On March 12, 1955, Charlie Parker collapsed in the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter’s Upper East Facet home after a 3-day booze binge. The improviser of superhuman poise was as soon as needless at thirty-four, eliciting solemn observance from musicians and followers, particularly these that’d been hanging spherical Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem the set, in the early 1940s, a new form of music known as bebop had been invented. “Bird has disintegrated into pure sound!” is presupposed to had been overheard someplace shut to the Five Jam on Cooper Sq., the Beat tavern the set grand inferior poetry was as soon as recited, and the set some huge musicians nightly turned the vogue that came out of Harlem into ever more febrile and kinked contortions. Fragment of the Bird enigma was as soon as the very now not going fusion of musical angel and reptilian addict, a miraculously magnificent artist who might maybe also preserve your horn and pawn it for smack.
Four months after Bird’s death, his one-time private assistant Miles Davis seduced each person at the Newport Jazz Competition, performing a tune known as “Spherical Midnight,” written by somebody who had been a part of the Minton’s scene but was as soon as mute an underground figure: Thelonious Monk, who had easiest a handful of records underneath his belt and, then drawing near forty, was as soon as mute enjoying on different of us’s dates. Certainly, he was as soon as the pianist in the aid of Miles for the Newport efficiency, which might maybe encourage the younger musician signal with Columbia records, hanging him on the side road to stardom. An oft-told tale has the two sharing a automobile reduction to Novel York. “You weren’t enjoying the tune upright,” Monk says, to which Miles replies that he is sweet jealous, at which point Monk orders the car to pull over and takes the ferry to the town alone.
The Newport popularity took situation midway thru Monk’s career, which was as soon as lengthy by the criteria of jazz. Over three decades he played on more than a hundred records, participating with artists as different as Sonny Rollins and Gerry Mulligan, John Coltrane and Clark Terry, Art Blakey and Oliver Nelson. From the first, he was as soon as revered by fellow musicians, even these that might maybe later invent away with harmony and structure, aspiring toward a form of “free” jazz. “Of the total bop greats Monk’s have an effect on appears to be like 2d now easiest to that of Charlie Parker,” Amiri Baraka wrote in 1967. Monk was as soon as moreover a committed teacher, along with to Rollins and Coltrane, who both spent mornings practising at his minute home on West Sixty-Third.
Commercial success, nonetheless, had a technique of eluding Monk. His career began with sporadic recordings on the Blue Present and Prestige labels, made thru the 1940s and 1950s, none of which sold effectively. Already struggling to lend a hand his family, his financial troubles worsened in 1951 when he was as soon as arrested—with his perfect friend, the massive bebop pianist Bud Powell—on drug charges and was as soon as left without his cabaret card for a half of dozen years, preventing him from enjoying in nightclubs. Switching to the Riverside designate in 1955, he stumbled on new momentum but easiest reached a huge public in 1962, when he was as soon as signed by Columbia records, joining a roster that included Miles Davis and Charles Mingus. After that, his profile dramatically grew; two years later he even looked on the quilt of Time. By his death in 1982, he had change into an even pillar of the music’s evolution, as considered in Ken Burns’s 2001 PBS documentary Jazz. But neither a cult standing as a pioneer of bebop nor American canonization quite does justice to Monk, who was as soon as merely surely one of many most imaginative composers of the 20th century, a judgment that in my gape does now not require the qualifiers “jazz” or “American.”
What made Monk a huge composer was as soon as his draw of hanging a tune together, and the designate he put on pianism—his weird and wonderful approach to chord voicing, phrasing and accent—was as soon as inseparable from his being a huge thinker in tune create. Like his hero Duke Ellington, he had a present for reconciling musical experiment with the immediacy of pop, discovering freedom in the constraints of a verse-chorus-bridge grammar that might maybe also merely otherwise default to clichés. Inventing a popularity of non-public magnificent regulations, he labored out their probabilities over the route of his career with admirable stubbornness and conviction. If the axioms had been laid down at Blue Present (1947–1952), revised right here and there at Prestige (1952–1954), the Riverside years (1955–1961), which I’ll zoom in on in what follows, confirmed what forms of proofs is also argued from them.
