Review of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original by Robin D.G. Kelley. Free Press, 2009.
Jazz biography is unique from other biography in that its music’s history has been determined largely through the innovations of the “jazz giants.” In a way, the history of jazz has been understood as a concatenation of the lives of jazz greats. Despite its being fundamentally about collective music-making, the essence of jazz turns into a mode of self-expression that is born out of the freedom-yearnings of individual lives. As Ingrid Monson has put it, “jazz history has traditionally favored the documentation of individual lives rather than the larger social forces shaping the creative community, in deference to the legacy of absolute music. It is as though the collectivization of experience would somehow diminish the luster and individuality of the music’s cultural heroes” (197). This perception of jazz has to do no less with “the legacy of absolute music” or how jazz has been packaged and consumed (regardless of form: the live act, the recording, or the scholarly book) than with the ostensible eccentricities of its progenitors.
The cult of the eccentric individual in jazz has a long, complex history fraught with racism. The period which gave rise to Bebop had African Americans fight Nazism abroad and Jim Crow at home, and a second wave of African-American migration to urban centers like New York produced new job prospects, and an attending prolaterianization and unionization. This new, cacophonic environment was distilled by bop musicians into a highly sophisticated music that stressed angular melodic lines, dissonant harmony, and break-neck tempi. Critics, sensing that something new was being created, rarely took note of the socio-economic context in which it sprung. Eric Lott underlines this confusion well when he writes “The further this modernism extended the resources of Afro-American expressive culture, the greater lengths culture critics would go to miss the point, though (or because, as [Amiri] Baraka ominously suggests) they began to recognize jazz’s status as art” (602). Critics increasingly cared more about who was playing this weird music than what this weird music was actually saying, and to whom it was being addressed. A misunderstanding about what the object of criticism in jazz has from the very beginning produced not only the biography, but, worse, the antagonistic discourse of black innovators versus white imitators. Elevating jazz to an art then allowed its defenders and detractors to pitch battles around a particular music’s or composer’s “worth,” often with reference to the firmly established “great-men-of-classical-music” model. White jazz musicians’ playing was serious because they had a “natural” access to the melodic and harmonic innovations of 20th-century classical music, while black music’s eccentricities and excesses needed to be reined in and rationalized by critics (see Gunther Schuller’s work in the 60s and Martin Williams’ in the 70s) who translated their music into understandable, white, classical concepts.
Robin D.G. Kelley’s elegant and thorough biography, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, deftly avoids getting caught up in this marred history of jazz scholarship and instead has something instructive to say about it. Kelley organizes his book chronologically and titles each chapter based on a Monk quote or composition—thus anchoring Monk’s life in his words and music. The archive and the interview dominate Kelley’s fourteen-year project, and he seemingly leaves little out; nostalgic record collectors can sequentially compare their recordings with the goings-on of the recording date, which takes up the bulk of the book, and we learn about the lives of the sidemen, producers, and critics along the way. Kelley’s exhaustive method is a bit tiresome, but that’s also the point: in focusing on Monk’s quotidian workload the reader begins to tire under the weight of a musician’s life. Kelley makes the object of Monk’s life work.
You seemingly can’t write jazz biography without committing to canonization, as the consumption of the music has always been fueled by the practice of elevating one artist over the other, or placing a player’s work in its proper lineage. Whereas other intellectual biographers use their subjects as springboards for historical survey or critical analysis of key works, jazz biographers are more often narrow archivists and confined to the evaluative mode. Kelley never omits the historical backdrop in which Monk is composing, but rarely does he forcefully entwine them; rather, he sets Monk’s music and its historical context alongside each other, and asks the reader to make her own synthesis.
Kelley is engaged in what I would call “estate biography.” Here, a successful project is dependent on full access to secret documents guarded by the estate executor who is almost always a family member. Risk management can often be the primary concern of the executor against the biographer’s desire for transparency, interpretation, and critique. Amid the struggle, biography can easily turn towards hagiography-by-force or defamation-through-resistance. The estate biography form can leave in its wake contempt, envy, and covetousness between biographer and the subject’s keeper, but it more often produces love, trust, admiration, and intimacy. Kelley has said that his one great regret about the project was the passing of Monk’s wife Nellie in 2002, the evening before she had agreed to an unprecedented divulging of the Monks’ life. The kind of intimacy and respect cultivated here moves this biography towards paean or eulogy—and austere objectivity by the biographer is both impossible and ungracious.
