A young Thelonious Monk (right), with his siblings Thomas and Marion, around 1940-42.
Courtesy of Thelonious Monk Estate
In A New Biography, Monk Minus The Myth
by WALTER RAY WATSON
December 29, 2009 4:02 PM
Biographer Robin D.G. Kelley wants to clear the air about Thelonious Monk.
"His story challenges a very tired idea of the tortured artist ... committed to making an art by any means necessary," Kelley says.
Kelley teaches history and American studies at the University of Southern California. He says Monk wanted people to enjoy his music — and purchase it, too.
"He was someone who thought of music as a vocation: to keep his family afloat; his wife, Nellie; his two kids," Kelley says. "And so he took his work seriously."
Monk died more than 25 years ago, but his music is still played and heard around the world.
Monk's work was often discounted by critics and the general public during the better part of his first two decades as a performer. When critical attention came his way, myths were spun around him, many of which remain to this day. Among them: that he was difficult, a recluse, an untrained genius.
But in his new book, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, Kelley tackles those enduring myths. He argues that Monk was not an isolated genius. He was connected to his New York City community, and he played benefits for the social causes of the day.
And his talent was not some mysterious, God-given gift: Monk studied.
"Well, I always did want to play the piano — the first piano I saw, I tried to play it," Monk said on a 1963 public television broadcast on New York's Channel 13. "I learned how to read before I took lessons, you know, watching my sister practice her lessons over her shoulder."
That recording is but one of Kelley's discoveries over the 14 years he spent researching his book. In scouring roughly 300 interviews, he says he learned that Monk may have started reading music when he was 10. By the time he was 11, he began studying with a classically trained pianist named Simon Wolf.
"The kinds of exercises he gave Thelonious came out of the books of Liszt, Chopin, Rachmaninoff," Kelley says. "These were the composers Monk was drawn to; Bach, Beethoven to a lesser degree."
In addition, Kelley notes that Monk studied with the stride pianist Alberta Simmons, a contemporary of Fats Waller.
Thelonious Monk, Dad
Drummer T.S. Monk is the son of the famed musician.
"For me, he was a father first, and then he was this Thelonious guy second," T.S. Monk says.
In spite of his father's daily rehearsals at home — and a constant parade of musicians through the apartment, including Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and John Coltrane — in the most important ways, the Monks had a fairly normal household, with a mom who worked a day job.
"It would be me, my father and my sister," T.S. Monk says. "He had on a wife-beater [shirt], and he was changing diapers — there was no such thing as Pampers back then, so these were funky diapers that you put in a bucket. And people don't think of Thelonious as Mr. Mom, but I clearly saw him do the Mr. Mom thing, big-time."
T.S. Monk helped Kelley gain access to the pianist's personal effects — and to his widow, Nellie Monk. She played a central role in the musician's life and career, and she functioned to a great degree as his manager.
She also gave her son rare recordings of Monk playing that had not been heard outside the family. Kelley calls them "just incredible gems."
"And what I heard particularly in this wonderful recording of him dealing with the song 'I'm Getting Sentimental Over You,' " Kelley says, "you hear him first try to assimilate the song, understand its dimensions. And he's playing a passage over and over again. And it sounds like somebody who doesn't know the song, though you know he does.
"And he works through it. And after about, really, 45 minutes of working through this, as if he's struggling, he suddenly gets his stride. And he obtains a kind of mastery of the song. And if there's any lesson in those tapes, it's that it was hard for Monk to play Monk."
Thinking Differently
Kelley says it may also have been hard for Monk to be Monk.
He was known to drink heavily and to smoke marijuana, and his struggles with what was initially described and treated as manic depression were ongoing. It took two decades before he got proper help for his bipolar disorder.
T.S. Monk remembers a cold New York day with 3 inches of snow on the ground.
"My father put on his slippers, his silk pajamas, his seal-skin hat — period," he says. "And we're walking down West End Avenue. And I knew I had to put on all my winter stuff, and I had to follow him to make sure that nothing happened to him."
