The History of Jazz (51 page)

Coltrane’s tenure with Monk lasted only a few months and has often been cited as a period of apprenticeship, an important contributor to the tenor player’s development as a jazz musician. Coltrane himself frequently expressed his admiration for Monk, praising him as a “musical architect of the highest order.” But the recordings made by Monk’s band during this period show that the tenorist was anything but overawed by his new employer. Indeed, one is hard pressed to find another Monk sideman who did so little to adapt to the idiosyncracies of the pianist’s music. On recordings such as “Trinkle Tinkle” or “Nutty,” Coltrane unleashes powerful solos that, rather than emulating Monk’s use of space or compositional style of improvisation as so many others did when playing with the pianist, reflect the saxophonist’s own emphatic, virtuosic style. (Compare these, for instance, with Sonny Rollins’s collaborations with Monk—successful in their own way—which find the horn player constructing incisive thematic solos, challenging the music from “inside,” rather than imposing his personality on top of it.) In a surprising turnaround, Monk came to adapt to Coltrane, even going so far as not playing behind some of the sax solos, allowing the tenorist to stretch out with just bass and drum backing (much as the saxophonist would do a few years later with his own band). In the final analysis, this was an extraordinary ensemble, one of the most creative units of its day,
not
because Coltrane served as disciple to Monk, as is so often stated, but because these two masters of the jazz idiom met, for the most part, on equal terms. During their few months together, these two premier stylists—one espousing a music of pregnant pauses and lingering overtones, the other filling each measure to the fullest, to overflowing, in a music of delirious excess—called to mind the physicists’ assertion that the creative energy of the universe is founded, ultimately, on the attraction of opposites.

On the crest of the sensation caused by the Five Spot band, Monk was enjoying unprecedented attention and praise, first among jazz insiders, who awarded him first place in the
Downbeat
Critics Poll in both 1958 and 1959, and gradually from the general public. He now toured frequently, both throughout the United States and overseas, and by 1960 was able to demand $1,000 for a one-night stand, substantially more than what he had charged for a full-week booking only two years earlier. For his 1959 Town Hall concert, the pianist was given an ample budget to finance a performance of his music with a large band and cover the cost of suitably “Monkesque” arrangements provided by Hall Overton. The concert was taped and released on Keepnews’s Riverside label, which was now recording Monk more freqently than ever, and with constantly improving sales.

But these were also troubling years for the pianist. His odd mannerisms and onstage demeanor may have amused audiences, but the deeper-seated psychological problems they represented were no laughing matter. In 1958, Monk’s obsessive pacing in a Delaware hotel lobby, and his steadfast refusal to respond to questions, led to a heated confrontation with local police. The following year, Monk ended a strange performance at Boston’s Storyville Club by remaining seated on the piano bench, motionless and impassive, long after his sidemen had left the stage. Later that same night, Monk was arrested at the airport and brought by a state trooper to Grafton State Hospital, where he was placed under observation for a week. During the 1960s, Monk received medical treatment for depression, and his personality grew ever more remote. Sometimes he would remain aloof for days at a time, with even his wife, Nellie, unable to extract more than a word or two from him.

Monk’s music seemed largely unaffected by these problems—then again, a certain psychological distance from the mundane and everyday had always been an ingredient of his artistry. Moreover, eccentricity fueled publicity. Indeed, the pianist’s fame and following were now great enough to attract the interest of a major label. In 1962, Monk signed with Columbia, and under the aegis of this entertainment industry powerhouse, his reputation continued to grow, even if his music changed little, culminating in a February 28, 1964,
Time
magazine cover story. By the mid-1960s, Monk was as much a legend as a musician. Yet his recordings for Columbia, although solid efforts, broke little new ground. His repertoire drew heavily on material he had recorded in earlier years. The settings were rarely as imaginative as those Keepnews had created for the Riverside recordings—most of the Columbia releases featured Monk in the context of his working band, which now included saxophonist Charlie Rouse. Rouse was a skilled journeyman player, especially sensitive to the nuances of Monk’s music, but he did little to make listeners forget the earlier pairings with Coltrane, Rollins, and other saxophone masters. Still, the best of these works served as important additions to Monk’s oeuvre.

