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.