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Culture Desk
Think of Thelonious Monk

By Ethan Iverson


There are sixty-odd Thelonious Monk pieces still in the active repertoire, something that cannot be said of
any other composer’s work. Photograph by Gai Terrell / Redferns / Getty

There was always something to talk about. The avant-garde music that verged on conceptual art but was delivered at a relaxed and buoyant foxtrot. The memorable melodies that sat atop a virtuosic harmonic conception, emphasizing unexpected dissonances. The blues that were an unchanging constant. For those who couldn’t tell he was an unusual musician simply from listening, the visuals were a helpful guide: outrageously idiosyncratic percussive piano techniques and long, spastic dances, not to mention a wardrobe of impeccable flash and taste.

At the beginning, Thelonious Monk was a shadowy figure known only to fellow-innovators. To help generate publicity, the Blue Note label dubbed him “the high priest” for his first records, as a bandleader, in the late nineteen-forties. After Monk spent a few more years in penniless obscurity, suddenly, most of New York City went to the Five Spot, where he was in residence for multiple months in 1957. From there he became a household name and one of the biggest draws on the European circuit. In 1964, he even appeared on the cover of Time magazine, and was profiled by Lewis Lapham, in the Saturday Evening Post, although most of the mainstream press during Monk’s lifetime made unhappy allusions to craziness, infantilism, and negroid primitivism. Eventually, the record companies decided that he wasn’t a religious icon (“the high priest”) but a warrior instead, and his last significant major-label release, “Underground,” depicted him on the cover with guns, grenades, and a captured Nazi.

During Monk’s ascendency, his style was so different from that of any other bebop or modern-jazz pianist. It was stubborn, incantatory, utterly African. Occasionally, when his left hand opened up and gave an accurate quotation of glorious Harlem stride, it became downright anachronistic. Some of the cognoscenti were bewildered, at least at first. Most of the skeptics ended up admiring his compositions, although certain great musicians, like Miles Davis, Lennie Tristano, and Oscar Peterson, would continue to dislike aspects of his playing. Ironically, Davis began his ascendency with a performance of Monk’s “ ’Round Midnight.” The ironies are compounded when you remember that Monk would always be irritated about how Davis used incorrect chord changes, not just on “ ’Round Midnight” but on “Well, You Needn’t,” as well.

After his death, in 1982, scholars and fans settled down and began doing the serious work of parsing the complexities and clearing away the controversies. In 1983, the boutique label Mosaic Records launched with “The Complete Blue Note Recordings of Thelonious Monk.” The quietly stunning cinéma-vérité documentary “Straight, No Chaser,” directed by Charlotte Zwerin, was released, in 1989. In 2002, “The Thelonious Monk Fake Book” collected accurate lead sheets, edited by Steve Cardenas and Don Sickler. In 2009, Robin D. G. Kelley published “Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original,” a hefty, family-authorized, and definitive factual biography, which declared that Monk was bipolar and offered clues, if not final answers, about why Monk spent his last years withdrawn and silent.

There are sixty-odd Monk pieces still in the active repertoire, something that cannot be said of any other composer’s work. Monk has varied musical tributes from Charles Mingus (“Jump Monk”), Sonny Rollins (“Disco Monk”), Eric Dolphy (“Hat and Beard”), Andrew Hill (“Monastery”), McCoy Tyner (“The High Priest”), and hundreds of others. Many of the remaining jazz celebrities are on the board of the Thelonious Monk Institute, which, for almost three decades, has sponsored the world’s biggest jazz contest.

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WKCR Thelonious Monk Special Birthday Broadcast


Tuesday, October 10, 2017 (All day)



Tune in on October 10 to WKCR 89.9 FM-NY for 24 hours of Thelonious Sphere Monk’s music in celebration of his 100th birthday. Born in 1917 in North Carolina but raised in Manhattan, Monk first established his musicianship as a mostly self-taught travelling church organist. He marked his grand entrance into the New York jazz scene in 1941 as the new house pianist at the Minton’s Playhouse, the breeding grounds of bebop. 1944 saw his first studio recording with the Coleman Hawkins Quintet, and in the fall of 1947 Monk released three Blue Note sessions as his first leader recordings. Over the course of the next decade he recorded with Blue Note, Prestige Records, and Riverside records. After joining Columbia Records in 1962, he formed his famous quartet with tenor saxophonist Charlie Rouse, bassist John Ore, and drummer Frankie Dunlop. He later teamed up with Ore to form another quartet with Larry Gales on bass and Ben Riley on drums, and played with them for the majority of the remainder of his musical career. As he surrounded himself early on with such widely influential contemporaries as Dizzy Gillespie, Kenny Clarke, and Charlie Parker, he quickly began to define his modern and idiosyncratic sound. Monk characterized himself by his sparse, angular melodies, as well as with his tendency to experiment with tonality as a soloist and especially as a composer. Many of his tunes, notably “Blue Monk,” “Epistrophy,” and “In Walked Bud,” pushed the boundaries of chordal harmony—especially for pianists—and entered the jazz lexicon where they remain today. Monk’s abstract harmonic and melodic approach combined with his grounding in stride and other more traditional jazz idioms set him apart from his contemporaries as a heady and quirky yet deeply inventive artist. His unconventional practices had a huge influence on the style of the new wave of rising bop musicians, both on and off the instrument—his so-called “bop glasses” and beret became a symbol of musical experimentation for the generation of musicians that followed in his footsteps. Join us at WKCR as we dedicate 24 hours of honorary programming to one of jazz’s most essential driving forces: Thelonious Monk.