Review

Robin D.G. Kelley

Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original

Despite the rise of jazz studies, the history of jazz remains wound up with a great deal of mythology (not that its the fault of the jazz studies field; these processes take time to unwind). And within The Jazz Tradition, no figure is more heavily mythologized than Thelonious Monk (save for Buddy Bolden, and, perhaps, Charlie Parker and John Coltrane). As Robin Kelley points out in his new biography of Monk, this process of mythologizing began even before Monk became notable outside of a circle of jazz musicians. The image of Monk the disaffected was essentially invented by Bill Gottlieb, a writer and photographer for Down Beat assigned to write about Monk in 1947. Having heard Monk's name dropped in interviews with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, Gottlieb envisioned Monk as "the George Washington of bebop," a Bolden-like figure who was pivotal to the bebop revolution.

His profile, which appeared in the September 24 (1947) issue of Down Beat, "set in motion the image of Monk as a mysterious, eccentric figure," asserts Kelley. It was an image against which Kelley tries to set the record straight. Unlike previous Monk biographers, Kelley had access to scores of private home recordings made by Monk and his wife Nellie, which present the image of Monk as a man of wide interests who was not indifferent to musical traditions, Western and otherwise, as the popular image of Monk asserts. Kelley paints a vivid portrait of Monk, the well-informed artist who struggled to make a living, but had the determination and self-assuredness to persist, knowing his music was both important and accessible.

Especially poignant are the scenes in which Monk struggles to deal with what was likely an undiagnosed case of bipolar disorder, which led to stints at psychiatric wards and regimens of amphetamine-laced vitamin shots and Thorazine which made his condition worse, not to mention countless manic episodes. This is a warts-and-all treatment of Monk, who leaned on the women in his life (including his mother, his wife, and confidant the baroness Nica de Koenigswarter) to take care of him while he focused much of his energy on his music and other diversions.

However, this is not to say that Monk does not emerge from the book as a triumphant figure. Kelley does not dispute the importance of Monk in the history of jazz, though he does rightfully critique Monk's complaints during the height of bebop's popularity that he did not get enough credit for his role in the development of the music. In the end, though, Monk seems more like a tragic figure than a triumphant one. While some of his peers like Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie thrived in the late-1950s and beyond, Monk frequently studied to make ends meet or even get gigs, on top of his psychological disorder.

If I may be slightly tendentious here, it is fitting that Kelley, a professional historian, wrote such a book as this. It takes the kind of person who thrives sifting through archives and staring at as few as three documents in one day to achieve this precision of the events covered in this book while also painting a coherent portrait of the man. With access to a treasure trove of personal recordings, which more than make up for the fact that Monk left no personal papers or journals to posterity, Kelley digs deep and sifts through the clutter to give us a story of a musician whose work remains a vital toucstone to jazz in the 21st century.

Willis Conover introduces Monk at Newport in 1958, clearly referencing the image of Monk the eccentric.

Bonus Material: Bop and Beyond interviews Kelley and has a few more words from the author.
Extra credit: Gabriel Solis' Monk's Music pairs quite nicely with Kelley's biography.

Thelonious, Nica

I promise I'll review Robin Kelley's new Monk biography, but I'm taking my time with the book. Although I can already tell you it is a good read. Kelley goes into great detail to give the reader the fullest portrait of Monk possible. Kelley succeeds in presenting the inner world of Monk, free of the mythologizing that dominated the popular image of Monk for so long.

Kelley was interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air today, have a listen. Terry also interviewed Hannah Rothschild, whose documentary on her Great Aunt, the Baroness Nica de Koenigswarter, is airing on HBO2 this month. Listen to it here.

Runnin' the Voodoo Down

• The fiftieth anniversary of Thelonious Monk's Town Hall concert was celebrated with a pair of concerts by Jason Moran and Charles Tolliver: Fred Kaplan, Ben Ratliff, and Will Friedwald have recaps and comments. Below the links is a video of Moran discussing Monk and preforming "Crepescule with Nellie." (UPDATE: Kaplan also filed a piece on the concerts in Slate today. Read it here).
  
• Jazzhouse Diaries posted a paper by Mark Gridley examining the linkages between free jazz and the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. It's quite long, but provides a long-overdue counterpoint to the narrative first propogated by Amiri Baraka and Frank Kofsky which placed free jazz squarely within the context of 1960s Black Nationalism.
• Between the Grooves takes a look at singer/guitarist Madeleine Peyroux.
• Doug Ramsey examines a recently-unearthed 1956 television performance of the Dave Brubeck Quartet.
• There is some wonderful jazz photography being shown at Jazz in Photo.
  
• This isn't about jazz per se, but interesting to me nonetheless. The LA Times filed a story last week about the increasing number of nonblack faculty teaching African American Studies at US colleges and universities. The piece elicited an interesting response from Keith Josef Adkins on The Root, who recalled questioning the authenticity of white instructors in a graduate seminar on Black Culture and Experience. He writes, "When most students think of Black Studies they imagine 'sanctuary' and a white professor (brilliant or not) is not part of that imagining." This is a subject I once thought about a lot as a white graduate student studying African American history, and one that continues to reveal a certain sense of friction within Academe.

