Monk’s Moods
Illustration by Joe Ciardiello
Thelonious Monk, the great American jazz artist, during the first half of his junior year at Stuyvesant 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. She had brought her three children to New York from North Carolina, effectively leaving behind her husband, who suffered bad health, and raising the family on her own, in order that they might receive a proper education. But Mrs. Monk, like a succession of canny, tough-minded, loving and very indulgent women in Thelonious Monk’s life, understood that her middle child had a large gift and was put on this earth to play piano. 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.
THELONIOUS MONK
The Life and Times of an American Original
By Robin D. G. Kelley
Illustrated. 588 pp. Free Press. $30
Associated PressThelonious Monk at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1963.
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. It’s unclear how much of Bartok he listened to. Monk did know well and play Rachmaninoff, Liszt and Chopin (especially Chopin). Stravinsky was also a favorite.
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. At the age of 11, he was taught by Simon Wolf, an Austrian émigré who had studied under the concertmaster for the New York Philharmonic. Wolf told the parent of another student, after not too many sessions with young Thelonious: “I don’t think there will be anything I can teach him. He will go beyond me very soon.” But the direction the boy would go in, after two years of classical lessons, was jazz.
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. He was 46 at the time, and after many years of neglect and scuffling had become one of the principal faces and sounds of contemporary jazz. The Time article, by Barry Farrell, is, given the vintage and target audience, well done, both positive and fair, and accurate in the main. But it does make much of its subject’s eccentricities, and refers to Monk’s considerable and erratic drug and alcohol use. This last would have raised eyebrows in the white middle-class America of that era.
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. Always a sharp dresser and stickler for just the right look, he also favored a wide array of unconventional headgear: astrakhan, Japanese skullcap, Stetson, tam-o’-shanter. He had a trickster sense of humor, in life and in music, and he loved keeping people off-balance in both realms. Off-balance was the plane on which Monk existed. He also liked to dance during group performances, but this served very real functions: first, as a method of conducting, communicating musical instructions to the band members; and second, to let them know that he dug their playing when they were in a groove and swinging.
Even early in his career, Monk often insisted on showing up late to gigs, driving bandleaders, club owners and audiences to distraction. And on occasion he would simply fall asleep at the piano. He would also disappear to his room in the family apartment for two weeks at a time. When he was young, these behaviors or idiosyncrasies were tolerated and, more or less, manageable. But the manic, erratic behavior turned out to be the precursor of a more serious bipolar illness that would over time become immobilizing. 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. He never left.
Kelley, the author of “Race Rebels” and other books, makes use of the “carpet bombing” method in this biography. It is not pretty, or terribly selective, but it is thorough and hugely effective. He knows music, especially Monk’s music, and his descriptions of assorted studio and live dates, along with what Monk is up to musically throughout, are handled expertly. 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 for Bud 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. Instinct is involved, surely as much as perspicacity, in sifting through the mass of observation and anecdote. 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. h
August Kleinzahler’s most recent book is “Music: I-LXXIV,” a collection of essays.