Myth Changer
Monk was as soon as born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, in 1917 in a dwelling the set he might maybe also dangle heard some are living music: his father might maybe also bang out ragtime on the piano as effectively as play harmonica, as Robin Kelly notes in his staggeringly thorough biography, Thelonious Monk: The Existence and Cases of an American Fashioned (2010)—from which this essay attracts most of its honest files. The family relocated to Novel York Metropolis in 1922, intriguing into Phipps housing in the San Juan Hill neighborhood at West Sixty-Third Avenue the set, at age six, Monk began taking piano lessons from a neighbor. Jazz was as soon as then dominated by swing bands like Duke’s, Depend Basie’s, and Fletcher Henderson’s, and neatly-known particular person soloists like Lester Young, Ben Webster, Louis Armstrong, and Benny Goodman. Piano was as soon as the inch form of James P. Johnson and Fats Waller, with Art Tatum at its intellectual apex. It was as soon as from that form of enjoying that Monk developed a significant interest in the instrument. Falling by the wayside of Stuyvesant High (the set he had excelled in math), he honed his chops on the side road, enjoying with a touring evangelist for 2 years.
He had a present for reconciling musical experiment with the immediacy of pop.
How and when began the private alchemy by which the inch vogue was as soon as given a modernist acid bath might maybe be bright to pinpoint. By the time he was as soon as sitting in with Coleman Hawkins in 1944, nonetheless, Monk was as soon as comping so off the grid that musicians had been squinting their eyes at him. It’s typically mentioned that he helped “safe” bebop, which is upright to the extent that he played at Minton’s in the early 1940s with several of the genre’s pioneers—Parker, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, drummer Kenny Clarke—and insofar as his enjoying mostly broke with swing-period mannerisms. But the differences between him and different bebop virtuosos are more hanging than the continuities. For all their blistering dart and invention, the likes of Bud, Bird, and Diz tended to now not sing, quite letting their formidable chops invent the speaking. By distinction, Monk built up tips from area cloth implicit in the tune, regularly soloing with the melody in mind. This comes thru vividly in his takes on standards like “Between the Satan and the Deep Blue Sea,” or “Every little thing Occurs to Me,” or “I’ve Obtained It Contaminated,” the set every chord appears to be like deliberated over, as if Monk is pausing to capture an expressive coloring that can easiest speak the melody.
On the same time, Monk had an normal sound marked by angular phrasing, recurring chord voicings, and his loved Tatum-ish glissandos. But it was as soon as moreover his tone, unusual as that sounds in the case of an instrument as fastened in its arrangement because the piano. Fingers rigidly horizontal over the keys, he played with both a bell-like purity and a harsh, percussive attack. Many in the starting set heard sloppiness, mistakes, even incompetence. (Philip Larkin later known as him an “elephant at the keyboard.”) Like the philistine who asserts that Dylan “can’t sing,” hearing Monk as a “inferior” pianist misses something so fundamental you don’t know the set to originate.
The early reception of Monk’s music was as soon as in overall accompanied, and typically overshadowed, by his public image as a “weirdo.” Clichés repurposed by journalists (“The High Priest of Bop”), his maintain sartorial affectations (bamboo framed glasses, berets, after which more weird and wonderful head equipment), and a brusque, infrequently morose form of conversation as a bandleader (when the twenty-two-year-weak Sahib Shihab checked out the jagged melody of “Who Is conscious of” at some stage in a 1947 session and mentioned it was as soon as too complex, Monk answered: “You a musician? You bought a union card? Play it.”)—all this blurred into an air of secrecy of mere eccentricity, otherworldly disconnection from actuality, changing correct into a create of kitsch. The delusion was as soon as reinforced by Monk’s propensity for Zen-like aphorisms about musical aesthetics, such because the claim that the “interior of the tune is the part that makes the out of doors sound honest.” By this he appears to be like to dangle intended that the B part (the interior) casts reduction over the A part, revealing the tune’s shape because it unfolds in time. Judge of now not shining that a tunnel followers out and widens (till you safe there) or of journeying thru a circle and slowly discovering it’s a long way a sphere. One other Monkism was as soon as the significance of swinging at gradual tempos, which made the plod against the metronome more stretched and exaggerated, and so more expressive, even maybe more musical.