Admiration for Monk and his family shine through Kelley’s work and it’s heartening the way he lets Monk go during his sudden manic departures, where the New Yorker indulged in doses of the city’s and the jazz scene’s underbelly. Thelonious was undoubtedly a weird cat, and Kelley doesn’t avoid the drug and drinking binges, the jail time, or the insomnia-laden meanderings, but they’re put in proper medical context, as they are with anyone suffering from bipolar disorder. A biography that would brood over the more unsavory details of a life (whether objectionable or not) serves one narrow type of knowledge, one that is often used to assign worth or to discredit. Kelley sees past this dead-end and rather sees these episodes related to clinical disease and the incredible pressure of raising a family on a musician’s wage.
What results is a serious account of Monk’s life where his quirkiness is demystified, not downplayed. Monk’s road manager in 1961 read Monk an encyclopedia entry about him, to which he replied, “I’m famous? Ain’t that a bitch!” Kelley rightly calls Monk’s innocent quip calculated, “feigned incredulity” (315). By 1961, fourteen years after his solo debut, Monk had finally attained the fame he long wished for. His fame rested first, Kelley rightly insists, on the power of his music. Even his penchant for wearing flashy suits and odd hats (Monk started wearing the beret before Dizzy Gillespie made it famous, less for its peculiarity than for showing solidarity with the French intellectual) was calculated and woven into an overall philosophy. Monk proudly wore a ring with his last name spelled out, so “MONK” flashed up and down every time his fingers hit the keys. He was well aware that it read “KNOW” to the other’s point of view. His compositions “Evidence” and “Epistrophy” pointed to the empirical and poetic, and his ring to the epistemological. Yet Monk could deceive as well. The disingenuous statement celebrated on the inside flap of the hardcover promoting the book has Monk reacting to an audience member who hears wrong notes, exclaiming “The piano ain’t got no wrong notes!” Potentially a maxim that would encapsulate Monk’s revolutionary method, Monk’s redress is actually a placebic explanation for what his music was about. Unfortunately, “The piano ain’t got no wrong notes” is a sloppy definition for jazz, bebop in particular, and it plays into that specific jazz audience’s perception that jazz is unsophisticated because you can play anything. Monk clearly didn’t believe what he said: he would reprimand colleagues for fumbling his compositions, he would dismiss drummers for not playing the right style, he was known for being an exacting teacher (John Coltrane, Bud Powell, and Sonny Rollins are counted among his students), and he would spend hours preparing for rehearsals and recording dates.
Monk’s peers would often observe him trying to figure out the melody of a tune right before they were to record it. They weren’t simply miffed about the laxity of his recording sessions; many couldn’t accustom themselves to the deliberate ways in which he voiced his left hand, or to the logic of the rhythmic and melodic angularity of his compositions. The many ways that jazz musicians show their disapproval of their music—“I’m not feelin’ it,” “it’s not swinging,” “that doesn’t sound right”—are not solely based on a vague aesthetic consensus. These disapprovals reveal differing philosophies of what music should do, how it should conform to a coherent political project, or how it contrasts with one’s own experiment in constructing a self- or group-based identity. By 1947, Monk’s music was “far out,” yet how “far” his music was from his peers could be measured—the one who says “far out” is at once both ascertaining the distance the music is from the norm and throwing their hands up in trying to explain it.
“Thelonious,” from Monk’s first Blue Note recording in 1947 still gives one pause, but that pause is rarely an occasion to pose critical questions. For example, what can be gleaned from Monk’s insistence on whole-tone-inflected melody? Is it enough to say that it’s original, unique, quirky, eccentric, jesting? What about if we say it’s derived from the harmonic sophistication of the stride pianists, or from Debussy’s late works, or maybe Scriabin? Even if we find a connection between Duke Ellington’s and Monk’s harmonic logic (assuming the connection seems to be “organic” and not forced, which in the latter case would produce meaninglessness), what does that really tell us? Does that connection tell us more about Monk or about his music? Perhaps it does, but it might be the same knowledge that works to construct lineages, produce hierarchies, and classify styles; in short, it’s the logic of canonization, an imperative that much music scholarship seems unable to avoid. To be fair, in jazz, this constant (almost fetishistic) acknowledgement of lineage among players and commentators is less about the canon and more about showing love, paying dues, and keeping alive traditions, making jazz a living, breathing, reflexive art. But the vigilant practice of connecting present styles with the past doesn’t account for the precise historical moment at which ever-new sounds are being created; a canonizing logic vaguely accounts for change but doesn’t explain it.