Holiday Break

I'm off to Florida for the holiday, so no blogging until Monday. In the meantime, enjoy some links, and a stray YouTube or two...

• Jazz.com has an interview up with Dave Holland. Also check out their "Dozens" list of 12 Jazz Perspectives on The Beatles.
  
• This is from a few weeks ago, but read the program notes from the recent Secret Society gig at the Jazz Gallery, written by fearless leader Darcy James Argue. Messr. Argue writes earnestly about his and the Society's devotion to "this staggeringly inefficient method of music-creation." You can also read his All About Jazz interview here.
  
• Mark Myers remembers Thelonious Alone in San Francisco on JazzWax.
• I wish I had known about this 1964 Playboy jazz symposium featuring Cannonball Adderley, Dave Brubeck, Dizzy Gillespie, Ralph J. Gleason, Stan Kenton, Charles Mingus, Gerry Mulligan, George Russell and Gunther Schuller when I was working on my MA thesis. It has some great discussions on the economics of jazz, race, cultural ownership, and the avant-garde.
• From The Gear Page, a tongue-in-cheek story about federal bailout funds for jazz musicians (h/t: International Review of Music).
  
• Though I already covered the subject in my Marsalis/Reagan post, just in case you skipped it, you really need to sit down with DTM's extensive posts on Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz Wars. Start here, and enjoy. Also, big thanks to Ethan Iverson for linking my Marsalis piece, it is very nice to be noticed.

That's it. Enjoy the long weekend. Someone recently turned me on to Miroslav Vitous' Journey's End. The album is up and down a little, but "Carry On, No. 1" is by far the best improvised minimalist tune I have ever heard. With that in mind, I'll leave you with Miroslav Vitous and Stanley Clarke playing "Freedom Jazz Dance."

Friday Album Cover: Monk and Mirrors

Thelonious Monk
Brilliant Corners
Criss-Cross

On the docket this week we have two strangely similar Thelonious Monk album covers. The first, from 1956, is Brilliant Corners, one of his most celebrated albums. Monk is playing with an outstanding group of sidemen, including Sonny Rollins, Max Roach, Clark Terry, and Oscar Pettiford. For the cover, Riverside Records selected a simple photo of Monk sitting in a corner created by two mirrors. It is a surprisingly apt representation of Monk's style, as his improvisations often resembled thematic reworkings of his tunes. These solos gave his listeners a look at a particular tune from every angle, much as this cover art presents Monk from multiple angles at once. It is not a brilliant album cover, but nonetheless it fits the material.

In 1963, Columbia records released Monk's album Criss Cross, his second for the label. On the album cover, the staff at Columbia used a similar mirror image to that presented on Brilliant Corners, using a photo of Monk playing at a grand piano in the studio. In this case, instead of presenting Monk from both angles, the album cover creates a new image out of the familiar lines created by the piano. Again, this resembles Monk's improvised solos. After presenting his material in the opening of a tune, Monk reworks the melody into something new. Not terribly imaginative (especially considering the fact that it had already been done), but it gets the point across.

The real question posed by these covers is why Riverside Records (who produced Brilliant Corners) never sued Columbia. Not too hard to imagine how things would have gone differently had these albums had been put out in the 90s...

Review

Monk's Music: Thelonious Monk and Jazz History in the Making
Gabriel Solis

Thelonious Monk is a curious figure in jazz history. Revered by his peers and other musicians, he did not receive the recognition he deserved from a mainstream audience until the 1960s, when he appeared on the cover of Time and was able to play regularly in the New York jazz scene again after a forced hiatus related to legal troubles. This was a full twenty years after he made his debut on the New York scene, playing in bands with Cootie Williams and Coleman Hawkins, and taking part in the jam sessions with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Christian, among others, at Minton's Playhouse where bebop was developed. It is not surprising, though, that it took awhile for the public to fully appreciate Monk, being that he was the supreme iconoclast of modern jazz. While he was often referred to as the High Priest of Bop, his own style was too unique to be lumped in with bebop, and most piano players of his day developed a style more closely related to Bud Powell's style than Monk's.

Ask any musician or jazz fan today about Monk, though, and you will likely hear that Monk is a seminal influence on most jazz musicians who came after him, and that his own idiosyncratic style is something that any jazz musician must contend with at some point in his or her musical development. In his provocative new study, Monk's Music: Thelonious Monk and Jazz History in the Making, musicologist Gabriel Solis examines the transformation of opinion surrounding Monk's music, and how jazz musicians of all stripes utilize Monk's music in the formation of both their own voice and competing jazz traditions. Though he begins with a cursory review of Monk's life, Solis' book is less about Monk and more about the way his jazz musicians engage with past masters in order to cultivate a personal style which drives the music forward. Solis uses the music of Thelonious Monk to demonstrate how jazz musicians make music which is "conscious of the past while simultaneously seeking to develop its impact on the present."

