The Long March of Thelonious Sphere Monk (1917-1982)

Marc Crawford (1930-1966) was a talented writer and critic of the music. His articles appeared in dozens of magazines and journals, including Down Beat, Jazz Podium, Swing Journal, among others. He also published the first extensive interview with Miles Davis for Playboy. A keen observer of Monk, he wrote an insightful profile on him for Ebony in 1959. The following first appeared in Jazz Podium and was reprinted in Time Capsule , a publication Marc founded and edited with students while teaching at New York University’s General Studies Program. Marc was also a wonderful human being with a commitment to social justice; among other things, he wrote political articles for the New York Daily Challenge and co-authored, with William Loren Katz, The Lincoln Brigade, a history of the American volunteers who fought in the Spanish Civil War.

We’ve taken the liberty to correct a couple of small errors in the text pertaining to dates and names..

1 By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.

2 We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.

3 For there they had carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, sing us one of the songs of Zion.

4 How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land.

For most of sixty‑four bittersweet years jazz pianist‑composer Thelonious Sphere Monk lived life as a legend. The big black bearded Buddha's complex compositions frightened all but the very best musicians, and his small hands and the unerring crash of his right elbow or forearm into a cluster of piano keys rearranged time so that silence sang in a voice we may never hear again. He neither announced nor listed what he would play and fans found no fault with his habitual tardiness, knowing Monk just might not have shown up at all. He once refused to begin a Detroit concert unless promoters flew his wife in from New York, and held out until Nellie arrived, hair still in curlers, clad in a housedress, her bedroom slippers flapping. Offstage and on, Monk always wore one of his many hats from distant lands and performed serious personal dances beside his piano when not playing or whenever sidemen soloed. That was how he conducted and made sure the music would swing.

Monk's majestic manner, sometimes coupled with bamboo‑framed sunglasses and a cabbage or collard leaf in his lapel, kept most at bay, People coming close departed puzzled by his cryptic monologues: "It's always night or we wouldn't need light." "Black is white," "Two is one." "Hey! Butterflies faster than birds? Must be, cause with all the birds on the scene up in my neighborhood there's this butterfly, and he flies any way he wanna. Yeah. Black and yellow butterfly. "

But behind that baffling banter breathed an implacable renegade who was jailed after a junk bust, beaten in the company of an English baroness for seeking a glass of water in a Delaware motel, banned from performing in New York for eight years and denied recognition for twenty. His revolutionary cunning and pursuit of excellence helped add a new dimension to African‑American music, the major and some say only gift to world culture to spring from these shores. Moreover, he lived to see that music and its maker's irrevocably validated.

"Monk is the guy who started it all," said great drummer Art Blakey, adding, "He came before both Parker and Gillespie." The late Charlie Parker‑" Bird" of the alto saxophone legend‑and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie were among the innovators of Bebop, as were the late pianist Bud Powell, guitarist Charlie Christian, who died in 1941, and Kenny Clark, the Paris expatriate drummer of more than thirty years, in whose small band Monk used to play at Kelly's Stables in New York.

"Some of us began to jam at Minton's up in Harlem in the early forties," said Dizzy Gillespie, recalling the birth of Bebop at Minton 's Playhouse, where Thelonious Monk was then house pianist. "But there were always some cats showing up there who couldn't blow at all and would take six or seven choruses to prove it. So on afternoons before a session, Thelonious Monk and I began to work out some complex variations on chords and the like and we used them at night to scare away the no‑talent guys. After awhile we got more and more interested in what we were doing as music, and, as we began to explore, our music evolved." (Both were members of Lucky Millinder's band in 1942.)

"We often talked in the afternoon," Kenny Clark remembered. "That's how we came to write different chord progressions. . . . We did it to discourage the sitters‑in at night we didn't want."

He might have added that they were tired of having their musical ideas plagiarized by a white world which would neither admit them nor pay for what was stolen.

