Monk's sphere of influence expands

[Dave Monroe]

Monk's sphere of influence expands
Late pianist finds renewed fame

By Steve Paul
Tribune/McClatchy newspapers

March 1, 2007


Here's the question: If jazz is America's classical music, could that
mean Thelonious Sphere Monk is on the way to becoming the American
Mozart?

Twenty-five years after his death, the pianist and composer with one
of the most distinctive legacies in jazz has been riding a recent wave
of attention.

Musicians have long played homage to him, but the release in late 2005
of a newly discovered concert recording Monk made 50 years ago with
John Coltrane helped spark a Monk revival that has yet to subside. The
disc has settled near the top of the Billboard jazz chart for 70 weeks
or more.

Then last spring the Pulitzer Prize board awarded Monk a posthumous
special citation, a measure of mainstream acceptance.

"Thelonious Monk went from being the complete, unequivocal outsider to
me going to pick up a Pulitzer," his son, the drummer T.S. Monk, told
me last year.

Lately the sounds I've been immersed in more than most belong to Monk.
Odd, given that I've listened to him for close to four decades now.

Monk was perhaps not as prolific as Mozart, but he produced a string
of indelible standards such as "'Round Midnight," "Blue Monk" and
"Straight, No Chaser." And he nearly patented the image of jazzman as
prophet from another sphere, as it were.

Monk's music requires you to shift the musical baseline of what your
mind and body respond to. It means letting in his almost radical style
-- the twisted syncopations, the spilled droplets of notes, the
gorgeous, silent gaps that suspend you in midair for fleeting thrills.

John Coltrane, the saxophonist who began to be great while playing
alongside Monk in 1957, had a similar take from a musician's
perspective. He said that playing with Monk was like walking into a
room with no floor so you had to figure out how to stand up on your
own.

"In an era when fast, dense, virtuosic solos were the order of the
day, Monk was famous for his use of space and silence," said Robin
D.G. Kelley, who's working on a Monk biography.

"As a composer, Monk was less interested in writing new melodic lines
over popular chord progressions than in creating a whole new
architecture for his music," Kelley said by e-mail. "In the end,
though, I think Monk's own description of what he was trying to do is
best: `Everything I play is different -- different melody, different
harmony, different structure."'


Growing influence

The tree of Monk's influence, slow-growing early in his career, has
spread mightily since his death Feb. 17, 1982.

The younger Monk keeps his father's legacy alive through a
Washington-based institute and a family-sponsored record label. The
Thelonious Monk Institute sponsors an international competition for
young players and fosters jazz education inunderprivileged or
underserved locations.

Monk the son is proud of the way children respond to Monk's lilting,
angular melodies.

"His music is remarkably digestible by any audience," he said.

It wasn't always so.

Monk was born in North Carolina in 1919, but his family moved to New
York. There he studied piano, played church music and then jazz in the
'30s.

He first caught the ear of New York's jazz world in the early 1940s.
He was present at the birth of bebop, generating new paths of rhythm,
speed and harmony with the likes of the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and
the drummer Kenny Clarke.

Over time, he flared away from hard-driving, fill-'er-up bebop and
into a world much his own.


A genius

For years even fellow musicians questioned the quirky rhythms and note
clusters that emanated from his piano. Others began labeling him a
genius.

When the postwar 1950s spawned what might have felt like the height of
the hipster-jazz ethos, Monk had to lie low and scrimp. A drug
allegation caused him to lose his cabaret license, and he couldn't
play in New York clubs for six years.

By 1957 Monk was back, and he invited Coltrane, recently fired by
Miles Davis, to join him on an extended gig at the Five Spot Cafe.
Just a few recordings have documented that period, but the annals of
jazz have long buzzed about the quality of the music they made
together.

Further confirmation arrived with the finding of that lost recording
made Nov. 29, 1957, at Carnegie Hall.

Monk's quartet, featuring Coltrane on tenor sax, played two sets in a
Thanksgiving concert, in a lineup that also featured Billie Holiday,
Dizzy Gillespie and Ray Charles.

The Voice of America taped the proceedings, and the recordings landed
at the Library of Congress, where they sat untouched until an
archivist tripped across them in 2005. The discovery was heralded as
one of the great jazz finds, and Blue Note -- along with the family's
Thelonious Records -- had a hit: "Thelonious Monk Quartet With John
Coltrane at Carnegie Hall."

The Thelonious label has been releasing previously unavailable
material from odd and brilliant corners -- live sessions in Europe,
for example, some of which are packaged with DVDs. (See YouTube for
some of those and other clips of Monk in performance.)

Another interesting project is one headed by Ben Riley, a drummer who
drove Monk's rhythm section in the 1960s. Riley's Monk Legacy Septet,
with arrangements by Don Sickler, transforms note-for-note Monk solos
into pieces for four horns, guitar, bass and drums -- that's right, no
piano at all. From what I've heard of it, there's a scrubbed, almost
formal sheen to the affair, even as the spiked melodies poke into your
brain.

Monk's music wound down in the late 1960s, and he all but disappeared in 1973.

He was only 64 when he died nine years later, leaving his near
matchless body of work for the future.

Few musicians worth hearing today fail to include Monk in their playbook.

A few weeks ago I heard the young pianist Jacky Terrasson make new
with a Monk melody during a set at a New York jazz club. It's fitting.
Terrasson's career got rocket-launched in 1993 after he won the Monk
piano competition.

The sound of Monk seems to be everywhere in the jazz world. It's like
one of those proverbial perpetual-motion machines -- legendary,
impossible and infinite all at the same time.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/chi-0702280480mar01,1,1294493.story