Solis is masterful in his analysis of recorded performances of Monk's music from artists across a broad range of styles, including Wynton Marsalis, Danilo Perez, and The Art Ensemble of Chicago. Solis takes the analysis further by placing Monk's music in the context of the debate between mainstream traditionalists like Marsalis and the avant garde over the definition of jazz and the role of tradition in jazz. Because Monk was an iconoclast in his own time whose ideas were later adopted and examined by a wide variety of musicians, it seems quite logical to Solis that Marsalis can claim Monk as a pillar of The Jazz Tradition, while other artists outside the jazz musician can argue that Monk is the type of artist whose existence negates a unified jazz tradition. Solis leaves the reader with a nuanced understanding of the mainstream-avant garde debate, and uses performances of Monk to illustrate the complexities of the debate.

Solis does not escape this review unscathed, though. One of his strong points is his multidisciplinary approach to jazz studies. Take a look at Solis' bibliography, and you will find Hegel, Foucault, and Erik Erikson scattered in with the usual jazz studies fare. However, while Solis can handily parse and analyze jazz musicians and their work, he has more trouble digesting Foucault. Despite this shortcoming, Solis has made a strong opening statement in his first book. He is an original thinker who can push the still-nascent field of jazz studies into new arenas and dimensions, and Monk's Music is illustrative of his academic potential, in addition to being a solid work of scholarship.

Solo Monk: An Appreciation

Thelonious Monk: "Don't Blame Me"
From Thelonious Monk Live in '66, Jazz Icons Series

There is perhaps no greater joy to be found in the history of jazz performance than a solo performance of Thelonious Monk. Even when playing one of his most introspective and quiet tunes, like Monk's Mood, for instance, Monk had the ability to surprise the listener in a way that would bring a soft chuckle, even as he was pouring his soul into the piano. This recording of the standard "Don't Blame Me," recorded in 1966 for Danish television and released on the Jazz Icons series a few years ago, is a favorite of mine. I think this performance is representative of the inimitable qualities of a Monk performance which get thrown about whenever his music is discussed: the employment of negative space to give greater meaning to his phrases, spontaneity, complex harmonies, and the stride-piano foundation which is evident in most of his solo playing.

Following a familiarly Monkish cadenza, Monk begins the Fields/McHugh composition with a simply stated melody in the first few bars, but quickly moves into variations on the melody. His improvisation on standards such as this deftly combines melodic variation interposed with complex rhythmic and harmonic figures which keep things interesting while expanding on the song's structure (see for instance the phrase beginning at 0:35). Monk's melodic conception was surpassed by only a very few (only Sonny Rollins comes to mind right now). He interspersed and juxtaposed phrases so well that he could create something new night after night without having to constantly reinvent himself. This recording is a perfect example of this trait; Monk does not pull off any technical feats of strength, or use any phrase of his we've never heard before, but it is the combination and sequence of his phrases that keeps the listener interested.

Monk employs his left hand in a quarter-note rhythm that comes straight out of the school of stride piano from which he drew much of his early inspiration. This is a common theme of solo Monk (for a more forceful example, listen to his shift into a stride rhythm in the solo section of "Monk's Point" in Solo Monk). This, to me, is emblematic of the oral tradition which signifies jazz, as well as what some have referred to as the democratic structure of jazz music. Though he sprung from the same milieu that spawned stride pianists like James P. Johnson and Willie "The Lion" Smith, Monk would never be confused with those or any other pianist of the style. But in his own individual way, Monk combined the style of these pianists with his sense of melody and harmony to create a style which pays tribute to these pianists while thrusting their music into a new dimension. Monk's solo playing is a perfect example of the jazz musician reshaping the music of his adolescence into form relevant to his own time, as well as the reinvention that has kept jazz a vital art form into the twenty-first century.

Besides demonstrating the continuity inherent in jazz, Monk's use of the stride rhthym in the left hand is indicative of what some musicians (including Billy Taylor and Wynton Marsalis, among others) have identified as the democratic aspect of jazz. This is not a new idea, indeed, the U.S. State Department cited the "democratic nature of jazz" when it proposed sponsoring international tours of jazz musicians as a means of promoting goodwill during the Cold War. This democratic theory of jazz states that a jazz ensemble, by promoting free individual expression in the framework of a cooperative group, mimics the ideals of personal liberty and cooperation inherent in the American Constitution. Monk's solo style, at first glance an exercise in total personal freedom, upon further examination fits well into this archetype. Throughout the entire performance, while expounding on fanciful melodies and accentuating ambiguous harmonies, the listener hears the constant (if subtle) beat of the quarter note in the left hand. These quarter notes are not only keeping time but also imposing discipline on Monk's right hand, keeping it within the rhythmic framework of the song and preventing Monk from improvising his way into a black hole of abstraction.

Although this democratic theory of jazz is of limited use, especially when considered outside of its original Cold War framework, it fits well into Monk's style. Though he is perhaps the ultimate individualist of jazz, Monk at the same time created a music that is both accessible and challenging to the scores of musicians that followed him. It is this quality of Monk which keeps his music fresh a half century after its creation, presenting a firm structure while allowing the improviser unlimited freedom. It is why I can never tire of his music.