"Now, I want to tell you what I know about how and why bop got started," the late pianist Mary Lou Williams once confided, "Thelonious Monk and some of the cleverest young musicians used to complain, 'We'll never get credit for what we're doing.' They had reason to complain. In the music business, the going is rough for original talent. . . . Anyway, Monk said, 'We're going to get a big band started. We're going to create something they can't steal because they can't play it.' "

To that strategy, Charlie Parker said, approvingly, "The Monk runs deep.”

There seems no record of what Bud Powell said, only the certain knowledge that he lent the music the brilliance of a blinding speed, impeccable taste and his outsized genius. Monk was protective of Bud and treated him like a brother. Bud sorely lacked the stuff of which warriors are made. Besides, Monk admired the way Bud played his compositions. But when his problems built too high, Bud's mind would snap like a broken shoe string and he lived, then, in another world. "On a dreary winter day," the late writer Allen Morrison said, "Bud walked into Minton's with mud all over his shoes and that strange light shone in his bulging eyes. The waiters had just covered the tables with fresh white linen. Bud started walking from tabletop to tabletop, leaving his muddy footprints behind. The waiters wanted to break Bud's legs, but Monk shouted, 'Don't a sonavabitch move! Don't a mother touch him!' No one did, either."

Perhaps Monk knew there was a sure pleasure in being mad which only madmen understood, for he himself had been committed several times. Perhaps, too, that incident inspired the Monk composition "In Walked Bud."

In universities across America today, the music Monk called into being is taught by professors of the highest rank, some of whom played with Monk in those long‑gone jazz rooms on 52nd Street or in the smoke‑soaked womb at Minton's Playhouse. It is also a widening field of Ph.D. study. For decades, Voice of America has made it a broadcast staple to win friends and influence people throughout the world, even though it remains an alien sound in the ears of most Americans.

Monk was the first major jazz composer after Duke Ellington, the master, who in half a century produced more than 3,000 works. Yet Monk's estimated 100 compositions are fast closing in on Ellington's as the music most performed by African‑American jazzmen today. French critic Andre Hodier hailed Monk as the first jazzman to have "a feeling for specifically modern esthetic values."

But when Dizzy and Bird led Bebop out of Harlem on an odyssey to the ends of the earth, Monk stayed behind to follow the footprints of his own musical dreams. "They think differently, harmonically," Monk once explained. "They play mostly stuff that is based on the chords of other things, like the blues and 'I Got Rhythm.' I like the whole song, melody and chord structure to be different. I make up my own chords and melodies." At another time he said, "Jazz is my adventure. I'm after new chords, new ways of syncopating, new figurations, new runs, how to use notes differently . . . . .. He played and recorded with Coleman Hawkins in 1944 and worked briefly with Gillespie, but aside from them he worked almost entirely on his own or leading a quartet or small combo. Jobs were hard to come by and many musicians resented him. Men of compromise waste no love on those who won't. Most of the time Monk spent closed up in his room alone, composing or studying the picture of Billie Holiday tacked to the ceiling. Wife Nellie took a clerk's job to buy his clothes and keep him in pin money.

Finally, in 1947, an opportunity knocked. Through the intercession of Bud Powell, Monk made the first recordings under his own name. Long before he would become president of Senegal, the African poet and Sorbonne professor Leopold Senghor urged, "New York, New York, let black blood flow into your veins that it may give your bridges the bends of buttocks." But white listeners tended to reject Monk's offering because, as Blue Note Records' Alfred Lion put it, "they thought he lacked technique."

"He hasn't invented a new scheme of things," Paul Bacon said of Monk in a 1948 issue of Record Changer jazz magazine, "but he has, for years, looked with an unjaundiced eye at music and seen a little something else. He plays riffs that are older than Bunk Johnson but they don't sound the same, His beat is familiar but he does something strange there, too. He can make a rhythm almost separate, so that what he does is inside or outside it. Monk is really making use of all the unused space around jazz, and he makes you feel that there are plenty of unopened doors."