Monk’s whole-tone language in “Thelonious” distinguishes itself by refusing to adhere to the mixture of half- and whole-step intervals that define the major-minor scalar logic we recognize. Like Schoenberg’s 12-tone serialism, whole tone logic emancipates all 12 tones from their respective power relations, a relational system that has maintained the tonic-dominant system of modern western music. The Tin Pan melodies on which bebop first riffed rely on this mixture of chromatic and whole-steps, which were always tethered to the imperative of the tonic. In “Thelonious,” Monk presents strict chromaticism in the horn parts and in his left hand while his right hand plays whole-tone melody loosed from the dominance of the tonic. In other words, Monk “splits” or “segregates” the two fundamental building blocks of Western melody and develops new vocabularies out of each.
Whole tone vocabularies stress freedom (as each note holds equal influence over the other) and space (the otherworldliness of the sound is recognizable in sci-fi movies and Marvin the Martian cartoons). Building new melody and harmony out of whole tone materials is at the same time egalitarian and anti-assimilationist—it’s a language already participating in another world. Monk couches this new language in familiar (but no less radical) bop rhythms, so it unfolds itself in the present progressive and looks to the future. When asked about Ornette Coleman’s “free jazz” turn thirteen years after “Thelonious,” Monk decreed “Hell, I did that twenty-five years ago, but I didn’t do it on every tune” (280). In “Thelonious,” whole-tone melody is being interchanged with classic Minton’s-style bop turns, repeated notes, and older stride-influenced rhythms. This vacillation between an exhaustive and probing engagement and critique of Tin Pan melody followed by a sudden but no less serious disengagement with it underlines a certain strategy of Monk that I think goes far beyond channeling an inner James P. Johnson-Coleman Hawkins-trading-choruses. Nor can you say, I believe, that these whole-tone passages mark Monk as a “trickster” figure, as if his mission was to embody an atemporal Br’er Rabbit. Whole-tone semiosis is dependent on a particular setting, under particular circumstances.
One SNCC activist in 1962 after a Carnegie Hall benefit concert gives Kelley a rare quote from the notoriously reticent, apolitical Monk: “That stuff (nonviolent resistance), it’s not going to work. That stuff you are all talking about—it’s not gonna [work]” (330). The critic who could politicize music, who recognizes that music, like other languages, has its own syntax, its own logic and relationality to other music and other cultural formations, who understands music not in its “absolute form” but whose meaning is historically contigent upon the specific juncture in which it appeared, is the same critic who would soon dispense with the canon, the cult of the individual, the eccentric, and the jazz giant. All the rules of biography have long been broken, so the sort of ‘”cultural-critical musical analysis” I’m trying to formulate here could either be the basis for a new brand of musical biography or abrogate it altogether.
We are accustomed to think that revolutions in art are born from the minds of eccentrics, the mad geniuses of history. Kelley, in his sobering portrait of Thelonious Monk as a hard-working family man, asks us a different, and in a way a more radical question about where sudden change comes from: is it not more from the day-to-day struggles of working people than from the larger-than-life personalities that have been so outlandishly constructed as to conform to our similar misunderstandings of the word “jazz?” For a drink ordered on the rocks, even if less flashy, is as potent as one without. Following Amiri Baraka: “The highest thought is a doing, a being, not an abstraction” (107).
Works Cited
Baraka, Amiri. (1991) “The ‘Blues Aesthetic’ and the ‘Black Aesthetic’: Aesthetics as the Continuing Political History of a Culture.” Black Music Research Journal, 11(2): 101-09.
On the Rocks, with Chaser
Review of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original by Robin D.G. Kelley. Free Press, 2009.
