THELONIOUS MONK
Inspirational book
THELONIOUS MONK,
The Life and Times of an American Original
By Robin D. G. Kelley
Thelonious Monk, the great American jazz artist, during the first half of his junior year at High school in New York, showed up in class only 16 out of 92 days and received zeros in every one of his subjects. His mother, Barbara Monk, would not have been pleased. Presently, her son was off on a two-year musical tour of the United States, playing a kind of sanctified R & B piano in the employ, with the rest of his small band, of a traveling woman evangelist.
The brilliant pianist Mary Lou Williams, seven years Monk’s senior and working at the time for Andy Kirk’s Clouds of Joy orchestra, heard Monk play at a late-night jam session in Kansas City in 1935. Monk, born in 1917, would have been 18 or so at the time. When not playing to the faithful, he sought out the musical action in centers like Kansas City. Williams would later claim that even as a teenager, Monk ”really used to blow on piano. . . . He was one of the original modernists all right, playing pretty much the same harmonies then that he’s playing now.”
It was those harmonies - with their radical, often dissonant chord voicings, along with the complex rhythms, “misplaced” accents, startling shifts in dynamics, hesitations and silences - that, even in embryonic form, Williams was hearing for the first time. It’s an angular, splintered sound, percussive in attack and asymmetrical, music that always manages to swing hard and respect the melody. Monk was big on melody. Thelonious Monk’s body of work, as composer and player (the jazz critic Whitney Balliett called Monk’s compositions “frozen . . . improvisations” and his improvisations “molten . . . compositions”), sits as comfortably beside Bartok’s Hungarian folk-influenced compositions for solo piano as it does beside the music of jazz giants like James P. Johnson, Teddy Wilson and Duke Ellington, some of the more obvious influences on Monk. Monk did know well and play Rachmaninoff, Liszt and Chohpin.
Robin D. G. Kelley, in his extraordinary and heroically detailed new biography, “Thelonious Monk,” makes a large point time and time again that Monk was no primitive, as so many have characterized him. Monk was well enough known and appreciated in his lifetime to have appeared on the cover of the Feb. 28, 1964, issue of Time magazine. Throughout the book, Kelley plays down Monk’s “weirdness,” or at least contextualizes it. But Monk did little to discourage the popular view of him as odd.
Even early in his career, Monk often insisted on showing up late to gigs, driving bandleaders, club owners and audiences to distraction. From his father, Thelonious Sr., who was gone from the scene by the time Monk was 11, Thelonious Jr. seems to have gotten his musical gene (there always seems to be one in there). But he also inherited his father’s illness. Monk Sr. was committed to the State Hospital for the Colored Insane in Goldsboro, N.C., at the age of 52, in 1941. The familiar episodes of Monk’s career are all well covered: the years as house pianist at Minton’s after-hours club in Harlem, which served as an incubator for the new “modern music,” later to be called bebop; the brilliant “Genius of Modern Music” sessions for Blue Note, Monk’s first recordings with him as the bandleader; the drug bust, where Monk took the rap forBud Powell and lost his New York cabaret license for six years; his triumphant return in 1957 with his quartet, featuring John Coltrane, at the Five Spot; the terrible beating Monk took for resisting arrest in New Castle, Del.; the final dissolution and breakdown. Likewise, the characters in Monk’s life and career are well served: his fellow musicians; his family; his friend and benefactor, the fascinating Pannonica (Nica) de Koenigswarter, the “jazz baroness,” at whose home in Weehawken, N.J., Monk spent his final years. He would die, after a long silence, in 1982, in the arms of his wife, Nellie.
Musicians - particularly jazz musicians of Monk’s period, and most especially Monk, taciturn and gnomic in utterance by nature - tend not, as writers do, to write hundreds of letters sharing with intimates what is going on in their hearts or heads. A biography of Monk, perforce, has to rely on the not always reliable, often conflicting, memories of others. The Monk family appears to have shared private material with Kelley that had hitherto been unavailable. This trust was not misplaced. There will be shapelier and more elegantly written biographies to come - Monk, the man and the music, is an endlessly fascinating subject - but I doubt there will be a biography anytime soon that is as textured, thorough and knowing as Kelley’s. The “genius of modern music” has gotten the passionate, and compassionate, advocate he deserves
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