As if the neglect by most critics, musicians and fans was insufficient to make his climb Promethean, Monk was arrested along with Bud Powell when a packet of heroin was found in their possession. Those in the know knew that Monk was "clean," but he refused to let Powell take the rap alone, perhaps to lend a strength he knew Bud had lost long ago. "Every day I would plead with him," Nellie recalled, " 'Thelonious, get yourself out of this trouble. You didn't do anything.' But he'd just say, 'Nellie, I have to walk the streets when I get out. I can't talk.' " Monk remained silent and the judge said, "Sixty days in jail!"

Upon his release, police cancelled his "cabaret card," without which no entertainer could appear in New York nightclubs. True, it killed what little livelihood there was, but police remained adamant. Monk didn't hold his mouth right, he wouldn't scratch his head if it didn't itch. Besides, lie was an oddball and insufficiently housebroken. The ban held for eight years. He made a few records and now and then went out on the road. In effect, he was all but silenced.

"Everybody was saying Thelonious was weird or locked up," Nellie remembered. "But they just talked that way because they'd never see him. He hated to be asked why he wasn't working, and he didn't want to see anybody unless he could buy them a drink at least. Besides, it hurts less to be passed over for jobs if you aren't around to hear the others' names called. It was a bad time. He even had to pay to get into Birdland."

In the 1950s new names, new critics, new magazine and newspaper columns, new promoters, new club owners, new recording companies, new A & R men, new salesmen, new outlets, new publicists, new journalists and new "scholars" took African‑American music on one hell of a ride, while Monk languished in Limbo.

Jazz, most of its creators believe, is that one continual cry of Africa's kidnapped in the New World, passed on from generation to generation; that this music, that feeling, is the loveliest of sounds wrung from the saddest of men‑men driven to the walls of themselves and forced to live beneath roofs too low for a man to stand up straight. How else can a musical midget look a giant in the eye?

Suddenly, some white musicians dared to speak of "refining" the most meaningful legacy of a whole people who, James Weldon Johnson wrote in the African‑American national hymn, has "come over a way that with tears has been watered . . . treading a path through the blood of our slaughtered." That the Atlantic is floored with the bleached bones of forty millions of Africans who never reached these shores proved in no way a deterrent. They would set it right, God bless 'em. So they dressed the African continuum in fugues and rondos, gave it a bath and everybody wore nice little Brooks Brothers suits. And, from the foulsmelling, smoke‑filled, booze‑swilling, over‑the‑music‑talking, needlejabbing, reefer‑sucking, pill‑dropping, emotion‑shouting, finger‑popping, foot‑stomping black and tan basements and dives, jazz went off to college and to Carnegie Hall. And there, in 1954, stood Monk on the pavement, down at the heels, his behind hanging out, nose pressed to the window, looking at all that glitter inside and at Dave Brubeck's face on the cover of Time. Hosanna! The jazz Messiah had finally arrived and the glorious force of him would clean out all the impurities left from all the untutored creators in the world. Privileged by the absence of skin color, white jazzmen yearning to be measured by the same yardstick as that of the music's creators must have itched terribly where they could not scratch.

Monk was Nellie's and they would walk hand and hand until his eyes closed on the world. But in his sad place and at that terrible time, Monk needed a friend, too. Someone he could trust, someone outside of him who would intuitively know and confirm what his music meant, who could understand the man who had blown the breath of his very life into it. That she should have been a wealthy and titled Englishwoman seems in retrospect stranger than fiction. But the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter became in time his closest friend, his unabashed champion for twenty‑seven years, the last nine of which he lived in her large Weehawken, New Jersey, home, with her fifty‑three cats, overlooking the Hudson River.

Daughter of the late British banker Nathaniel Charles Rothschild and the sister of the third Baron Rothschild, she takes her title from a twenty‑year marriage to Baron Jules de Koenigswarter, a hero of the French Resistance and, in 1953, France's ambassador to Mexico. 'Nica, as she is known to friends, could no longer abide the dull and prescribed life of the diplomatic community. In Norway, she was awestruck when she first heard the new music, but it became the siren song that lured her to New York when it caught up to her again in Mexico City.