After a share in Down Beat in regards to the “Genius of Bop” caught the attention of the Blue Present designate’s cofounder Alfred Lion, he and his partner Lorraine Gordon had been invited (by its creator Robert Gottlieb) over to Monk’s home, the set they sat with their toes up on the bed while he played with his reduction to them. He was as soon as quickly equipped a contract with Blue Present, on which he recorded diverse dates—first in 1947, again in the early 1950s—of mostly normal area cloth, all of which might maybe attain out as The Genius of Trendy Music Quantity 1 and 2 in 1951 and 1952. “Criss Wrong,” an up-tempo, asymmetric tune from these first dates, is an efficient example of his compositional draw. The opening part is studded with barriers, particularly an eighth relaxation and a quarter relaxation on both side of an A in the third measure, which throws off what the ear expects because the completion of the phrase. (For some reason, on a later recording of the tune for the Columbia LP Criss Wrong, he eradicated that first relaxation, giving it a grand straighter indubitably feel.) That part is then contrasted with a 2d notion, chromatically descending tones ping-ponging against a repeated G, a figure which, doubled in unison with Milt Jackson’s vibraphone, appears to be like like somebody laughing.
The jazz historian and composer Gunther Schuller notion “Criss Wrong” was as soon as exemplary of Monk’s musical language, calling it an summary notion. That appears to be like upright enough, despite the truth that Schuller moreover insisted that “Criss Wrong” wasn’t technically a “tune,” which is inferior. The Stravinsky-like placement of rests to assemble off-kilter accents, damaged phrasing that works against the bar traces, and the frequent feeling of music assembled as if it had been a Calder cell—none of this prevents “Criss Wrong” from coming off with the fizz of a pop single. And the same is upright of various ostensibly “summary” pieces from The Genius of Trendy Music, like “Off Minor,” “Evidence,” or “Misterioso,” with its staggered significant 6s rising and falling like a Slinky. These tunes are bright now not for their virtuosity but for their structure and shape—how their interior expresses the out of doors and vice versa, to make snort of Monk’s splendidly correct analogy. And this is to now not bid ballads like “Spherical Midnight,” “Quiz Me Now,” and “Ruby, My Pricey,” which Ira Gitler described in his liner notes as conveying “sentiment without sentimentality.”
After the Blue Present records sold dismally, Monk moved in 1952 to Bob Weinstock’s Prestige records for a 3-year contract, rearranging and rerecording a batch of songs he’d been enjoying for years. The clearly out-of-tune piano on the first Prestige disc ought to present a sense of the recording funds for these dates. One of them, plagued with mishaps and misunderstandings, incorporates a use of “Friday the 13th” that wished to be coached into extra time from the control room, chugging on over its glum riff for ten and a half of minutes. Though sales had been again now not huge, musicians had been beginning to listen to, as was as soon as Orrin Keepnews—an industrious Columbia undergraduate who helped edit the jazz newsletter The Myth Changer and had befriended Monk years earlier. Keepnews finally lent Monk the $108 and alternate to safe Prestige to total the contract and signed him to his maintain new enterprise, Riverside Information.
The suggestion that Monk commit his Riverside debut to a popularity of Duke Ellington tunes was as soon as Keepnews’s notion. It stemmed from his sense, as he put it in the notes for the sleeve of Thelonious Monk Plays the Music of Duke Ellington (1956), that it might probably maybe also merely be “priceless to know the true structural and melodic starting point of a musician’s improvisations.” In different phrases, why now not apply Monk’s slightly of bent melodic imagination to songs each person already knows? It proved to be an inspired notion. Supreme out of the gate, “It Don’t Mean A Part (If It Ain’t Obtained That Swing)” merges Monk’s world with Duke’s, its stuttering, telegraphic one-describe intro an apparent echo of “Thelonious” from the Blue Present lessons. On “Solitude,” he finds piano shades that appear to safe at Duke’s orchestrations, along with a huge-open inch vogue swinging underneath the upright-hand melodies. All over, he takes up the topic cloth in a easy, magnificent, by hook or by crook fundamentally singing draw. The same is also mentioned for the covers on the 2d Riverside free up, The Unfamiliar Thelonious Monk (1956), on which, to use one example, Eubie Blake’s “Memories of You” is given a halting half of-inch solo remedy that feels both warm and anxious.
The third Riverside LP leaves the enviornment of duvet variations for traditional compositions arranged for a band that included Sonny Rollins and Max Roach. Kelley describes how the musicians had a tricky time getting an even use of the title video display, “Incandescent Corners,” due to its big intervallic leaps and tempo shifts. Steadfast in his conviction that music needs to be realized by ear, Monk wouldn’t share the charts, which exacerbated the grief. Left with twenty-five takes and no grasp, Keepnews lower them along with a razor blade for the model that’s on the file, a feat of studio wonkery rare for the length, especially in jazz. The album’s different masterpiece, “Pannonica,” was as soon as named for Monk’s shut perfect friend and in the future caretaker, financial backer, and nurse—the Baroness in whose home Bird had died. It’s an even example of “swinging at gradual tempo,” its tipsy melody turning spherical like a revolving oval. There took situation to be a celeste in the Reeves studio that day, prompting Monk to make snort of it for the first lunge spherical on “Pannonica,” which provides a plunky lullaby sheen to the design.
