"Monk"
Thelonious
Monk - obituary by Whitney Balliett
Oxford University Press, 1991
The pianist and composer Thelonious
Monk, who died last week, at the age of sixty-four, was an utterly original man
who liked to pretend he was an eccentric. Indeed, he used eccentricity as a
shield to fend off a world that he frequently found alien, and even hostile. A
tall, dark, bearish, inward-shining man, he wore odd hats and dark glasses with
bamboo frames when he played. His body moved continuously. At the keyboard, he
swayed back and forth and from side to side, his feet flapping like flounders
on the floor. While his sidemen soloed, he stood by the piano and dnaced,
turning in slow, genial circles, his elbows out like wings, his knees slightly
bent, his fingers snapping on the after-beat. His motions celebrated what he
and his musicians played: Watch, these are the shapes of my music. His
compositions and his playing were of a piece. His improvisations were molten
Monk compositions, and his compositions were frozen Monk improvisations. His
medium- and up-tempo tunes are stop-and-go rhythmic structures. Their melodic
lines, which often hinge on flatted notes, tend to be spare and direct, but
they are written with strangely placed rests and unexpected accents. They move
irregularly through sudden intervals and ritards and broken rhythms. His
balladlike tunes are altogether different. They are art songs, which move
slowly and three-dimensionally. They are carved sound. (Monk's song titles -- "Crepuscule
with Nellie," "Epistrophy," "Ruby, My Dear,"
"Well You Needn't," "Rhythm-a-ning," "Hackensack"
-- are as striking as the songs themselves. But none beat his extraordinary
name, Thelonious Sphere Monk, which surpasses such euphonies as Stringfellow
Barr and Twyla Tharp.) His improvisations were attempts to disguise his love of
melody. He clothed whatever he played with spindly runs, flatted notes, flatted
chords, repeated single notes, yawning silences, and zigzag rhythms. Sometimes
he pounded the keyboard with his right elbow. His style protected him not only
from his love of melody but from his love of the older pianists he grew out of
-- Duke Ellington and the stride pianists. All peered out from inside his
solos, but he let them escape only as parody.
Monk hid behind his music so well
that we know little of him. He was brought from North Carolina when he was
little, but eventually settled in the West Sixties, and he lived there until
his building was torn down. He married the Nellie of his song title, and he had
two children, one of whom became a drummer. he began appearing in New York
night clubs around 1940, but he achieved little recognition until the late
fifties. (He was often lumped with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, however,
he did not have much in common with them outside of certain harmonic
inventions.) part of the reason for Monk's slow blooming was his iconoclastic
music, and part was the fact that he was unable to perform in New York night
clubs from 1951 to 1957 -- the time when Charles Mingus and the Modern Jazz
Quartet and Gerry Mulligan were becoming famous. (The police had lifted his cabaret
card, because he had been found sitting in a car in which narcotics were
concealed.) But when he returned to the scene, he suddenly seemed to be
everywhere -- on record after exceptional record, at concerts and festivals, at
the old Five Spot and the Vanguard and the Jazz Gallery. He filled us with his
noble, funny, generous music.
Then, in 1973, he vanished again.
There were rumors that he was ill and had been taken in by his old friend and
mentor the Baroness Nica de Koenigswarter, who lives in a big house in
Weehawken, New Jersey. The rumors turned out to be true, and this is what the
Baroness had to say about Monk before he died. "No doctor has put his
finger on what is wrong with him, and he has had every medical test under the
sun. He's not unhappy, and his mind works very well. He knows what is going on
in the world, and I don't know how, because he doesn't read the newspapers and
he only watches a little telly. He's withdrawn, that's all. It's as though he
had gone into retreat. He takes walks several times a week, and Nellie comes
over from New York almost every day to cook for him. He began to withdraw in
1973, and he hasn't touched the piano since 1976. He has one twenty or thirty
feet from his bed, so to speak, but he never goes near it. When Barry Harris
visits, he practices on it, and he'll ask Monk what the correct changes to
'Ruby, My Dear' are, and Monk will tell him. Charlie Rouse, his old tenor
saxophonist, came to see him on his birthday the other day, but Monk isn't
really interested in seeing anyone. The strange thing is he looks beautiful. He
has never said that he won't play the piano again. He suddenly went into this,
so maybe he'll suddenly come out."
But Monk must have known he
wouldn't. His last public appearance, at the Newport Jazz Festival of 1976, was
painful. His playing was mechanical and uncertain, and, astonishingly, his
great Gothic style had fallen away.
© Whitney Balliett