Older jazz was not new to her, however. During the dark days of World War 11, Winston Churchill would sometimes dispatch Lord Victor Rothschild, her brother, to Washington for sensitive talks with President Roosevelt himself. But Lord Victor would stop off first, in New York, she said, to take piano lessons with jazz great Teddy Wilson. "The owner of the Musical Express, in London, was an old friend of mine," the baroness recalled. "He and I were responsible for getting Teddy Wilson to England for the very first time in 1954. He put up the bread and I acted as Teddy's chauffeur."

When Charlie Parker died in her apartment ("BEBOP KING DIES IN HEIRESS’ FLAT") in 1955, she took a bum rap. In his last few days she had tried to save Bird's life with money and medicine when no one else would. Quite simply she could not understand how men of such artistic genius should have to endure so shabbily and were not perceived as national treasures. From start to finish, Monk fascinated her. Sitting up front in her big silver Bentley, Monk looked like nothing so much as a fat Mandarin warlord after a banquet, while the baroness drove, and still does, like the lead car in the Indianapolis 500.

She provided Monk with rooms to compose and play in, helped to collect medical evidence that he was not a junkie, along with character references from jazzmen and musical scholars, and in 1957 police returned Monk's cabaret card. Everyone flocked to the Five Spot to hear the music they had been denied for eight years. Monk and the music he made there with the late tenor man John Coltrane remain unforgettable.

Then Monk lost his cabaret card again. He, the baroness and tenor saxophonist Charlie Rouse were driving through Delaware for a week's work in Baltimore. Monk was a big man, who loomed even larger. Had he stood in the back of the room, all eyes would have eventually turned to him and his own would have met every pair. Those with preconceived notions of what a black man's proper bearing ought to be would, most likely, have found Monk's mien unsettling. In any event, Monk stopped at a motel for a drink of water and disturbed the manager by lingering long in front of a picture of the leaning tower of Pisa. In The Jazz Life, Nat Hentoff quotes Nellie as saying, "I used to have a phobia about pictures or anything on a wall hanging just a little bit crooked. Thelonious cured me. He nailed a clock to the wall at a very slight angle, just enough to make me furious. We argued about it for two hours, but he wouldn't let me change it. Finally I got used to it. Now anything can hang at any angle and it doesn't bother me at all." But the motel manager called the police.

Six of them surrounded the Bentley and ordered Monk out. He refused. What law had he broken? They tried to pull him out. The baroness protested. Monk resisted. They began to beat him with clubs. He held fast to the steering wheel. The baroness warned them not to hit his hands, that he was a pianist. They beat his hands loose and dragged him out and over to a police car. But his long legs were hanging out. They beat and kicked them inside. The baroness demanded to be arrested, too. "I feared they would take him off and kill him," she said. They did arrest her when she took the rap for some loose marijuana, which she describes in her deep, throaty aristocratic voice as "garden variety." She was sentenced to three years and it took three years of legal maneuvering to have the sentence set aside. No charge was placed against Monk, but he lost his cabaret card anyway. It took two more years to get it back.

In February 1959, Monk was presented as a leader of a large orchestra in a memorable concert at Town Hall in New York. He began performing at jazz festivals. His compositions‑" 'Round Midnight," "Ruby, My Dear," "Off Minor," "Epistrophy," "Well You Needn't," "Straight No Chaser," "Blue Monk"‑had become classics. He made records. Some companies only wanted to grant four hours of paid rehearsal time. Monk would insist on seven days. Max Roach said some of those sidemen didn't realize until years later why Monk held out for longer rehearsal time. He wanted them to make some money, too. Monk never forgot what it was like for a musician to be unemployed or passed over.