Played Twice
Whitney Balliett, who wrote about jazz for The Novel Yorker for practically fifty years, mentioned of Monk that “his improvisations had been molten Monk compositions and his compositions had been frozen Monk improvisations.” An awfully extravagant occasion of that notion is the outtake of “Spherical Midnight,” recorded as a part of the Thelonious Himself (1957) lessons and included on the Total Monk on Riverside (1986) field popularity. Over the route of a lovely, open, twenty-two-minute use, Monk comes at the tune’s tips from different angles, circling reduction elliptically to repeat total sections, enjoying phrases out of describe, like he’s turning an object spherical slowly and letting the gentle hit it in numerous spots. One begins to mediate the video display much less as a discrete composition and more as an environment, a distributed vary of musical probabilities organized across the incomparable melody, which holds the pieces together like a recurring dream.
Fingers rigidly horizontal over the piano keys, he played with both a bell-like purity and a harsh, percussive attack.
There was as soon as an even deal of gigging at the time, and Keepnews was as soon as conscientious about hauling mics spherical for which that you just might mediate releases. In most cases are living settings can raise out Monk’s rhythmic extremism more vividly than on file, as with a model of “Evidence,” recorded at the Five Jam in the summertime of 1958. By treating the subdivisions of the bar as a form of random number generator—enjoying on the and of 1, then on the 1 of the subsequent bar, then the and of 3, then on 2 and heaps others—Monk creates an safe practically of meterlessness, a pointillist articulation without extend spacey and nerve-racking, concluding on an F7 figure that, with its comically pasted-on feeling, suggests the total thing is a prank. Needless to explain, it’s now not a prank, and the tune is the rest but meterless. Monk is being excessively cautious with time, and the band is fussily counting while by hook or by crook swinging extra bright thru all of it. Misterioso, one other Riverside are living free up, captures the quartet on a different night at the Five Jam that year, with Monk taking a solo on “Bye-Ya” that turns the melody correct into a sequence of splashy clusters.
Monk’s arranging had regularly urged that his work might maybe also merely be curiously popularity for a huge band, an experiment that first took situation in composer Hall Overton’s Sixth Avenue loft. These rehearsals in the starting set took situation with the two of them seated at a piano, going thru the charts and discussing preparations, after which a ten-share band was as soon as assembled and a dwell efficiency booked. The Thelonious Monk Orchestra at Metropolis Hall (1959) finds a band now not regularly particular of what to invent with Monk’s music, but which infrequently reveals what’s also completed. “Minute Rootie Tootie,” solutions dissonant piano triplets working against bass-trumpet-alto unison traces; contrastive colors that add a new dimension to the sooner Prestige recording of the tune. On that night, he moreover played thru surely one of his purest summary compositions, “Crespuscule With Nellie,” which is dedicated to his infinitely patient easiest perfect friend and partner, and by hook or by crook conveys the united statesand downs of existence, the surprises, and jolts, and the recurring tenderness of coming dwelling to a family.
If asked to determine a single tune that easiest encapsulates Monk’s weird and wonderful approach to composition, I’d lend a hand in mind “Played Twice” from 5 by Monk by 5 (1959). It opens with three whacks on an open hi hat, then a figure enters suggesting the significant of Db, followed by the band, which is accessible in a half of step down, in C. Has a key alternate occurred two seconds in? In actuality, it’s much less a key alternate than a melody so surprisingly shaped it suggests modulation, and which quickly moves from that apparent dwelling frightening of C to a significant 7 figure that, enjoying on one other half of step (between C and B), again lures us with chromaticism. Yet by the following phrase, a measure later, we’re reduction to Db! As soon as the shock wears off, you lunge mediate about at the chart, which finds an appealing replicate structure whereby half of step chord voicings are reflected in half of step moves in the melody, which might maybe be in turn by hook or by crook moreover reflected in how one part shifts to the following. It shouldn’t originate any sense, nonetheless it does. It’s moreover hummable and form of rocks.
