That blew my mind. I won't lie to youwhen I went into this project, I didn't know I would find what I ended up finding. Read Full Biography. Blues was filled with complex and culturally specific imagery. The initial release, issued when Monk was 35, offered eight originals including "Epistrophy" "'Round Midnight," "Well You Needn't," Ruby My Dear," and "Off Minor"; the second featured "Criss-Cross," "Four in One," and "Straight, No Chaser." Minton's was home to the late-night jam sessions frequented by young lions Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Max Roach, and Bud Powell; the club served as an incubator for the emergent bebop. Music thats insane and gorgeous, droll and dire, ardently crafted to be so perfectly wrong that it robs you of your predictions and replaces them with ever unfolding alms of unexpected rapture. But the wizardry of Monk, who is comfortably situated in this 400-year tradition, is that he was as much a brilliant musical technician as he was a brilliant troll. If his ideas are out of the mainstream, the way he plays them is up in your face, too. Bipolar disorder, bad treatment, and what Nellie called "the un- years," when Monk had lost his cabaret card and could not play in nightclubs that served alcoholwhich was pretty much all of them. Musical cycles that tumbled you up one hill and down another side, landing you in an entirely different place than you began. Buy back issues of the magazine here. This insistence on leaving the less-learned behind was at the core of Monks singular and captivating peculiarity. At one point during the recording, bassist Oscar Pettiford was just pretending to play, miming while the tape was running. Add to this the systemic racism of the era, his unusual name, his large physical stature, and iconic fashion sense: He wore a stylish goatee, and had a constantly changing array of colorful hats, bamboo sunglasses, and sharp cut suits. And his two-handed stride work, most evident on jumpy solo sessions like North of Sunset and even midtempo gems like Im Confessin, distinguished him from contemporaries who favored an aloof comping approach to their solo workplaying chords fully on the left hand.

