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Thelonious Monk Part One Thelonious Sphere Monk – for some, the name says it all. Monk the musician was a total original, in jazz
and in music itself. Both he and his music
were unique, unlike anything that came before or would follow. Once called “the mad Monk,” and “the
high priest of bebop,” Monk himself once said, “I say, play your own way. Don’t play what the public wants. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you’re
doing – even if it does take them fifteen,
twenty years.” The public is still picking up what Monk was doing, almost 20
years after his death in 1982. Born October 10, 1917, in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, he and
his parents soon moved to New York City. Monk
took piano lessons as a young boy and by the time he was 13 he had been barred from
entering the weekly amateur contests at the Apollo Theater because he’d won them so
often. The pianist and writer Mary Lou Williams reported meeting him
in Kansas City in the mid-1930s. “Thelonious,
still in his teens, came into town with either an evangelist or a medicine show – I
forget which. While he was in Kaycee he
jammed every night, really used to blow on piano, employing a lot more technique than he
[did later]. He felt that musicians should
play something new and started doing it. He
was one of the original modernists all right.” When he was 19 Monk joined the house band at Minton’s
Playhouse in Harlem. In 1947, not quite 10
years later, Monk told Down Beat, “Be-bop
wasn’t developed in any deliberate way. For
my part, I’ll say it was just the style of music I happened to play. We all contributed ideas…. Along with the
bass and drums, I was always at the spot and could keep working on the music. The rest, like Dizzy [Gillespie] and Charlie
[Parker], came in only from time to time at first.”
Trumpeter Richard Williams said, “By the time he joined the after-hours
jam sessions at Minton’s Playhouse … he had become a complete original – as
a pianist who seemed to be engaged in a search for the notes between the keys, and as a
composer of sharp-elbowed tunes.” By sheer good fortune, some of these sessions in 1941 were
recorded by a jazz fan named Jerry Newman, who lugged a 78-rpm disk recorder up to Harlem. These recordings – of fairly dubious fidelity
– have for years been described as “amateur,” but in fact they were made
for radio broadcast, as “delayed on disk” “live” broadcasts. There were four Minton’s Playhouse
broadcasts, which have supplied the material for all the records released subsequently. (They include The Immortal Charlie Christian on Laserlight, CD 17
032; Don Byas: Live at Minton’s on Musidisc
30 JA 5121; and The Early Thelonious Monk on Moon CD 086-2, as well as LPs released on
Everest, Counterpoint/Esoteric, Xanadu, ARC/Society and other labels. Many, if not most of these were quasi-bootlegs,
with material duplicated by different labels. Some
were taken from Newman’s 78 masters and others from the AM radio broadcasts. None are mentioned in jazz record-collecting
price guides, but the original 1950s LPs were small-run pressings and now quite
rare.) In 1944 Monk joined the Coleman Hawkins Quartet. Hawkins was one of the very first jazz
saxophonists (on tenor sax), having begun his career in the 1920s. His 1938 recording of “Body and Soul”
was an immediate classic, and “Bean,” as Hawkins was affectionately known, was
the man all other tenor players were compared to or contrasted with. Although he gained prominence in the Swing era,
Hawkins stayed on top of the newer developments in jazz and was hospitable to Bop. On October 19, 1944, Hawkins’ Quartet with
Monk on piano recorded four sides, which have been released as part of Bean & the Boys, on Prestige (7824; CD
24124-2). In 1946 Monk briefly joined Dizzy Gillespie’s Big Band,
and was recorded in June and July of that year at the Spotlite Club in New York for nine
tracks of The Legendary Dizzy Gillespie Big Band – Live 1946
(Bandstand BDCD 1534), one of them Monk’s own composition, “’Round
Midnight,” which would subsequently become a jazz standard. In 1947 Monk began recording as a leader for the Blue Note
label. His early records (all singles) were
not well received by the jazz press. Down Beat referred to Monk as someone who “generally
plays bad, though interesting, piano,” and accused him of “veritably faking a
rather large order.” In fact by then
Monk had developed a unique piano technique which involved playing with the fingers
straight and splayed out, often striking two adjacent notes on the keyboard. What his early critics failed to understand was
that he did this deliberately, playing the quarter-tones which lurked “in the crack”
between those two notes. These Blue Note
sides were collected first on two 10-inch LPs, Genius
of Modern Music, Volumes 1 (BLP-5002) and 2 (BLP-5009), released in 1951 and 1952. Volume 1 is now valued at $300 to $500 (depending
on condition); volume 2 at $200 to $400. In
1956 Blue Note reissued them as 12-inch LPs, in two editions, one pressed with “deep
grooves.” The “deep groove”
editions are worth $125 to $250; the regular pressings $100 to $200. Both versions carry the same catalogue numbers:
Vol. 1 is BLP-1510; Vol. 2 is BLP-1511. (CD
versions of these albums exist on Blue Note, but do not coincide with the LPs. Blue Note has also issued The Complete Blue Note Recordings of Thelonious Monk, BN 30363, a four-CD
box set which includes alternate takes and material recorded with and under Milt Jackson’s
name as well.) Part Two [The first two paragraphs of Part Two were a briefer
recapitulation of the first four paragraphs of Part One and have been deleted.] Monk himself said, “Jazz is my adventure. I’m after new chords, new ways of
syncopating, new figures, new runs. How to
use notes differently. That’s it. Just using notes differently.” And John Coltrane, who played with Monk in the 1950s, said,
“I think Monk is one of the true greats of all time.