Despite the travails of his personal life, Monk maintained a fairly hectic recording and performance schedule during his first several years with Columbia, but by the close of the 1960s his activities had tapered off. In the 1970s, Monk’s public appearances, like his Delphic utterances, grew even less frequent. As befitted a legend, he remained mostly out of sight. His last official performance came at a Carnegie Hall concert in 1976, but, in an appropriate coda to his career, Monk surprised listeners one night after that by sitting in at Bradley’s, a small New York bar where few would have expected this reclusive jazz master to grace the keys. In his final years, the pianist resided with the Baroness de Koenigswarter, who had also befriended Charlie Parker during the altoist’s last illness. On February 5, 1982, Monk suffered a stroke, and died twelve days later at Englewood Hospital in New Jersey. He was sixty-four years old.

As early as the mid-1950s, a few jazz pianists were paying close attention to Monk’s example. For players such as Herbie Nichols, Richard Twardzik, Randy Weston, Mal Waldron, and Elmo Hope, several elements of Monk’s playing proved especially influential. First and foremost, the vertical conception of his music offered a robust alternative to the essentially linear approach of most postwar pianists. Similarly, Monk’s textured chords, sinewy melodies, and assertive rhythms served as open marks of rebellion against the “cool school,” then in the ascendancy, and its attempts to find a crossover audience for jazz among the general public. In essence, Monk figured as patron saint for those who saw jazz as an underground movement resisting assimilation. His music’s prickly exterior was perhaps not intended to make it sound foreboding, but for his admirers the sharp edges were a virtue, a fitting defense mechanism to repel all but an inner clique. But Monk’s music was equally admired for its primal insistence, for his vision of the piano as a percussion instrument—a sensibility that shaped the pianist’s tone control, phrasing, and sense of rhythm. In many ways, this was merely a return to the earliest jazz keyboard tradition (and, as such, it should come as no surprise that Monk and Nichols had strong ties to the stride idiom); but it was also a link to the later avant-garde players, most notably Cecil Taylor, who would owe much to Monk’s celebration of the piano as a giant tuned drum with manifold possibilities.

Following Monk’s model, however, was fraught with difficulties in the mid-1950s. Nichols, Twardzik, and Hope have each received far more recognition posthumously than during their abbreviated careers. All were dead before their mid-forties, leaving behind only a handful of recordings to testify to their potent reworkings of the jazz tradition. Herbie Nichols, one of the most brilliant modern jazz composers and pianists of his day, made just three albums as a leader, with most of his working life spent playing in Dixieland bands. Nichols’s attack and the basic elements of his musical vocabulary show a great debt to Monk, but his performances are more driving, more densely packed. And in the place of Monk’s sly humor, they tend toward a brittle hardness, somber and remote, at times bordering on an academic otherworldliness. Nichols’s best recordings—“The Third World,” “2300 Skiddoo,” “Blue Chopsticks,” “Cro-Magnon Nights”—are powerful statements, totally free from cliché, and revealing a poised balance between form and content. Twardzik spent even less time in the recording studio than Nichols, but the few items in his discography reveal a progressive thinker of titanic proportions. His music raises obvious comparisons with Monk’s but is also notable for its links to twentieth-century classical music and its anticipation of the later free jazz movement. Twardzik’s reputation rests primarily on a single trio session and sideman efforts with Serge Chaloff and Chet Baker. However, these are substantial works by any measure and indicate that had he lived longer—Twardzik was dead of a drug overdose before his twenty-fifth birthday—he might have established himself as one of the leading jazz players of his generation. Hope’s visionary style came to the fore on recordings made, as both a leader and sideman, in New York during the mid-1950s, but the revocation of his cabaret card due to drug problems limited his ability to build on these accomplishments. After relocating to California, Hope undertook sessions under his own name, as well as contributed greatly to the success of Harold Land’s classic recording
The Fox
. Like Monk, Hope found his music branded as “difficult,” and few listeners were willing to make the effort to probe its rich implications. He continued to work and record sporadically after his return to New York in early 1961 until his death six years later, but never gained a following commensurate with the virtues of his steely and multifaceted music.