Jazz biography is unique from other biography in that its music’s history has been determined largely through the innovations of the “jazz giants.” In a way, the history of jazz has been understood as a concatenation of the lives of jazz greats. Despite its being fundamentally about collective music-making, the essence of jazz turns into a mode of self-expression that is born out of the freedom-yearnings of individual lives. As Ingrid Monson has put it, “jazz history has traditionally favored the documentation of individual lives rather than the larger social forces shaping the creative community, in deference to the legacy of absolute music. It is as though the collectivization of experience would somehow diminish the luster and individuality of the music’s cultural heroes” (197). This perception of jazz has to do no less with “the legacy of absolute music” or how jazz has been packaged and consumed (regardless of form: the live act, the recording, or the scholarly book) than with the ostensible eccentricities of its progenitors.
The cult of the eccentric individual in jazz has a long, complex history fraught with racism. The period which gave rise to Bebop had African Americans fight Nazism abroad and Jim Crow at home, and a second wave of African-American migration to urban centers like New York produced new job prospects, and an attending prolaterianization and unionization. This new, cacophonic environment was distilled by bop musicians into a highly sophisticated music that stressed angular melodic lines, dissonant harmony, and break-neck tempi. Critics, sensing that something new was being created, rarely took note of the socio-economic context in which it sprung. Eric Lott underlines this confusion well when he writes “The further this modernism extended the resources of Afro-American expressive culture, the greater lengths culture critics would go to miss the point, though (or because, as [Amiri] Baraka ominously suggests) they began to recognize jazz’s status as art” (602). Critics increasingly cared more about who was playing this weird music than what this weird music was actually saying, and to whom it was being addressed. A misunderstanding about what the object of criticism in jazz has from the very beginning produced not only the biography, but, worse, the antagonistic discourse of black innovators versus white imitators. Elevating jazz to an art then allowed its defenders and detractors to pitch battles around a particular music’s or composer’s “worth,” often with reference to the firmly established “great-men-of-classical-music” model. White jazz musicians’ playing was serious because they had a “natural” access to the melodic and harmonic innovations of 20th-century classical music, while black music’s eccentricities and excesses needed to be reined in and rationalized by critics (see Gunther Schuller’s work in the 60s and Martin Williams’ in the 70s) who translated their music into understandable, white, classical concepts.
Robin D.G. Kelley’s elegant and thorough biography, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, deftly avoids getting caught up in this marred history of jazz scholarship and instead has something instructive to say about it. Kelley organizes his book chronologically and titles each chapter based on a Monk quote or composition—thus anchoring Monk’s life in his words and music. The archive and the interview dominate Kelley’s fourteen-year project, and he seemingly leaves little out; nostalgic record collectors can sequentially compare their recordings with the goings-on of the recording date, which takes up the bulk of the book, and we learn about the lives of the sidemen, producers, and critics along the way. Kelley’s exhaustive method is a bit tiresome, but that’s also the point: in focusing on Monk’s quotidian workload the reader begins to tire under the weight of a musician’s life. Kelley makes the object of Monk’s life work.
You seemingly can’t write jazz biography without committing to canonization, as the consumption of the music has always been fueled by the practice of elevating one artist over the other, or placing a player’s work in its proper lineage. Whereas other intellectual biographers use their subjects as springboards for historical survey or critical analysis of key works, jazz biographers are more often narrow archivists and confined to the evaluative mode. Kelley never omits the historical backdrop in which Monk is composing, but rarely does he forcefully entwine them; rather, he sets Monk’s music and its historical context alongside each other, and asks the reader to make her own synthesis.
Kelley is engaged in what I would call “estate biography.” Here, a successful project is dependent on full access to secret documents guarded by the estate executor who is almost always a family member. Risk management can often be the primary concern of the executor against the biographer’s desire for transparency, interpretation, and critique. Amid the struggle, biography can easily turn towards hagiography-by-force or defamation-through-resistance. The estate biography form can leave in its wake contempt, envy, and covetousness between biographer and the subject’s keeper, but it more often produces love, trust, admiration, and intimacy. Kelley has said that his one great regret about the project was the passing of Monk’s wife Nellie in 2002, the evening before she had agreed to an unprecedented divulging of the Monks’ life. The kind of intimacy and respect cultivated here moves this biography towards paean or eulogy—and austere objectivity by the biographer is both impossible and ungracious.