He developed his approach over time, too. The room contained a piano, but he seldom touched it. Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of An American Original by Robin D. G. Kelley is the first biography to put the idiosyncratic music and eccentric behavior of this jazz legend into factual context. In 1964, Monk, at the peak of his popularity, appeared on the cover of Time Magazine: He is one of only five jazz musicians to have done so. With unprecedented access to Monk's family and records, Kelley dispels many of the myths around the eccentric pianist and the psychiatric, legal, and professional challenges he faced before he died in 1982. Still, Monk continued to record and tour for the label. Doing things wrong is often how black people create their own freedom. Because his rhythmic solos reflected an uncommon use of space, and a somewhat percussive technique, some musicians and critics erroneously thought him an inferior pianist. He recruited saxophonist Pat Patrick and son Thelonious, Jr. for his quartet. This material, all but ignored during his lifetime, was collected for a box set by Mosaic after his death and acclaimed for the inspiration and quality in his playing. Clark Gable. Monks take appears on the 1964 masterpiece Solo Monk, released on Columbia Records. A quiet but confident child, he fell immediately in love with the piano after taking 15-cent lessons at the community center, and hustled his way into jamming with every local musician he could. Everything about Monks life and work suggests a person unconditionally committed to the world in his head. And when that outsider has enslaved, beat, hung, dragged, murdered, raped, starved, and excluded your people for centuries, then its more than a game of intellectual keep-away. Even Duke Ellington and Count Basie, as beautiful as their compositions were, enjoyed what fame they did outside of black communities precisely because they received benediction from the likes of Aaron Copland, George Gershwin, and others; they had to prove they could speak the language of white music in order to be taken seriously. took the Saturday morning b-boy cartoonism of Run-D.M.C. He also didn't like the way the jazz avant-garde took credit for harmonic developments he had been working on, and became the darlings of the media. Jazz expressed an attempt to deconstruct and complicate American band music in a way that captured the violent and frenetic pace of life in northern cities. (The others were Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington, and much later, Wynton Marsalis.). He possessed indelible speed on the keyboard, as demonstrated by his vivid runs, tossed on to the ends of tunes as if to say, But to many of us who live lives of broken chords and impossible dissonance that nonetheless create wild and beautiful music, Monks message was as straightforward as the black keys on a piano. Ad Choices. With the Riverside release of the solo Thelonious Himself and Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane, the artist received belated but well-deserved acclaim. Monk was hired by Lucky Millinder's orchestra in 1942 and he also worked with the Coleman Hawkins Sextet between 1943 and 1945, making his recording debut on the 78 "Flyin' Hawk." Just a lot of contradictory assertionsautism, Tourette's Syndrome, all sorts of things. But what were you really after? They both charted and were received enthusiastically by critics. But as far as where Monk saw himself in what I call the tradition of sonic disturbance, his stylistic criteria came down to this: Does it Swing? Churchill had been on the cover of Time. Recorded during a benefit concert in 1957, the tape sat untouched in the Library of Congress until recording lab supervisor Larry Appelbaum unearthed it for restoration by Michael Cuscuna and T.S. And that was the point. Well, first of all, there's another thing I discovered: Monk's distinctive sound, his approach to the piano, was deliberate, very thought-out. Probably none more so than his breakthrough album, 1957s Brilliant Corners. You write about Thelonious Monk getting up from the piano and dancing around in circles on stage, falling asleep at the keyboard, sporting strange hats, staring off into space and wandering out of nightclubs during gigs. Both personally and professionally, Monk faced endless challenges. He played to their expectations. Kanye decided you could be therapeutically self-reflective while dropping televangelist-level braggadocio. Some fingers were heavy, as you say, and some were light. He pulls as much from his roots, the old-style traditions he never left, as from really futuristic stuff, musical territory he was the first to visit. How did Monk view himself in the development of jazz? (A final recording from these sessions appeared as Blue Sphere in 1977.) Its almost as if hes testing you, teasing you like an older sibling, training you to hear it again and again until you understand the impartial beauty of its disfigurement, until you finally recognize the delicacy and grace of the perfectly placed wrong note. Slave songs were coded messages about escape and freedom. Descriptions of his music become conflated with descriptions of his behavior, onstage and off. Every moment imbues the maker with the power that comes when you create music that is direct, epic, and (most importantly) impossible to understand for people that dont live it. In 1957, he recorded Mulligan Meets Monk with Gerry Mulligan; the release helped expose him to a wider audience. All rights reserved. The most gifted musicians in town often died broke and penniless, overdosing while country clubs played handsome fees to white men to perform their compositions. A feeling that things were slightly off. I interviewed Michael Blackwood, who shot that footage in 1968. Emotionally full. Soon after that first recording session, Monk married Nellie Smith, who gave birth to his two children Barbara and T.S. The writer, Barry Farrell, treated him as a zoo-ish curiosity, devoting over 5,000 words to describing his idiosyncrasies while only managing to include two or three direct quotes from his subject. The title track is legendary, in that it almost caused a fist fight in the studio. Sometimes it seems the entirety of black American music is about this: trying to carve out a space unspoiled by the overbearing whiteness of being. I know exactly what you're talking about. He could be notoriously taciturn, and when he did deign to talk to reporters he frequently parried obvious questions with philosophical games of Whos on First? Frank London Brown learned this when he profiled Monk in 1958 for Downbeat magazine. In 1971, Japan's Express signed him and issued Monk in Tokyo with a pick-up quartet comprised of saxophonist Paul Jeffrey, bassist Larry Ridley, and drummer Lenny McBrowne on one side, and with Toshiyuki Miyama & His New Herd Orchestra on the flip. Monk had small hands, and played with flat fingers, like the mallets you use on vibes, to make up for ita trick he developed to play like James P. Johnson and the other Stride pianists he came up with. Subsequently, he accompanied a faith healer and preacher for a year-long tour that revealed to him the subtleties and intricacies of rhythm & blues accompaniment. I also think it's a romantic notion: in Monk's case, the negative consequences of the disease created barriers to being able to work. Despite the fact that the virtuosic pianist and bebop originators compositions were beginning to be studied by jazz and classical musicians alike, most of his nearly 15-year career had been spent in relative obscurity. The framers of bebopMonk. This was the soil from which Monk sprang. I describe Monk as Janus-faced, looking in both directions at once. If you want to understand Monk trolling, you have to understand bebop trolling.

Each of these titles reflected Monks trademark playing style, which incorporated silence and dissonance as forms of self-expression. You make a very strong case for your conclusion that Monk was a manic-depressive. All served to brand him an outsider. A trumped-up charge for drug possession (he took the rap for Powell) didn't help, either, as it deprived Monk of his New York cabaret license in 1951, forcing him to seek work in Brooklyn and elsewhere for six years. It sold out almost instantly. But the most lavish demonstrations of Monks aptitude come with his compositions.

Monk was a very methodical, careful composer. Once that happened, I wanted to approach this project as a historianmeaning the more you find out, the more you have to look up. I think his lack of creative output from the mid-1960s on, as a composer, at least, has to do with the level of fatigue he felt from travelling all the time, getting hardly any sleep, and just generally not feeling very goodhe suffered from an increasing number of health problems, some of which had to do with the thorazine he was taking. His compositions were so harmonically and rhythmically advanced -- even when employing a 12-bar blues or 32-bar ballad architecture -- they confused lesser and/or lazier players. Photo by Herb Snitzer/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images.