In spite of his challenges, Monk could also be wryly funny in his own way. In that 1963 public television appearance, he was interviewed by Hall Overton, a composer and arranger with whom he'd worked. Overton asked Monk to talk about his intended audience:
"I'd like to reach everybody, the public plus the musicians; that's the standard I set for my songs," Monk said. "Something that will get to the people's ear, plus ... no criticism from the musicians."
"What he reminds the audience is that, 'Yes, I have a technical mastery of what I want to do — but I also have humor. And the humor is actually in the music. Part of what I want you to do is make you laugh, make you think differently,' " Kelley says.
To think differently: That's part of Kelley's intention for his readers. But he says his motivation was to craft a portrait that both Thelonious Monk and his wife, Nellie, would have appreciated. Monk died in 1982, and his widow died in 2002, before Kelley completed the book.
"I think that if they can see the truth in their own lives, then I've succeeded," Kelley says. "And it's up to us to try to figure out and engage that truth."
Excerpt: 'Thelonious Monk, The Life And Times Of An American Original'
December 29, 2009 4:29 PM
by Robin D.G. Kelley
Mary Lou Williams first relayed the message to Thelonious. A white guy named Bill Gottlieb was looking for him. He worked for Down Beat magazine as a writer and photographer and he wanted to do a story on Monk. Monk was incredulous. For the past year he had been hustling for nickel-and-dime gigs. Now the nation's premier jazz periodical wanted to do a story on him? Publicity meant gigs, and Monk desperately needed both. Williams arranged the meeting for early September, 1947, and instructed Gottlieb to meet Thelonious at Mrs. Monk's apartment on West 63rd.
The bespectacled and intense Gottlieb looked more like a college professor than a typical jazz fan, but he knew his stuff. Born in Brooklyn in 1917, Gottlieb earned a bachelor's degree from Lehigh University and went on to work in the advertising department of The Washington Post. He began writing a weekly jazz column for the Post but because the paper had no budget for a photographer, he bought a Speed Graphic camera and took his own pictures. Gottlieb's reputation grew through his work with the camera. After a tour of duty in the service, he returned to New York City and started working for Down Beat in the spring of 1946. He covered most of the mainstream big bands and launched a feature he called "Posin'," candid shots of musicians with a sentence or two of witty commentary. He had become one of bebop's more enthusiastic champions. Just prior to meeting Thelonious, he had published several photos of Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis, including what would become an iconic image of Gillespie posing with a beret, glasses, and goatee — Monk-style.
Why the sudden interest in Monk? Virtually every arts and entertainment magazine was scrambling for anything related to the hottest trend in music — bebop. Besides the jazz mainstays — Down Beat, Metronome, The Record Changer — popular magazines such as The New Republic, Esquire, and Saturday Review began carrying profiles, editorials, and curiosity pieces on bebop and its major players throughout 1947, a good six months to a year before debates over the new music began to really heat up. The battles were fierce: bebop was great, or terrible. No one could define it musically, but that didn't matter. Musicians felt compelled to enter the debate, and some of the genre's prominent voices — Mary Lou Williams, Tadd Dameron, and Lennie Tristano — published articles defending the new music from its detractors. Of course, those musicians who came to represent the different camps continued to call music "music," and neither generational nor stylistic differences kept them from sharing the bandstand or a recording studio. But collaboration, flexibility of style, and ambiguity in genre distinctions didn't sell magazines.
Bird and Diz suddenly became the new heroes — or antiheroes, depending on one's stance — in the jazz wars. And in virtually every interview they granted, they mentioned Thelonious Monk. Monk had mastered the new harmonic developments; he was one of the pioneers at Minton's Playhouse. Suddenly Monk came across as the 1940s version of Buddy Bolden, that missing link who started it all but then disappeared. To Gottlieb, he was "the George Washington of bebop."
Gottlieb first laid eyes on Monk the previous summer at the Spotlite when Monk was still with Dizzy's big band. Gottlieb enjoyed the music but was even more fascinated by the visual spectacle: "You could recognize [Monk's] cult from his bebop uniform: goatee, beret and heavy shell glasses, only his were done half in gold." From that moment on, Gottlieb wanted to have a conversation with Thelonious, but claimed he could never find him.