Lennie Tristano’s impact on the development of jazz piano is perhaps even more difficult to gauge than Monk’s. During most of his life, Tristano remained an outsider in the jazz world. He recorded little and, as the years passed, increasingly restricted his music making to the confines of his home. His influence was more often exerted indirectly, through the activities of his students and followers, rather than his own efforts. At times this corps of ardent admirers took on the appearance of a cult, of which Tristano stood as high priest and oracle. For members, Tristano was the seer who saw the outlines of the future of jazz, celebrating it as a rugged, cerebral music, unforgiving and uncompromising. For those less favorably inclined, Tristano was a monomaniac whose mark on the jazz scene was a matter of manipulation, rather than a result of superior musical values.

In such a charged atmosphere, it was difficult to find a middle ground in evaluating Tristano. One was either a devotee, or a traitor to the cause—and few could live up to the demands Tristano placed on his devotees. Accordingly, with the passage of time, Tristano’s inner circle found fewer and fewer new acolytes. In the last twenty years of his life, his performances were increasingly rare, new recordings all but nonexistent, and older ones mostly out of print. By the time of his death in 1978, Tristano was a largely forgotten figure, relegated to the fringes of the jazz world.

Yet there was some irony to this turn of events. For the evolution of jazz piano was increasingly turning in precisely the direction that Tristano had foretold. His phrasing across the bar lines, his superimposition of elaborate polyrhythms over the ground beat, his biting percussiveness, his splintered harmonic structures: these key elements to Tristano’s playing from the 1940s and 1950s were now appearing as defining elements in jazz piano in the years following his death. In many instances, younger players were coming to these same end points
not
because they had listened to Tristano—emphatically, in many instances, they had not (although most had listened deeply to Bill Evans, who had carefully studied Tristano and his school)—but because these developments were logical extensions of the modern jazz idiom. Moreover, a number of Tristano’s most daring initiatives from the late 1940s and early 1950s—involving atonality, total improvisation, overdubbing, and other unusual devices—could now be seen as foreshadowing key developments in the later history of jazz. In this regard, Lennie Tristano was something of a Nostradamus of the bop era: when the future of jazz finally arrived, it bore a striking resemblance to his personal vision of how it
should
be.

A flu epidemic left Tristano blind shortly after his birth in Chicago on March 19, 1919. He began piano studies under his mother’s supervision and later pursued a more extensive musical education at a school for the blind. By the time he had completed high school, Tristano had learned to play saxophone (tenor, alto, and C melody), clarinet, trumpet, guitar, and drums. Even before his teens, he was working professionally, and only gradually came to focus his energies on the piano. After completing his bachelor’s degree at the American Conservatory of Music, Tristano began taking students in addition to performing in and around the Chicago area. By 1945, Tristano had attracted a small coterie of promising pupils, including saxophonist Lee Konitz, guitarist Billy Bauer, and composer/trombonist Bill Russo.

Tristano’s first recordings, made around this time, reveal that his style was already fully formed, and that his conception of the keyboard was frighteningly advanced. Gunther Schuller has cited Tristano’s 1946 trio performance of “I Can’t Get Started” as a landmark in the development of jazz, comparing it to Armstrong’s “West End Blues” and Ellington’s “Cotton Tail.”
¹⁸
Again it is the futuristic element of the music that is compelling, its startling harmonic conception, bordering at times on atonality, and its rhythmic complexity leading Schuller to praise the performance as “one of the most prophetic recordings in all jazz history.” But in many ways, Schuller concludes, the performance was “too far ahead of its time.”

In truth, placing Tristano within the context of a specific period and jazz movement has proven all too difficult. Most commentators and historians have listed him as a member of the cool school that predominated during the 1950s. But this classification captures only a small part of Tristano’s legacy. For the most part, his music had little in common with the pared-down melody lines, the warm lyricism, the relaxed tempos and chamber music delicacy that characterized the cool jazz vocabulary. Schuller, for his part, evaluates Tristano as part of his study of
The Swing Era
, and though a case could be made linking the pianist to swing period musicians such as Art Tatum and Mel Powell, this too remains an unsatisfying choice. Finally, one might see Tristano as a precursor of the later free jazz movement. All these supposed genealogies can point to some family likeness to justify their claims. However, to my ears, Tristano’s closest allegiance was to none of these schools, but rather to the bebop movement; he shared its fascination with long melodic lines, its celebration of intensity, its refusal to compromise, and its imperative to experiment.