Much of the talk around jazz, and around Monk, turns on ideas of knowing and not-knowing. “He knew what he wanted to do, and he did it.” In other words: this person knows a lot. Blakey watched Monk defend his own music and insist on the right way to play it. The drummer Art Blakey described in a 1973 interview how Monk had been his sympathetic guide through what Blakey called the “cliques” in New York jazz when Blakey first arrived from Pittsburgh in the early ’40s. “I can play more piano than this guy!” In other words: it’s unclear what this person knows. Another reaction was humility. “Who is this cat on piano?” Weston remembers thinking, in his memoir African Rhythms.
The pianist Randy Weston, then 18, first saw Monk playing in Coleman Hawkins’ band. The assumption, often, was that either he didn’t have much technique, or was withholding it because he didn’t want to be understood or known too quickly, and why would someone do that?Ī common initial reaction to Monk was skepticism. He made polytonal clonks on the keyboard by playing the desired note as well as the key adjacent to it. He phrased in a wide circumference around the beat, leaving a lot of silence in an improvisation, enough for you to notice.
Like any cliche, it only applies badly to Monk.Īs a pianist, Monk, who would have turned 100 this year, was not a dazzler-virtuoso like Art Tatum or Oscar Peterson. There is a reversal of fortune Monk makes a great album he wins. This is all a relatively easy story to tell. Also during this time, Monk got himself a manager, began a close musical relationship with John Coltrane, made several albums for Riverside records including Monk’s Music, regained his cabaret card, and started a six-month job at the Five Spot Café-a gig which would re-establish his performing career, serve as Coltrane’s finishing school, and be described thereafter as a high point in New York jazz culture. (What else was going on in his bloodline? Kelley’s book, at this period, contains a chilling sentence: “Thelonious did not know that his own father had been living in a mental asylum for the past fifteen years.”) In May, his wife Nellie developed an illness which resulted in a thyroidectomy, leaving her frail and depressed, which had a relay effect on Monk. At the beginning of 1957, Monk spent three weeks in Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital, taken there by a policeman he'd been unresponsive to after a car accident. In early 1956, an electrical fire destroyed his New York apartment on West 63rd Street, totaling his piano and resulting in his family of five, basically destitute, having to stay for months with friends-15 people in a three-room apartment. Kelley, whose book Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original is the principal source of much biographical information here.Īt the end of 1955, Monk’s mother, Barbara, had died. In fact he lived with bipolar disorder-undiagnosed at the time, though we know about it now, especially through the work of the scholar Robin D.G. He was introverted and sometimes guarded such behavior has never been unusual in jazz. And so he hadn’t been easy to see, which means he might have seemed elusive.
His cabaret card, a relic of New York law enforcement since prohibition, had been revoked in 1951 after a spurious narcotics charge. He was then a 39-year-old New York jazz pianist of great repute who hadn’t been able to work at most jazz clubs in New York for the past six years. The summer of 1957 would seem to mark the redemption of Thelonious Monk, the summer he made Monk’s Music in one night.
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