Admiration for Monk and his family shine through Kelley’s work and it’s heartening the way he lets Monk go during his sudden manic departures, where the New Yorker indulged in doses of the city’s and the jazz scene’s underbelly. Thelonious was undoubtedly a weird cat, and Kelley doesn’t avoid the drug and drinking binges, the jail time, or the insomnia-laden meanderings, but they’re put in proper medical context, as they are with anyone suffering from bipolar disorder. A biography that would brood over the more unsavory details of a life (whether objectionable or not) serves one narrow type of knowledge, one that is often used to assign worth or to discredit. Kelley sees past this dead-end and rather sees these episodes related to clinical disease and the incredible pressure of raising a family on a musician’s wage.
What results is a serious account of Monk’s life where his quirkiness is demystified, not downplayed. Monk’s road manager in 1961 read Monk an encyclopedia entry about him, to which he replied, “I’m famous? Ain’t that a bitch!” Kelley rightly calls Monk’s innocent quip calculated, “feigned incredulity” (315). By 1961, fourteen years after his solo debut, Monk had finally attained the fame he long wished for. His fame rested first, Kelley rightly insists, on the power of his music. Even his penchant for wearing flashy suits and odd hats (Monk started wearing the beret before Dizzy Gillespie made it famous, less for its peculiarity than for showing solidarity with the French intellectual) was calculated and woven into an overall philosophy. Monk proudly wore a ring with his last name spelled out, so “MONK” flashed up and down every time his fingers hit the keys. He was well aware that it read “KNOW” to the other’s point of view. His compositions “Evidence” and “Epistrophy” pointed to the empirical and poetic, and his ring to the epistemological. Yet Monk could deceive as well. The disingenuous statement celebrated on the inside flap of the hardcover promoting the book has Monk reacting to an audience member who hears wrong notes, exclaiming “The piano ain’t got no wrong notes!” Potentially a maxim that would encapsulate Monk’s revolutionary method, Monk’s redress is actually a placebic explanation for what his music was about. Unfortunately, “The piano ain’t got no wrong notes” is a sloppy definition for jazz, bebop in particular, and it plays into that specific jazz audience’s perception that jazz is unsophisticated because you can play anything. Monk clearly didn’t believe what he said: he would reprimand colleagues for fumbling his compositions, he would dismiss drummers for not playing the right style, he was known for being an exacting teacher (John Coltrane, Bud Powell, and Sonny Rollins are counted among his students), and he would spend hours preparing for rehearsals and recording dates.
Monk’s peers would often observe him trying to figure out the melody of a tune right before they were to record it. They weren’t simply miffed about the laxity of his recording sessions; many couldn’t accustom themselves to the deliberate ways in which he voiced his left hand, or to the logic of the rhythmic and melodic angularity of his compositions. The many ways that jazz musicians show their disapproval of their music—“I’m not feelin’ it,” “it’s not swinging,” “that doesn’t sound right”—are not solely based on a vague aesthetic consensus. These disapprovals reveal differing philosophies of what music should do, how it should conform to a coherent political project, or how it contrasts with one’s own experiment in constructing a self- or group-based identity. By 1947, Monk’s music was “far out,” yet how “far” his music was from his peers could be measured—the one who says “far out” is at once both ascertaining the distance the music is from the norm and throwing their hands up in trying to explain it.
“Thelonious,” from Monk’s first Blue Note recording in 1947 still gives one pause, but that pause is rarely an occasion to pose critical questions. For example, what can be gleaned from Monk’s insistence on whole-tone-inflected melody? Is it enough to say that it’s original, unique, quirky, eccentric, jesting? What about if we say it’s derived from the harmonic sophistication of the stride pianists, or from Debussy’s late works, or maybe Scriabin? Even if we find a connection between Duke Ellington’s and Monk’s harmonic logic (assuming the connection seems to be “organic” and not forced, which in the latter case would produce meaninglessness), what does that really tell us? Does that connection tell us more about Monk or about his music? Perhaps it does, but it might be the same knowledge that works to construct lineages, produce hierarchies, and classify styles; in short, it’s the logic of canonization, an imperative that much music scholarship seems unable to avoid. To be fair, in jazz, this constant (almost fetishistic) acknowledgement of lineage among players and commentators is less about the canon and more about showing love, paying dues, and keeping alive traditions, making jazz a living, breathing, reflexive art. But the vigilant practice of connecting present styles with the past doesn’t account for the precise historical moment at which ever-new sounds are being created; a canonizing logic vaguely accounts for change but doesn’t explain it.
