The History of Jazz (50 page)

This was an amazing turn of events for a figure who had been largely dismissed by critics and fans after his early involvement with the birth of modern jazz at Minton’s. In 1942 Monk worked with Lucky Millinder, in 1944 he joined Coleman Hawkins, and in 1946 he spent some time with Gillespie’s big band. These were solid sideman gigs, but stood out as rare interludes of employment during a difficult time in which chances for Monk to perform and record his music were infrequent at best. For the most part, the 1940s were a lost decade for Monk. In his 1949 book
Inside Bebop
, one of the first critical efforts to come to grips with the new music, author Leonard Feather dismissed Monk out of hand. Monk’s reputation, Feather asserted, was “grossly distorted, as a result of some high-powered publicity work. He has written a few attractive tunes, but his lack of technique and continuity prevented him from accomplishing much as a pianist.”
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It is easy to blame the otherwise astute Feather for his obtuseness with regard to Monk. But Feather was not alone. At the close of the 1940s, Monk’s music was perceived by most members of the jazz community as too far outside the mainstream to be valued in its own right, and too personal to influence other players. His style, built on disjunction, stood as a puzzling connect-the-dots drawing for which most listeners could not see the overall picture. For a time they called Monk the “high priest of bop,” and the nickname revealed how little the jazz world understood him. Despite the Minton’s connection, Monk’s mature music bore little resemblance to bebop. In contrast to the speed-obsessed work of Parker, Powell, and Gillespie, Monk preferred slow and medium tempos, and his process of improvising had a deliberate, hesitating quality. And though he occasionally tackled the standard songs of the bebop repertoire, Monk preferred to play his own pieces—and played them again and again, often recording the same tune a half-dozen or more times over the course of his career.

Even before Monk’s comeback in the 1950s, the pianist gave notice of his singular vision of jazz, although few outside the inner circles of modern jazz were paying attention at the time. The amateur recordings made by Columbia student Jerry Newman at Minton’s testify to the pianist’s iconoclasm—one would be hard pressed to find a more forward-looking jazz piano performance, circa 1941, than Monk’s reconfiguration of George Gerswhin’s “Nice Work if You Can Get It.” In his 1944 sides with Coleman Hawkins, Monk revealed his zeal for experimentation to a wider audience, although he balanced his dissonances here with a judicious dose of more circumspect sounds. Hear, for example, his solo on “Flyin’ Hawk,” where the first sixteen bars hew close to bebop, but the closing sixteen bars sound the way jazz might be played in another galaxy. Yet the core of Monk’s output from this decade came from the four sessions the pianist made for the Blue Note label during 1947 and 1948. Here, in these landmark recordings, Monk revealed his mature style as almost fully formed. In his debut session as a leader for Blue Note, Monk is weighed down by an unsympathetic horn section, and his piano solos are too brief. Yet even in this constrained setting, he showcases many of his characteristic devices: angular phrases and whole-tone scales; the stark repetition of the simplest melodic fragments, serving almost as a parody of traditional thematic development; thick comping chords laced with dissonances, and dropped with the subtlety of a hand grenade.

Monk’s second session, held nine days later, dispenses with the horn players. In this piano trio setting, he adopts an even wider range of mannerisms—and not just his futuristic techniques, but snippets of older jazz styles as well. On the alternate take of “Nice Work if You Can Get It,” a remnant from Monk’s Minton’s days still in his repertoire, he slips in several unexpected bars of stride piano. On “Ruby, My Dear” he provides two bars of a figured bass that hint at the left-hand patterns of boogie-woogie. Perhaps Meade Lux Lewis and Albert Ammons were on his mind— after all, they were favorites with Blue Note head Alfred Lion—because on “Well, You Needn’t” Monk again adopts elements of boogie-woogie, this time in his right-hand block chords. But all these ingredients—whether old or new, borrowed or blue— manage somehow to cohere. The pianist’s personal signature is so strong that everything he touches turns, if not to gold, at least to Monk. This date featured three of Monk’s most famous compositions (“Ruby, My Dear,” “Well, You Needn’t,” “Off Minor”), but even the popular standards included end up sounding like his originals. The two remaining Blue Note sessions from this period resulted in milestone performances of a number of other important Monk compositions, including “‘Round Midnight,” “Epistrophy,” “I Mean You,” “Misterioso,” “In Walked Bud,” and “Monk’s Mood.” In particular, the July 2, 1948, session, in which Monk plays cat and mouse with vibraphonist Milt Jackson, stood out as the most complete statement to date of his unorthodox musical values.

