Thelonious Monk -- "It's Monk's Time"

CBS CS 8984 / BPG 62391 / CK 468405 / CL 2184

 

Nice Work If You Can Get It; (January 29, 1964 - N.Y.)

Stuffy Turkey; (January 30, 1964 - N.Y.)

Lulu's Back In Town; Brake's Sake; (February 10, 1964 - N.Y.)

Memories of You (solo); Shuffle Boil; (March 9, 1964 - N.Y.)

 

Thelonious Monk - piano. Charlie Rouse - tenor. Butch Warren - bass. Ben Riley - drums.

 

Sleeve notes by Fr. Norman J. O'Connor, C.S.P.

 

What I want to say is never what I do say. This betrayal which goes on inside this human frame is not because I am some kind of nut (let us presume normalcy for the moment) but the loss in articulation can be ascribed to the notions I am at pains to express. They are clear and then they are not. The insights leave the mind in coherent fashion and as they arrive at my tongue and at my fingers, these once-innocent, clear concepts turn out to be magical and chimerical.

 

My problem at the moment includes me, and Monk, and you who are doing the reading. My problem has been stated. Monk presents difficulties as you write about him because as you check back over his previous commentators you find that many of them have trouble getting to the point of what Monk is really about. This means there are few leads into the inside, hidden, inner life of Monk. However, it's easy to be distracted as you face the brightness and flash of this man and thus you spend your time going over the glistening surface. You are the problem, too, because jazz enthusiasts have a penchant for enjoying the obvious.

 

Monk is a problem, you ask? Have you ever seen him in a performance? I sometimes see him at the Five Spot, a jazz club on Manhattan's lower East Side. The drummer and bass player and Charlie Rouse, the tenor man, appear on the bandstand. Suddenly, a fairly tall man, with a figure that bulges in the right places, meanders on stage in an abstracted way, suddenly dips into the keyboard, and then there is sound and you are into the music of Monk. Atop his head is a hat of varying shape and fabric depending on the season of the year. The hatted head moves back and forward in a strange motion, in the manner of a sightless person. No movements pass over the planes of the face, over the skin and bones. There is no smile, no surprise, no sorrow, no joy. The eyes are not glassy, but they are unseeing. Immediately, he is standing and starts a slow shuffling circle around the areas of the piano bench, his hands and head and body keeping perfect time to the beat of the music. The musicians are still playing. There is another glide by Monk and he has slipped through a portico behind the bandstand and as you peer out through the shadows, he is standing still looking out on the avenue.

 

But, the music. I might suggest that you don't listen too carefully to the melodies; you might even avoid too much notice of the harmonies which have an energy and tension few contemporaries can equal. but, feel and listen to the rhythm. Soak yourself in it, if such an image can be used. It's a walk that you are on, and your step has a crooked gait to it, and as you walk the length of Broadway, there is a blister on your heel and you limp within the gait. But, you never drop out of step or rhythm. Now, think of that movement going on and on, and occasionally you step around small packs of tourists, an occasional drunk, a stop-light and you have the pattern -- up-down-up-down-over-across-stop-up-down-over-across-stop-up-down-over -across-on and on and on and on and on and on and...

 

Just what is this Monk all about? Obviously, Monk is busy with a simple theme. His house is not filled with a hundred rooms in which various furniture styles are heaped. The canon of his work is small, and his decorative elements are refined and in taste.

 

But, at heart Monk is a primitive man who sees life as a churning, dynamic existence, in which the heart is a beat that moves this world. In fact, there is nothing else but a syncopation in which birth, death, love, sex, art, religion, men are in a vast constant turning-over which goes on and on and music is only a reflection of this staccato, changing rhythm that is the core of existence. It isn't an unfamiliar theme or insight. It is highly romantic and it flaunts its hatred of the rational and of form because these elements are always in conflict with the innocence and clarity of the original insight. In his view, even Chance has a part because it is within the beat which is the world.

 

Jazz has not concerned itself too often with this quest for certainty and identity. but one almost suspects that the Negro heritage in jazz has been this primitive, simple insight of all things in movement, all things go on, and death is as much of the mosaic as is life. The Eastern insight is similar in that ever-recurrent is the vision of renewal and reincarnation.

 

As I said earlier, "What I want to say is never what I do say." I just hope you are still reading as you shift feet and bend further over the record rack with this album in your hand. but play the album, and relax and listen to the recurrent gait of Monk, and it goes on and on. what is this Monk about? At times he almost touches a world of chaos, a world of fire and brimstone. but then, you peer at him through the shadows of the portico and beyond Monk you see a world of beats and it's a neon sign out on the street that flashes on and off, on and off, on and off, and tomorrow the subway is running as it ran today, and lunches are being served, and graves for the dead are opened and it's the same yesterday, today and tomorrow. The facial muscles don't move, and there is no sight in the eyes, but there is just the movement, even with a hat on it.