The Monk You've Never Heard

By Robin D. G. Kelley
SeeingBlack.com Cultural Critic

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The few record labels left willing to carry serious "classic" jazz are masters at selling old wine in new bottles. The "complete" box-sets of most artists consist of re-released material, a handful of unreleased takes, and, increasingly, all the studio chatter and false starts that made it into the vault. With one exception: Thelonious Records, the newly launched label founded by Thelonious Monk, Jr., son of the legendary jazz pianist, and composer and a multi-talented drummer and band leader in his own right. Unlike the big labels, the Monk family discovered a cache of fairly high quality homemade recordings from various engagements in addition to incredible reel-to-reel tapes of Monk creating at home. They date from about 1957 to the early 1960s, and were made primarily by his widow, Nellie Monk. These recordings are available on www.monkzone.com.

The treasures include a 1958 performance of Monk's quartet at the Five Spot Café, which happened to be the first gig to include legendary tenor saxophonist Charlie Rouse, a performance from Birdland in 1963, and a stunning recording of Monk working through the standard "I'm Getting Sentimental Over You" for the first time in his tiny apartment on West 63rd Street in Manhattan. This is just the beginning.

Listening to these recordings, especially the tapes Nellie Monk made at home, has radically changed the way I think about Monk's piano playing, which is not an easy thing to do, since all jazz heads think we know Monk. He's universally acknowledged as an unequivocal genius who has always resisted easy categories. In the course of a career that stretched from the late 1930s to 1976, he helped transform modern jazz in the so-called "bebop" era, and yet shied away from bebop's frenetic tempos or its proclivity for borrowing altered chord progressions from Tin Pan Alley songs. His way out, ultramodern melodic lines and harmonies, often proved treacherous even for virtuoso jazz artists, and yet he continued to incorporate elements from the old Harlem stride pianists of the 1920s and 1930s.

A man of few public words and a limited paper trail, what we know about Thelonious Monk derives largely from recorded music or anecdotes of other musicians. From the first journalistic pieces to the more recent documentary films, he comes across as an eccentric, mad genius, a brilliant idiot savant or a mysterious diviner whose musical ideas are unknowable. He is alleged to have an "intuitive" and "child-like" approach to the piano. But listening to these recordings, we learn instead is that his distinctive sound is a product of unceasing discipline, practice and hard work. Whether he is reconstructing an old standard or working through his own originals, achieving the harmonic and rhythmic language we've come to recognize in Monk did not come easy to him. Indeed, playing "straight" seemed easier for Monk than playing Monk.

Perhaps the earliest of the recently discovered tapes is several takes of Ned Washington and George Bassman's "I'm Getting Sentimental Over You," a 1932 torch song well-known as the theme for Tommy Dorsey's Orchestra. The tape must have been made between January and March of 1957, just before he took the song into the studio for the first time and recorded it as a solo piece on April 16, 1957, for the Riverside label. The eighty-four minute tape provides a detailed record of how Mr. Monk painstakingly made "Sentimental" his own.

During the first five-minute take, he manages to get through only one chorus of the melody, stopping, starting, repeating three or four note phrases. As he wrestles with each measure, it becomes apparent that every note in his reinterpretation of the melody is carefully placed and probably written out at some point. Over time, Monk begins to integrate stride piano style into his interpretation. Once he has reached a comfort zone, we hear him singing solfeggio, making great intervallic leaps all over the keyboard and just plain enjoying himself. He never loses track of the melody, to which he returns on the last chorus with a slight hesitation at the bridge. He ends with a cadenza which would become fairly common in future versions of the song, but then tags on a line quoting one of his original compositions, "Light Blue."

The successive takes, adding up to a little over an hour of continuous playing, is an astounding exercise in discovery. It is especially fascinating to hear Monk, regarded as a master of space and economy, leave so little space between notes and play continuously for so long. His purpose seems to be to hear many different possibilities so that he could decide how to construct a tight, "edited" performance. And we can assume that these eighty-four minutes represent just a fraction of how much the Monk household had to endure listening to this one song during those early months of 1957. Most musicians close to Mr. Monk, like pianists Barry Harris and Dr. Billy Taylor, recall how long he would practice a new piece, sometimes playing two hours or more in tempo. As his friend and fellow pianist, Mary Lou Williams, once recalled, "When Monk wrote a new song he customarily played it night and day for weeks unless you stopped him. That, he said, was the only way to find out if it was going to be any good."

By the time Mr. Monk took "Sentimental" into the studio on April 16, 1957, he was able to distill all of his hard work into a four-minute masterpiece. Following a romantic rubato opening filled with lush arpeggios, Mr. Monk flows easily into a slow stride tempo, emphasizing the melody throughout his improvisations. By 1960, "I'm Getting Sentimental Over You" was fully incorporated into his regular repertoire, but by then it had metamorphosed from a romantic solo piano piece to a swinging medium tempo vehicle for his quartet.

All of the newly discovered recordings are remarkable for different reasons, but these home tapes sent chills down my spine. I felt like I was in the room with him, overhearing his pleasures, his struggles and his intimate love affair with his devoted wife. Besides music itself, these tapes reveal Monk's love of music, Nellie's delight in listening to her husband and the joy they both derive from each other's company. Sometimes they are joking with one another, or simply figuring out how to work the tape recorder; other times Mrs. Monk sings along in perfect unison with the piano. For me, at least, they confirmed my belief that deep down Thelonious Monk was really a romantic who loved those old songs for more than their harmonic features. I felt it profoundly at the end of a tender rendition of "Tea for Two," when he turns to Nellie and says in a surprised but gentle voice, "Were you recording that?"

-- July 12, 2002

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