A brilliant composer and criminally underrated pianist whose sense of rhythm, space, and harmony made him one of the founders of modern jazz. He could be notoriously taciturn, and when he did deign to talk to reporters he frequently parried obvious questions with philosophical games of Whos on First? Frank London Brown learned this when he profiled Monk in 1958 for. By 1965, Columbia had become enthralled with rock and R&B artists on its roster thanks to administrative vice-president and general manager Clive Davis, who took the helm in 1966. Yes, Monk was known for his crazy hats, for getting up from the piano and dancing in the middle of a song, for sometimes wandering out the club in the middle of a gig. On the other hand, he would likely not have had so many of the very difficult episodes which contributed to his overall malaise and fatigue as time went on. I try to be very careful in discussing the way the medical profession understood his problems. One and a two and a three and a four. The music had become simple, easy to comprehend. What's far more important to Monk's story than his diagnoses or misdiagnoses, for me, is pharmacological history. Its track list included performances by jazz musicians such as the Carla Bley Big Band with Johnny Griffin; Steve Lacy with Elvin Jones or Gil Evans, and many others, but it also included rock and funk musicians like Was (Not Was), Joe Jackson, and NRBQ interpreting Monk's tunes. On eccentricity alone, I can see why he'd be a good subject for a book. It was so hard to figure out the most basic thingsin fact, I'm still finding mistakes in the book that I'm correcting for the paperback. The tune, by Harry Akst, written for the vaudeville show The New Plantation, has been recorded by Chet Baker, Cab Calloway, Bing Crosby, Duke Ellington, and many more. Nellie, Monk's wife, had never granted interviews until I came along. They would be lost. New York City police forced every jazz musician to carry an identification card without which they were barred from playing. He was wildly introspective and capable of extreme focus, often to the exclusion of social niceties like greetings and small talk. He knew why people paid to see him in nightclubs. His stalwart wife, Nellie, and his precocious adolescent niece both tried to help Brown out by rephrasing the question, but Monk would not be moved. Monks playing on the hook manages to simultaneously lead the procession and trail behind it like a child dropping magnolia petals in a glorious small-town parade. Deliberate, with a heavy hand on the keyboardlike a thumb in the eye of the musical establishment. But to many of us who live lives of broken chords and impossible dissonance that nonetheless create wild and beautiful music, Monks message was as straightforward as the black keys on a piano. This is the apogee of Monks vision. Simply titled Palo Alto: Live at Palo Alto High School, it was set for release by Impulse!

This desire, indeed, was what drove his offbeat and mesmerizing compositions. Monk II. I talk so plain, he said, that a deaf and dumb man can hear me.. His singles were eventually compiled onto two 10" vinyl LPs released as Genius of Modern Music, Vols. And then the whole thing starts double timing. In what other ways did you find the real Monk different from the image we have of him? As a consequence, I ended up writing a very different book than what I thought I would write. When people listen to Monk for the first time, people think, hey, this guy's missing keyshe's playing the wrong notes. The framers of bebopMonk, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Milt Hinton, and Kenny Clarkebegan to rebel against this idea of friendliness in music, perhaps subconsciously at first, but then with greater purpose. He attended the prestigious Stuyvesant High School, but dropped out to tour the South as an accompanist for a traveling preacher. And he would hit a note, hold it, then hit another note so that the open string created overtones.

And what I found was that so much of what we think we know about Monk's life is just wrong. Monk toured widely in 1972 with the "Giants of Jazz," a bop supergroup consisting of Dizzy Gillespie, Kai Winding, Sonny Stitt, Al McKibbon, and Art Blakey, resulting in the Atlantic-issued live set Giants of Jazz. He also received rigorous gospel training accompanying his church choir (in which his mother sang), and attended Stuyvesant High School, where he excelled at physics and math. Pitchfork is the most trusted voice in music. That was Monk, too.

But I really came to see her as a fully realized human being with her own goals and dreams, desires and frustrations, as someone who suffered quite a bit. Timbaland and Pharrell took Puffys gold-plated pinky rings off and let it be nerd-core. Its just what the melody means. He's always going to be associated with the founding of bebop, with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. What the hell. In the 1958. It's one of the artist's most unjustly underrated offerings, and it's still a radical album. Toshiyuki Miyama & His New Herd Orchestra, The Complete Blue Note Recordings of Thelonious Monk, The Complete Vogue Recordings/The Black Lion Sessions, The Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall, The Story of the "Thunderbolt" That Led to Chick Corea Finally Appreciating Mozart, New Releases Roundup: Week of November 26, 2013. During his time with Blue Note, Monk recorded a host of titles for Prestige including Thelonious Monk Plays and Sonny Rollins and Thelonious Monk. A vast cosmic wink permeated all of Thelonious Monks work. Jazz was losing its place of import. Every moment of this progression consists of a black artist making something that challenges the norm and tries to give life to the specificity of their experience. The upshot is a savvy rendering of a goofy love song. It's not just his idiosyncratic chordal clusters, his timing and phrasing, but his touch. But Monk approached this style with a vicious sarcasm that was at once beautiful and contentious. Tragicomic. Prior to the forms inception, the once fiery swing genre had cooled to a series of bland big bands in dance clubs. They had a portrait painted: Monks profile in a feathered chapeau, his stately gaze off to the distance as though he were surveying the kingdom he ruled. I was also struck by the role of his wife, Nellie. They worked on the song for five long, smoke-filled, tense, and probably stinky hours, and still couldnt nail it. After leaving Columbia in 1971, he recorded and played live only sporadically. To tell Monk's story and the story of the people who shaped his world, I was uncovering some of the most obscure individuals, people in the jazz world we know nothing about now.