Yet three years would elapse before Monk returned to the studio as a leader. In a prescient 1948 interview, Orrin Keepnews—who would later become Monk’s record producer—cited the pianist as potentially representing “a huge step forward” in modern jazz and noted that his music was further away from the bop idiom than most commentators had realized. But even Keepnews conceded that Monk was a “little known figure” and that “only time and continued playing” would determine his true merit.
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Most other journalistic accounts from the time preferred to emphasize the bizarre aspects of Monk’s demeanor—an oft-repeated anecdote depicted him spending long periods staring at a photo of Billie Holiday taped to his ceiling—while the freshness of his music was usually restricted to a passing mention, a side note to his unconventional lifestyle. And those fans who hoped to make up their own mind about the so-called “high priest of bop” had little chance to do so. Monk played infrequent engagements, with most of his music making taking place at home.

Monk’s return to the studio in July 1951 represented progress of sorts. But opportunities to record came at the same time that Monk’s cabaret card was revoked due to a narcotics arrest. That event led to a six-year involuntary absence from New York nightclubs. Meanwhile, Monk’s recordings during this period document a major burst of creativity and set the foundation for his ascendancy to the top of the jazz world in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In his comeback session for Blue Note, Monk featured some of his most complex compositions. Gunther Schuller has praised “Criss Cross,” recorded at this date, for being much more than a “tune” or a “song” but succeeding as a true “composition for instruments” and likened it to the abstract painting in vogue around that time. In fact, all the pieces recorded by Monk at this session reflect the same virtues. The harmonies of “Straight, No Chaser” are built on a standard twelve-bar blues, but the melody is a clever exercise in the rhythmic displacement of a changeable motif, which sometimes ends on a blues note and sometimes resolves into a major third. Even more daring is “Four in One,” where Monk employs surprisingly fast, almost glissando-like passages in the melody line, like a painter unexpectedly smearing the canvas with sweeping brushstrokes.

In some respects, these pieces represented a departure from the norm (to the extent that one could discuss a “norm” with regard to this nonconforming keyboardist) for Monk. Throughout his career, Monk had tempered his avant-garde tendencies with simple, repetitive, and almost childlike melodies. Pieces such as “Epistrophy,” “Misterioso,” “Blue Monk,” “Well, You Needn’t,” “Let’s Cool One,” “Rhythm-a-ning,” “Hornin’ In,” “Trinkle Tinkle,” “Bemsha Swing,” and “Off Minor” boasted memorable, rigorously developed themes. These singsong melodies stayed in listeners’ ears long after the performance was over, and no doubt served for many as an inviting entry point into musical structures that, viewed from other angles, could be foreboding. Much of Monk’s genius lay precisely in this ability to juxtapose the simple and complex, a talent he applied in many other ways: in his dramatic balancing of silence and aural density; his alternating use of thick and thin chords; his manner of incorporating wry humor into the often self-serious atmosphere of modern jazz. But at times Monk would push the limits even further, building elaborate musical mazes such as “Four in One” or “Brilliant Corners,” where not only the casual listener but even skilled jazz players risked getting lost in the labyrinth. At the 1957 session that produced “Brilliant Corners”—a maddeningly difficult Monk chart that took twenty-five takes to complete—producer Keepnews interpreted the wry half-smiles of the sidemen (who included Sonny Rollins, Max Roach, and Oscar Pettiford) as signifying a silent lament: “Hard? This is
impossible!
”

At the other end of the spectrum were Monk’s ballads. Here his links to the American song tradition were most evident. One could envision compositions such as “‘Round Midnight” and “Ruby My Dear” performed by mainstream popular artists, perhaps even appealing to a nonjazz audience—hardly possible for Monk musical koans such as “Epistrophy” or “Well, You Needn’t.” Of course even these ballads, when played by the composer, could take on all the quirky qualities of Monk’s more experimental work, just as he could take pop standards such as “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” or “The Man I Love” and make them sound like his own creations. But Monk was also capable of more harmonically ambiguous slow numbers, as in his evocative “Crepuscule with Nellie” where his work captures a rarefied sensibility closer to the ambiance of art song than either to jazz or popular music.

