family name (Speer) on his mother's side.
Born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, in 1917, he was four years old when his mother left her husband and, with three small children, moved to New York, where they settled in San Juan Hill, a neighbourhood that was home to thousands of emigres from the southern states and the Caribbean. It was here, amid a daily life vividly evoked by Kelley, that Monk discovered music, including the hymns and gospel songs he heard at home and in church and the distinctive New York stride piano styles of Eubie Blake, James P Johnson and Willie "The Lion" Smith.
As his fame grew, it became fashionable to portray him as some sort of noble savage, an untutored genius reaching back to Africa to restore a lost "purity" to jazz. In fact, as the author shows, between the ages of 11 and 13 he studied with a teacher who exposed him to the classical literature, including the works of Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Rachmaninoff and Liszt. At 17, having just missed a scholarship to the Juilliard conservatory, he went on the road accompanying an evangelist; at 22, back in New York, he was leading his own quartet, the forerunner of those with which he would tour the world in the 1960s and 70s, after fame, if not fortune, had finally found him.
Kelley describes in considerable detail Monk's crucial role in the birth of bebop at such legendary after-hours joints as Minton's Playhouse and Monroe's Uptown House, where Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker were among his accomplices (and whose greater success provoked a lasting resentment). He describes how, in 1948, the publicity campaign for Monk's first recordings established the conventional view of "a shy and elusive person . . . surrounded by an aura of mystery . . . a strange person whose pianistics continue to baffle all who hear him". This was both true, in that he could be obtuse and unreliable, and much less than the truth, given his parallel existence as a loving husband, doting father, constant friend, cheerful neighbour and generous teacher, and the sheer playfulness of many of his compositions.
Gradually, however, the image of the High Priest of Bebop caught the public imagination. Despite being severely hindered by his inability to work in New York clubs for many years thanks to the withdrawal of his "cabaret card" by the New York police after a minor drugs offence, a slow and painful path ultimately led to acceptance in the late 1950s, when he became the first black jazz musician to appear on the cover of Time magazine.
A functional rather than an elegant writer, but a terrific sleuth whose copious footnotes are worth perusal, Kelley also charts Monk's troubled experiences with the music industry. After early exposure with the cream of the independent jazz labels – Blue Note, Prestige and Riverside – he joined the glittering jazz roster of Columbia Records, a major company.
Unlike his labelmates Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck and Duke Ellington, however, Monk lacked even the semblance of a careerist impulse and, despite the efforts of Columbia's art department to relaunch him as a countercultural figure in the late 60s, he failed to live up to their hopes of significant commercial success. If the accounting methods of the independent labels were far from immaculate, Columbia's practices invoke a sense of shame: at the end of 1976, after recording 13 albums for the label, Monk was indebted to the company to the tune of $16,594.71, a sum that one imagines has been amply recouped since his death.
Thoughtful attention is given to Monk's coexistent relationships with his spouse, Nellie – "wife, road manager, business manager, mother, caregiver and accountant" – and his friend and benefactor Pannonica de Koenigswarter, the Bentley-driving Rothschild heiress. It was in the Jazz Baroness's New Jersey home, a modernist house originally built for the film director Erich von Stroheim, that he spent the last years of his life, dressing in a suit and tie every morning in order to spend the day on his bed, watching The Price is Right on television.
Lithium treatment had slowed the advance of his bipolar attacks – almost certainly inherited from his father – but had also, probably in combination with a lifetime's use of alcohol and marijuana (regular), cocaine and heroin (intermittent), and amphetamines (prescribed by a rogue medic), brought his musical output to a full stop long before a stroke finished him off. Those 70 compositions survive, a fount of gnomic musical wisdom for future generations to explore.
SCARCE THELONIOUS SPHERE MONK FUNERAL PROGRAM OBITUARY 1982 ORIGINAL VINTAGE:
$3372.02
Related Items:
SCARCE THELONIOUS SPHERE MONK FUNERAL PROGRAM OBITUARY 1982 ORIGINAL VINTAGE
$3372.02