When Gottlieb and Monk finally did meet, they hit it off famously. They were the same age, they both really dug the Claude Thornhill band, and had a thing for Billie Holiday. Gottlieb had shot some gorgeous photos of Holiday that were published in The Record Changer earlier that spring, and Thelonious kept a photo of Billie taped to his bedroom ceiling. "In the taxi, on the way up," Gottlieb recounted, "Thelonious spoke with singular modesty. He wouldn't go on record as insisting HE started be‑bop; but, as the story books have long since related, he admitted he was at least one of the originators." But Monk's interpretation of events may have been less modest than Gottlieb realized. "Be-bop wasn't developed in any deliberate way," he explained in the interview. "For my part, I'll say it was just the style of music I happened to play. We all contributed ideas …" Then he immodestly added, "If my own work had more importance than any other's, it's because the piano is the key instrument in music. I think all styles are built around piano developments. The piano lays the chord foundation and the rhythm foundation, too. Along with bass and piano, I was always at the spot [Minton's], and could keep working on the music. The rest, like Diz and Charlie, came in only from time to time, at first."
Once they reached their destination, Monk headed straight for the piano. Former manager Teddy Hill and trumpeters Roy Eldridge and Howard McGhee just happened to drop by, though it's likely Gottlieb had tipped them off beforehand. Gottlieb took several photos of Monk at the piano — playing, posing, looking anything but mysterious in his slightly oversized pinstriped suit and dark glasses. Most of the shots are hatless, but Gottlieb persuaded Monk to don his famous beret for a few. Monk wasn't just posing, however. He was up there to work. Gottlieb observed how McGhee "got Thelonious to dream up some trumpet passages and then conned Thelonious into writing them down on some score sheets that happened to be in the club." Then Gottlieb coaxed the men to step outside for an impromptu photo shoot. He produced one of the most widely circulated and iconic photographs in jazz history. Four pioneers of modern jazz standing abreast beneath the awning at Minton's Playhouse, the house that "bop" allegedly built. The published photo is rich with wit. Gottlieb created a Mount Rushmore of modern jazz, with Thelonious positioned on the far left in George Washington's spot.
Excerpted from THELONIOUS MONK: The Life and Times of an American Original by Robin D.G. Kelley. Copyright © 2009 by Robin D.G. Kelley.
One day in late January, Larry Appelbaum was thumbing through some old Voice of America audiotapes about to be digitized at the Library of Congress when he made a discovery that would stun him and many other jazz fans.
The Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at the Five Spot Café in New York City, 1957, the same year as the Carnegie Hall concert. Enlargement: From left, John Coltrane, Shadow Wilson, Thelonious Monk and Ahmed Abdul-Malik.
The Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at the Five Spot Café in New York City, 1957, the same year as the Carnegie Hall concert. Enlargement: From left, John Coltrane, Shadow Wilson, Thelonious Monk and Ahmed Abdul-Malik.
Credit: Don Schlitten
Eight 10-inch reels of acetate tape were labeled "Carnegie Hall Jazz 1957." One of the tape boxes had a handwritten note on the back that said "T. Monk" with some song titles.
Appelbaum, a jazz specialist at the Library of Congress, got excited at the prospect of finding unpublished materials by the jazz master Thelonious Monk. Then he heard another distinctive sound. "I recognized the tenor saxophone of John Coltrane and my heart started to race," Appelbaum says.
The Nov. 29, 1957, concert was recorded by the Voice of America but never broadcast. For years, the recordings were lost and forgotten. Now, thanks to Appelbaum's discovery, Blue Note Records is releasing them.
The cover of the original program for the Nov. 29, 1957, Carnegie Hall concert.
Program Courtesy Carnegie Hall Archives; Poster Courtesy Douglas Garn
The original program for the Nov. 29, 1957, Carnegie Hall concert.
Program Courtesy Carnegie Hall Archives; Poster Courtesy Douglas Garn
Paris 1969, from the late Thelonious Monk, comes out Nov. 26.