The Blue Note relationship was followed by recordings for the Prestige label. These, for all of their musical merits, achieved limited sales and only a tepid response from critics. Prestige eventually released Monk from his contract for the meager sum of $108.27. The pianist now signed with Riverside, a small record company run by Keepnews, who by now had switched hats from journalist to producer—a role at which he would excel. This initiated a six-year relationship during which Monk, under Keepnews’s supervision, undertook twenty-eight recording sessions. These were fertile years for Monk, not so much because his music evolved during this period—on the contrary, his style changed very little after the mid-1940s—but because he was finally provided with the chance to express his musical ideas in a wide range of conducive contexts. Monk had always excelled in a trio setting, and his first several Riverside sessions followed that format. But soon Keepnews was planning more elaborate dates featuring larger bands and guest soloists. He was especially intent on creating opportunities for Monk to record alongside name saxophonists. The resulting projects showcased an impressive roster of horn players, including Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, Coleman Hawkins, Gerry Mulligan, Johnny Griffin, Phil Woods, Harold Land, and Charlie Rouse. The Riverside recordings also found Monk in the company of many of the leading drummers of modern jazz, including Max Roach, Kenny Clarke, Art Blakey, Roy Haynes, Shelly Manne, Art Taylor, and Shadow Wilson. These were ambitious—and almost universally successful— projects, and were especially impressive given that they were undertaken by a small independent jazz label that operated under severe financial constraints (and would go bankrupt in 1964). By comparison, Monk’s later recordings for CBS/Columbia, the leading company in the industry with the deepest of pockets, rarely ventured beyond combo recordings with his working band.

But the Riverside recordings were equally notable for their intimate sessions featuring Monk as a solo pianist. This was an ideal setting for him. His playing had always been distinguished by its open, uncluttered landscapes—“It’s not the notes you play, it’s those you leave out,” he had once cryptically explained—but never more so than when working unaccompanied. Here he could expand time and tempo to their limits, as in his solo performance of “I Should Care,” where Monk takes a simple statement of the melody and lingers lovingly over these thirty-two bars for a full three minutes. Such performances also captured the full resonance and rich overtones of his harmonies, the distinctive crispness of his piano touch, and the orchestral implications of his keyboard style. Moreover, they represented a type of antivirtuosity, a refreshing antidote to the elaborate patterns and runs, the florid cocktail piano mannerisms that had permeated the music since the days of Hines and Tatum.

Despite his lengthy absence from the New York nightclub circuit, Monk’s reputation was soaring and his records selling in increasing quantities. Infrequent public appearances may have only added to his mystique—a program for a 1955 concert described him, tellingly, as the “Greta Garbo of jazz.” The reinstatement of his cabaret card put an end to his apparent reclusiveness but did nothing to hinder his popularity. His booking at the Five Spot during the summer of 1957 showed the breadth and depth of his newfound audience. Drawing full houses night after night, his engagement was extended to eight months, and management brought in a special piano chosen by Monk himself. Even by Monk’s standards, this was an exceptional band. “Those of us who heard it will never forget the experience,” jazz historian Ira Gitler later recalled. “There were some weeks when I was at the Five Spot two or three times, staying most of the night even when I intended just to catch a set or two.”
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The attraction of this combo was as much its star saxophonist as it was Monk himself. John Coltrane was on the verge of establishing himself as the leading tenor saxophonist in jazz at the time he joined Monk’s band. Coltrane had recently completed a high-profile stint with Miles Davis, following previous sideman gigs with Dizzy Gillespie and Johnny Hodges, and had just recorded his first album as a leader for the Prestige label. Even at this early point in his career, Coltrane stood out from the pack with his explosive improvisations, his technical prowess, and the unprecedented energy of his performances. The following year
Downbeat
would christen him an “angry young tenor”—a misnomer given Coltrane’s reflective nature and spiritual leanings, but an appropriate response to his intemperate saxophone playing. More to the point was Gitler’s oft-quoted description of Coltrane’s style as a relentless spinning forth of “sheets of sound.” In this regard, Coltrane took the implications of Bird one step further: the notes are even more densely packed, the traditional jazz syncopations and rhythmic inflections even less prominent. Instead, Coltrane favored cascading waterfalls of notes, scales, arpeggios, figures, sometimes played in short bursts, at other times expanded in breathlessly elongated phrases.