He’s a real musical thinker – there’s not many like him.” In the early 1950s Monk recorded four albums for Prestige. In 1953 Prestige released two 10-inch LPs, Thelonious Monk Trio (PRLP-142) and Thelonious Monk Quintet with Sonny Rollins and Julius
Watkins (PRLP-166), the latter his trio (with drums and bass) augmented by Rollins’
tenor sax and Watkins’ French horn. (Both
are nor valued at $150 to $300, depending on their condition.) In 1954 Prestige released two more 10-inch
LPs, Thelonious Monk Quintet (PRLP-180), and Thelonious Monk Trio (PRLP-189), both valued at the
same prices as the prior Prestige LPs. The material on these four 10-inch LPs was repackaged and
reissued by Prestige on a series of 12-inch LPs in 1956 and 1957 (Thelonious Monk, PRLP-7027; Monk, PRLP-7053; Thelonious Monk/Sonny Rollins, PRLP-7075 –
all worth from $50 to $125), which were themselves reissued with new titles and catalog
numbers starting in 1959 and continuing into the mid-1960s (as Monk’s Moods,
PRLP-7159, a reissue of 7027; Work, PRLP-7169, a
reissue of 7075; and We See, PRLP-7245, a
reissue of 7053). (We See was later again reissued as The Golden Monk, PRLP-7363; Monk’s Moods as The High Priest, PRLP-7508; and Work as The
Genius of Thelonious Monk, PRST-7656 –
in “electronically rechanneled” fake stereo.) Interestingly enough, 1956 was also the year Blue Note
repackaged its two-volume Genius of Modern Music
10-inch LPs as 12-inch LPs. What had happened? Riverside
Records had happened. A label which had
started out with reissues of traditional jazz recordings from the 1930s and 1940s had
begun poking its toes in the waters of modern jazz. Riverside
signed Monk in 1955 and began a series of ambitious recordings with him which were
well-produced and well-packaged, and were subsequently well-marketed as well. The first was one designed to introduce Monk to a
wider audience, Thelonious Monk Plays Duke Ellington
(RLP-12-201). (The original, first edition of this LP, with a photo cover, is worth $200
to $400. Three years later Riverside reissued
the album with the same catalog number, but with a cover reproduction of Henri Rousseau’s
painting, “The Repast of the Lion.” This,
much more common version of the LP, is worth only $16 to $40.) Monk owed a debt to the Harlem stride pianists of the 1920s,
out of which Ellington had come, and Ellington himself had heard Monk, and understood and
appreciated what he was doing, so Monk playing Ellington was not a surprise. But, to those who had been prepared by his earlier
and more adventurous work for Blue Note and Prestige, it was somewhat disappointing. So was his second Riverside album, released in
1956, The Unique Thelonious Monk (RLP-12-209; worth $40 to $100), which
consisted entirely of standards, albeit uniquely interpreted. But if these albums did not
advance the frontiers of jazz, they did advance Monk’s fortunes and establish him
with a much larger audience – leading Blue Note and Prestige to dust off their Monk
recordings and return them to the market. And Riverside finally allowed Monk to premiere new
compositions of his own on his third album, Brilliant
Corners (RLP-12-226), in 1957. (The album, like most of his Riverside albums, is now
valued at $16 to $40.) Riverside went on to
issue 12 additional albums by Monk by 1963, the year he signed to Columbia. And Monk would record another ten albums for
Columbia in the 1960s. While these albums
(some of them recorded live at club dates) documented Monk’s working group (usually
with Johnny Griffin on tenor sax) and are well worth hearing, they lack something in
comparison with his Blue Note and Prestige recordings – a sense of freshness,
perhaps. Although Monk was uncompromisingly
himself throughout his career, his music achieved a plateau in the mid-1950s beyond which
he did not climb further. Both the Prestige albums and the Riverside albums are now
available from Fantasy’s Original Jazz Classics label on CD, and Sony/CBS has
reissued the Columbia albums on CD. Thelonious Monk died in 1982, at the age of 65. |
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