Monk’s whole-tone language in “Thelonious” distinguishes itself by refusing to adhere to the mixture of half- and whole-step intervals that define the major-minor scalar logic we recognize. Like Schoenberg’s 12-tone serialism, whole tone logic emancipates all 12 tones from their respective power relations, a relational system that has maintained the tonic-dominant system of modern western music. The Tin Pan melodies on which bebop first riffed rely on this mixture of chromatic and whole-steps, which were always tethered to the imperative of the tonic. In “Thelonious,” Monk presents strict chromaticism in the horn parts and in his left hand while his right hand plays whole-tone melody loosed from the dominance of the tonic. In other words, Monk “splits” or “segregates” the two fundamental building blocks of Western melody and develops new vocabularies out of each.
Whole tone vocabularies stress freedom (as each note holds equal influence over the other) and space (the otherworldliness of the sound is recognizable in sci-fi movies and Marvin the Martian cartoons). Building new melody and harmony out of whole tone materials is at the same time egalitarian and anti-assimilationist—it’s a language already participating in another world. Monk couches this new language in familiar (but no less radical) bop rhythms, so it unfolds itself in the present progressive and looks to the future. When asked about Ornette Coleman’s “free jazz” turn thirteen years after “Thelonious,” Monk decreed “Hell, I did that twenty-five years ago, but I didn’t do it on every tune” (280). In “Thelonious,” whole-tone melody is being interchanged with classic Minton’s-style bop turns, repeated notes, and older stride-influenced rhythms. This vacillation between an exhaustive and probing engagement and critique of Tin Pan melody followed by a sudden but no less serious disengagement with it underlines a certain strategy of Monk that I think goes far beyond channeling an inner James P. Johnson-Coleman Hawkins-trading-choruses. Nor can you say, I believe, that these whole-tone passages mark Monk as a “trickster” figure, as if his mission was to embody an atemporal Br’er Rabbit. Whole-tone semiosis is dependent on a particular setting, under particular circumstances.
One SNCC activist in 1962 after a Carnegie Hall benefit concert gives Kelley a rare quote from the notoriously reticent, apolitical Monk: “That stuff (nonviolent resistance), it’s not going to work. That stuff you are all talking about—it’s not gonna [work]” (330). The critic who could politicize music, who recognizes that music, like other languages, has its own syntax, its own logic and relationality to other music and other cultural formations, who understands music not in its “absolute form” but whose meaning is historically contigent upon the specific juncture in which it appeared, is the same critic who would soon dispense with the canon, the cult of the individual, the eccentric, and the jazz giant. All the rules of biography have long been broken, so the sort of ‘”cultural-critical musical analysis” I’m trying to formulate here could either be the basis for a new brand of musical biography or abrogate it altogether.
We are accustomed to think that revolutions in art are born from the minds of eccentrics, the mad geniuses of history. Kelley, in his sobering portrait of Thelonious Monk as a hard-working family man, asks us a different, and in a way a more radical question about where sudden change comes from: is it not more from the day-to-day struggles of working people than from the larger-than-life personalities that have been so outlandishly constructed as to conform to our similar misunderstandings of the word “jazz?” For a drink ordered on the rocks, even if less flashy, is as potent as one without. Following Amiri Baraka: “The highest thought is a doing, a being, not an abstraction” (107).
Works Cited
Baraka, Amiri. (1991) “The ‘Blues Aesthetic’ and the ‘Black Aesthetic’: Aesthetics as the Continuing Political History of a Culture.” Black Music Research Journal, 11(2): 101-09.
Lott, Eric. (1988) ‘Double V, Double-Time: Bebop’s Politics of Style.’ Callaloo, 36 (Summer): 597-605.
Monson, I. (1999) ‘Monk Meets SNCC.’ Black Music Research Journal, 19(4): 187-200.
Zachary Petersen is a Ph.D. student in Cultural Studies at George Mason University.