By 1962, Monk was as soon as ready to leave Riverside after a buildup of distrust toward Keepnews and a few proof of shady royalty coping with and bookkeeping practices. Getting wind of this, a producer at Columbia records, Teo Macero, straight away shot off a describe to the designate administration, which equipped Monk a form out more money in advances than he’d ever considered. The records got slicker, the stereo more luxuriantly separated, the rooms (just like the Thirtieth Avenue “church” the set Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Adaptations and West Facet Story, amongst others, had been recorded) richer and greater. The sound rep of the piano on the Columbia dates is form of a shining Cadillac—and to overextend the analogy, on Riverside it’s a Honda Prelude, on Prestige a jalopy, and on Blue Present a Model-T (in honest situation). But these corpulent advances might maybe also merely mute be paid reduction, which necessitated some “hit-making.” It’s doubtless that the financial tension resulted in wrongheaded ideas, along with some indubitably mistaken canned “rock” peaceful by Macero.
A late Columbia studio LP Underground featured a duvet depicting Monk sequestered in a bunker amongst surprisingly militarized paraphernalia—hand grenades, an computerized rifle, a Nazi officer held as prisoner, a TNT detonator of the kind Wile E. Coyote might maybe also describe from the Acme Corporation—as effectively as a cow, empty wine and whiskey bottles, and “Vive la France” painted on the wall. Your entire thing is gargantuan-at a loss for phrases, as if Columbia notion airbrushed Shaded energy optics might maybe also merely be blended with a reboot of the “weirdo” imprint to soar open sales. In spite of every thing, Monk did now not fulfill the Columbia contract, as his occasional spells of bipolar catatonia, for which he had been misdiagnosed (first Thorazine for “despair” then electroshock for “schizophrenia”) gradually ceased to be episodes, changing correct into a frequent screech of withdrawal. He slid deeper into silence, warding off the piano, spending most of his time in Novel Jersey at the Baroness Pannonica’s dwelling with her and her a total bunch of cats. Many mornings he got completely dressed after which spent all day in bed.
In Monk’s Wake
A tag of Monk’s originality is the draw in which others dangle stumbled on systems to clarify upon it. Steve Lacy, Don Pullen, Anthony Braxton, and Abdullah Ibrahim, to determine a few, all lower Monk records that are moreover extensions of their maintain magnificent. Nicely-known pianists from the following technology—Stanley Cowell, Marcus Roberts, and Gonzalo Rubalcaba attain to mind—dangle taken up his quirks of keyboard phrasing in a sense most doubtless much just like the draw in which Monk mashed up Johnson and Waller and Tatum. Terry Adams of NRBQ made a file of Monk covers that reveals how amenable his music is to rhythm-and-blues combos of a form that aren’t too a long way from rock-and-roll.
Taking the total humble nonlinguistic bones of tune, he bent them toward his maintain explicit needs and imaginative and prescient.
But Monk’s wholly normal songwriting is his most lasting legacy. Taking intro, verse, refrain, bridge, coda, and “hook”—the total humble nonlinguistic bones of tune—he bent them toward his maintain explicit needs and imaginative and prescient. In this sense, he turns into a part of a broader renaissance of American tune in the 2d half of of the 20th century. We mediate how Brian Wilson modified the notion of design by drawing near the multitrack studio as a popularity of timbral and dynamic probabilities, of how Dylan made vocal phrasing itself a medium of invention, of Frank Zappa’s whiplash edits between doo-wop and serialism, of Laura Nyro’s dart-on sentence melodies, of Joni Mitchell’s mind-set in open tunings, of Steely Dan spiking FM radio with queasily expanded chords and harmonies—and these closing two completely know their Monk.
If it appears to be like a stretch to address such examples as Monk-adjacent, that’s on story of there’s an inclination to mediate songs as readymade schemas designed both to bring a sing-along chorus or to enhance insipid genre clichés. But a tune is an infinitely elastic create. If approached the upright draw, its principles invite one to be more imaginative, its constraints give one more freedom—an figuring out of freedom it sounds as if preferable to Monk, who referred to “free jazz” as “casting off structure and merely piling plenty of notes one on high of the an excessive amount of.” Whereas the seventy or so originals Monk wrote and recorded in his lifetime create a planet with its maintain regulations and atmosphere, moreover they are in fixed conversation with a convention of tune as a tightly rule-trip medium. When Monk mentioned merely “jazz is freedom,” he might maybe also had been relating to his maintain strikingly normal mind-set and working in tune create.