In February 1964, ten years after Dave Brubeck, the face of Thelonious Monk appeared on the cover of Time, a symbol of some sort of an American arrival. "I was friends to lots of musicians," the cover story quoted him as saying, "but looks like they weren't friends to me." Of course, he didn't mean Bud Powell, caged at the time in a tuberculosis sanitarium outside of Paris, and who was to die in 1966. Monk was one of the few to send Bud money when he most needed it.

Monk was seen around the world, made a comfortable living, did the kind of things stars are supposed to. But in the early seventies he was seen less and less: only on three occasions after 1973.

. . . . Much of Monk's world was changing and he became ill, moved across the Hudson to the baroness' house in 1973 and into a room which he seldom left. He looked at the ceiling a lot and there was no picture of Billie Holiday up there anymore. As the late Bill Walker would say, "La‑de-da/Lady Day/You've Gone Away/ You're Gone/You."

In the 1981 autumn, the loveliest of New York seasons, the baroness said, "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 well. He knows what is going on in the world, and I don't know how, because he doesn't read 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 his wife, 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 (who also lives there) practices on it, 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."

Perhaps Monk knew that whatever it was he looked for now could no longer be found on a piano.

His mother had brought him and his sister to New York from their native Rocky Mount, North Carolina, when Thelonious was three years old. He began playing piano at six and had taught himself to read music before his first lessons at eleven. His persistent rebellion against orthodox harmony, with which he became familiar through organ‑playing in a local Baptist church, began when he was still a youngster. He began playing in bands at thirteen, in saloons, theaters and at Depression house rent parties. Four years later he joined a group that traveled with an evangelist. "She preached and feared," Monk recalled, "and we played." When the troupe reached Kansas City, pianist Mary Lou Williams, who went on to become one of his close friends, heard Thelonious for the first time. Later she would say, "He is playing the same style then that he is now." Two years later he was at Minton's.

The lecturer at a Columbia University jazz class once turned to guest Monk and asked if he would "play some of your weird chords for the class."

"What do you mean 'weird'?" Monk bristled. "They're perfectly logical." Interestingly enough, when he died, the Columbia University radio station played thirty‑three consecutive hours of his music as a tribute.

Monk playing Mao from under a Chinese Coolie hat:

There is no Jade Emperor in Heaven

There is no Dragon King on Earth

I am the Jade Emperor

I am the Dragon King

Make way for me you hills and mountains

On February 5, 1982, Monk was rushed to the Englewood, New Jersey, hospital. Brain hemorrhage.

Often at the piano Monk seemed locked in a struggle to free himself from a bag he could never quite get out of. Still, at times he came right up to the mouth of it, carrying his audience right up with him, and they prayed that he would find the lost chord, the right note and the ultimate energy because when he did—Great God Almighty—the bag would fly open and all of Aunt Hagar's children would conic marching right straight on out of there, without a Moses or a Red Sea anywhere near.

He remained in a coma for eleven days.

Sometimes the look on his face when he played was that of a tired old man I still dreaming of Paradise and‑0' God‑why on nights when the moon hangs just so and all the stars are out do I hear on the wind again the sad mournful sound of Monk playing "Remember."

You promised that you'd forget me not.

But you forgot to remember.

At 8:10 on the morning of February 17, 1982, Monk's right hand joined those waiting to be born and his ancestors took him by the left one, completing the magnificent circle that carried him right into the romance of history.

The New Yorker said of Monk, "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. His very soul had gone, and he never found it again. "

Perhaps, perhaps. Quien sabe que?

But in a letter to me on February 9 of this year, the baroness wrote, "I once came across something in a preface to a study of Kahlil Gibran, which seems to me to apply perfectly to Thelonious.

"'There is a race of strangers, of wayfarers, that persists upon the earth. They dwell with us awhile, calling us brothers, but we come to be aware that they are of 'an immortal stuff, somewhat more deific than ourselves, and only insofar as we receive and comprehend their utterance, only insomuch as we join our wavering, uncertain voices with their voices, may we partake in brief and finite measure of their communion.'