Courtesy of Free Press
I was able to see Thelonious Monk perform twice. The first time was at a concert at UCLA in California. Monk used hats to express himself. At the concert, which was, I believe, just after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed by the Democratic Congress and signed by President Johnson, Monk was wearing a Stetson hat just like Johnson used to wear. He appeared uncomfortable with his surroundings, and did not play well. The next time I saw him was at Shelley's Manne Hole in Hollywood in 1965 or 1966. Monk was a big, bear-like man who moved very quietly and quickly. When he and his wife Nellie came in the front door, it was like they had materialized. They weren't there one second and in the next second, they were there.
During his performance, I was able to sit about ten feet from his right hand. He smoked constantly while he was playing, and had a pack of cigarettes and butane lighter on the piano. The butane lighter flame had been adjusted to a height of about 18 inches. He would hold the lighter about even with the keyboard and use it to light the cigarette. The audience in front of him could not see the lighter and it must have appeared to them like a flame had leaped off the piano keyboard up to Monk's cigarette. He always hit the end of the cigarette with the flame, and never set his beard on file. That was something he had to have practiced a lot. He never said a word to the audience or his sidemen during the performance.
It was fascinating to watch his hands. While he held his hands flat during his normal playing, his right hand would curl into the proper position to make a run up or down the keyboard, just like a classical pianist. Seeing that, and the trick with the butane lighter, made me realize that a lot of what I had read about Monk was probably wrong. He obviously had his own, original, practiced brand of stagecraft such as getting up to dance and spin when others were soloing. While he was supposed to have a crude, self-taught technique, it was obvious to me that somewhere in his past he had had music lessons. He was no "mad genius," but a man who knew what his image was and worked hard to cultivate it with his stagecraft.
A lot of jazz scholarship is regurgitating legends as facts. There were many legends about Monk that were passed off as facts. For example, the legend that he was self-taught and could not read music; the idea that his first name was different gave rise to all sorts of speculation. In his new book, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (Free Press, New York), author Robin G. Kelly blows the lid off many of these legends. This is a work of scholarship that is in stark contrast to a lot of jazz biographies, since Kelly had access to the Monk family papers.
In this book, we find a very different portrait of Monk as a witty, highly intelligent and devoted family man who was very aware of his surroundings and the politics that went with them. He was brutally honest. His family somehow knew he was someone special and supported him as a child, before he became famous and during the inevitable rough periods that fame brings. Monk was bipolar, and was sustained through these periods by his doting wife Nellie and by the Baroness Nica De Koenigswarter. Kelly puts to rest the speculations and rumors that swirled around the relationship between Thelonious, Nellie and the Baroness.
In his research into the ancestors of the Monk family, Kelly has unearthed the derivation of Thelonious. It is a Latinized spelling of St. Tillo, a seventh century Benedictine monk who was enslaved for a time. We find that Monk had a formidable classical piano education, was familiar with and could play at sight, music by Chopin and others. His classical piano teacher said after three years, that he could not take Monk any further and tried to send him to more advanced teachers. Monk had folios of classical piano music on his piano. He apparently also had a very firm grasp of music theory and harmony that allowed him to do what he did within the confines of that knowledge. His penchant for trenchant comment is illustrated in his reply to a question on the differences between jazz and classical music, "Two is one!" That stopped the conversation.
Kelly's scholarship also dispels and illuminates some of the legends that swirled around Minton's Playhouse in the 1940s, where a new way of playing jazz was evolving out of the swing style. There is also a lot of detail on the New York jazz scene in the 1950s and 1960s that is very valuable. He gives us a window into Monk's composing methods. He worked hard putting those little gems of music together, often taking weeks or even months working over a particular phrase. That is why his compositions are complete. Jazz musicians that think that Monk's tunes consist of a theme statement and a string of chords to improvise on will, in the end, fail to understand these tough, yet brittle pieces of music. They will not produce satisfactory renditions of Monk's music.
In 1972, Thelonious Monk began a slow slide mentally and physically toward his death ten years later, rarely performing in public. He moved to the home of the Baroness in Weehawken, New Jersey. Kelly's work is exemplary in describing the reasons behind Monk's move and the love and care of him in his last years by both Nellie and the Baroness. Monk had a stroke on February 5, 1982 and died 12 days later on February 17, 1982.
This is a valuable contribution of real scholarship to jazz history and should be on the bookshelves of every jazz fan. It also should be required reading in black history classes.
