This blog is nothing if not eclectic, and I really don’t see that changing anytime soon. It’s only theme is things I’m interested in, and that’s pretty wide field. So to continue in that veine today I thought I’d write about one of my favorite subjects; Jazz, and one of my favorite musicians Thelonius Monk.
Monk was quite literally the mad genius of Jazz; his son T.S. Monk has said he was hospitalized on several occasions; though no official diagnosis was ever made public it has been speculated that he was schizophrenic. But none the less he was a genius, one of the most gifted pianist ever and a man credited as a father of bebop and hard bop. If cool jazz was the more straight forward presentation of music that favored technical style over improvisation; bop was all about improvisation and complexity, and few were better then Monk. An early example, and one his best know pieces is Epistrophy.
Even by the standards of bebop Epistrophy is a complex song; and one of the great examples of what made Monk a under-appreciated musician. It was the complexity of his work caused causal fans to turn away from him and toward Cool Jazz, and it couldn’t have come at a worse time. At the same time that his music wasn’t selling well he lost his “cabaret card” a license to play in alcohol serving establishments for his unwillingness to testify against Bud Powell, who arrested in August of 1951 for narcotics possession. The loss of the card forced Monk out of the fruitful New York club scene into theaters and out of town clubs.
In 1954 Monk was signed to Riverside who bought out his contract from Prestige for $100. It was Riverside that began to move Monk away from bebop towards hard bop; first by convincing Monk to cover Duke Ellington’s work on Thelonious Monk Plays Duke Ellington. While regarded as one of Monk’s weaker works, it none the less introduced him to a larger audience, and began to change how Monk viewed his playing.
Around the time of his success with Monk Play Ellington he had his cabaret card restored and was able to begin working the New York clubs, and with one of the most important quartets in history. John Coltrane spent much of the 1950s battling his heroin addiction, and had lost his seat with Miles Davis due to his “unreliability” but by 1957 he had beaten his addiction and was looking for work. Monk and Coltrane played together for 9 months during 1957, before rejoining Davis at the beginning of 1958. But it was during those 9 months that Monk cemented his move into hard bop, exemplified by the blues influence of ‘Round Midnight and Blue Monk.
By the 1960s Monk had signed with Columbia and appeared on the cover of Time magazing, but creatively he was beginning to slow down, producing fewer original works; and beginning to become more erratic in his behavior. By the 1970 he had retired into seclusion and would die in 1982 of a stroke. Only after his death was an honest assessment of his work done, and he was recognized as one the top jazz musicians ever.