Jean-Pierre Leloir/Courtesy of the artist
First Listen: Thelonious Monk, 'Paris 1969'
by PATRICK JARENWATTANANON
November 17, 201311:03 PM
Fifteen years later, Monk returned to Paris and the Salle Pleyel with his own band in a much different situation. He recorded for the mainstream label Columbia Records, was featured on the cover of Time magazine and generally reaped the public adulation that musicians and insiders had long held for his music. He was an international star, and the concert was televised. It's what you can preview here, before it's released to the public as an audio recording and DVD titled Paris 1969.
You'll find Monk in the quartet orientation with which he played for many years; it included long-time saxophonist Charlie Rouse. (Coincidentally, another worthwhile live recording emerged this year of a Thelonious Monk quartet at the 1959 Newport Jazz Festival.) The rhythm section did feature two young musicians new to the band, Berklee student Nate Hygelund (bass) and 17-year-old Paris Wright (drums), though the Thelonious Monk quartet had had about a month on the road to get it together before this particular show. They take on a familiar program of Monk's music, and also make room for their leader to play some stride-inflected Tin Pan Alley tunes alone on stage. This isn't the tap-dancing, elbows-on-the-piano Monk of yore — perhaps a month in Europe ending with eight cities in eight nights will do that to you — but it's Monk doing Monk, swinging intensely through severe rhythmic crevasses.
Listen in particular for what happens in "Nutty." The American master drummer "Philly" Joe Jones had been expatriated in France at the time, and Monk had him come by and sit in for a tune. Now, Paris Wright is a strong player, and was even at 17, but Philly Joe was a legend — you can hear it in the massive applause before a note is even sounded. There's a kind of new communion between the piano and the snare and kick drums; it raises the overall intensity even before the impeccably organized drum solo. It's pretty much a clinic in jazz drumming, and when it wraps up, it's easy to imagine everyone on stage feeling quite pleased with how the moment — and the night as a whole — had unfolded.
Thelonious Monk: 'Thelonious Himself'
August 01, 200112:49 AM
Monk was noted for his odd stage behavior, including a seemingly improvisational dance he performed during others' solos.
William P. Gottlieb/Library of Congress via flickr.com
When you hear his name, you can expect to hear some of the most original and challenging music of the 20th century. Whether it's his dissonant chords or his uncanny sense of space and syncopation, pianist and composer Thelonious Monk's sound is easily recognizable. He left behind a legacy that has had a lasting influence on modern music and fellow musicians.
Born Oct. 10, 1917, Monk grew up in Manhattan in the '20s and '30s, with great stride pianists such as James P. Johnson, Fats Waller and Duke Ellington within earshot. Monk loved stride piano because it allowed him to infuse his playing with surprise and humor. Critic and writer Stanley Crouch calls Monk "an abstracted stride piano player ... he played it in a way that made it funny."
During the '40s, Monk was dubbed "The High Priest of Bop," and along with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker he led a generation of musicians through the bebop era.
Monk was almost as well-known for his unpredictable behavior as for his unique musical techniques. He would get up from the piano and dance around the bandstand, and was often labeled as aloof, eccentric and weird. Even Monk's son, drummer T.S. Monk, described his father as an "unusual guy." Critics dismissed Monk, and even ridiculed him, but he persevered despite the bad press.
“ For years, they were telling me to play commercial, be commercial. I'm not commercial. I say, play your own way. You play what you want, and let the public pick up on what you were doing, even if it takes 15, 20 years." ~ Thelonious Monk
In 1951, after doing jailtime for drug possession, he was banned from performing in New York clubs. With the help of jazz patron Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, he was able to win back his right to play again.
Monk's career took off with the recording of Brilliant Corners, and his work at the Five Spot in New York also helped win him a new following and reputation. He landed a contract with Columbia Records — at the time, one of only a handful of jazz artists to do so — and was featured on the cover of Time magazine.
Almost six years before his death, Monk stopped playing. No one knows why, although some speculate that there were health reasons. He spent most of those final years alone at the home of the Baroness. Monk died of a stroke on Feb. 17, 1982.
It took years for the jazz world to understand Monk's contribution to the genre, but now his tunes rank among the most-played jazz compositions; his classic ballad "'Round Midnight" is one of the most familiar themes in all of jazz. With numerous tributes and awards for his work, as well as legions of faithful fans, Monk has earned a unique place in the pantheon of American music.
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