In 1959, Monk began to see a quack psychiatrist who put him on Thorazine, a powerful tranquilizer used in the treatment of psychosis, accompanied by vitamin shots that also contained amphetamines.
Fortunes took a swift turn for Monk when he began working for Riverside Records after 1955. This page was last modified on 7 June 2022, at 22:46. Robin D.G. His mature style, as rehearsal tapes reveal, was carefully worked out, just as his compositions were no less carefully notated. Psychiatry was a decidedly inexact science in the 50s and 60s, and it was not uncommon for black men who, like Monk, had experienced hostile encounters with the police to be institutionalized. His public image, like that of such other prominent beboppers as Charlie Parker and Bud Powellboth of whom, like Monk, also spent time in mental institutionswas as off-putting to the average layman as his music. That notwithstanding, Monks facile inclusion of heavy, rhythmic sounds, catchy melodies and unexpected intervals of silence in his compositions made him one of the founding figures of modern Jazz. Why, then, was he put on the cover of a newsmagazine written for a mass audience of middlebrows? Play the melody! he told one of his musicians in 1960. By that time, though, his major phase as an artist was long over, and his reputation would now be essentially no different had he died years earlier. Thelonious Sphere Monk ( October 10, 1917 February 17, 1982) was an American jazz pianist and composer. In 1973 he lapsed into a protracted depression and sharply curtailed his public appearances, playing his last concert in 1976, five years before his death. In Thelonious Monk, Kelley discloses that from 1957 on, Monk underwent numerous periods of incarceration in psychiatric hospitals. And while I think it unlikely that Monks mental problems did anything to shape the music that he wrote in his peak years, I have no doubt that they made it harder for him to bridge the gap between artist and audiencea gap that had already been widened by the coming of modernism, and whose continuing existence is arguably the greatest problem facing the jazz musicians of today. Start your risk free trial with unlimited access. Once the rclame arising from his appearance in Time wore off, he became once again what he had always been, an unabashedly difficult modernist. America Needs a Fight Between Florida and California. 
However, due to Monks limited exposure to playing arenas, unpopular playing style and techniques, his music failed to be noticed by a wider audience in this period and sold poorly in the market. Not only is this style aggressively percussive, but Monks unorthodox fingering made it difficult for him to execute scale-based solo passages with the smooth dexterity of a swing-era jazz pianist like Art Tatum or Teddy Wilson. Scrupulously sourced (the endnotes run to 99 pages of agate-sized type) and written with the cooperation of Monks family, it is the first factually accurate account of the pianists life, one for which scholars will long be grateful. Because he was an eccentric whose peculiarities made for good copya mad genius, in Times words, who suffered from periods of acute disconnection in which he falls totally mute., That Monk deserved attention for other, better reasons is now beyond question. But when he addresses the problem of Monks sanity, he does so in a way that sheds light on whether one of the most important jazz musicians of the 20th century suffered from a major mental illness. Monk was renowned for a distinct look which included suits, hats, and sunglasses.
Thelonious Monks career resulted in some of the most thought-of tracks in modern Jazz music, such as Round Midnight, Straight, No Chaser and Blue Monk. Unlike Dizzy Gillespie, a natural-born entertainer who went out of his way to make his musical innovations palatable to a popular audience, Monk was a mid-century modernist par excellence, unafraid to be difficult and certain that the world would someday catch up with him. But mental illness ran in Monks familyhis father spent the last part of his life in an asylumand while the stresses of his personal and professional life must have contributed to his idiosyncrasies, it also appears that he may have suffered from an organic mental disorder whose symptoms were exacerbated by his abuse of alcohol and illegal drugs. Lost your password? Monks ingenuity arouse from his mastery of the piano and the unconventional, musically awkward techniques he embellished his songs with. Monk is the second-most-recorded jazz composer after Duke Ellington. He was also noted for an idiosyncratic habit during performances: while other musicians continued playing, Monk would stop, stand up, and dance for a few moments before returning to the piano. He played with stiff, flattened-out fingers, hammering the keyboard as if it were a set of tuned drums and only rarely employing the sustaining pedal. Pat your foot and sing the melody in your head, or play off the rhythm of the melody, never mind the so-called chord changes.. On the other hand, Monks deliberately awkward-sounding pianism has never been as popular as his compositions, and in the 40s and 50s, it was actively controversial, not merely among jazz aficionados but also among his fellow pianists. It is here, I suspect, that Thelonious Monks long-lasting reputation as a mad genius is most relevant today. His style was not universally appreciated; the poet and jazz critic Philip Larkin dismissed him as "the elephant on the keyboard". Yet Monks old-fashioned attitude toward melody (which is especially evident in such unsentimental yet poignant ballads as Ask Me Now and Monks Mood) did not make his music any more accessible to lay listeners. All this points to why it took so long for Monk to win wider acceptance as an artist. Some of the most respected works that brought him international fame were Thelonious in ActionandMisterioso (1958) and The Thelonious Monk Orchestra at Town Hall (1959). After his miraculous comeback to the Jazz stage, he travelled to different parts of the world, focusing more on performing in Europe. Monks Dream was another album released in 1963, with tracks such as Bye-Ya and Bright Mississippi amongst the most popular. Monk is one of five jazz musicians to have been featured on the cover of Time magazine (the others being Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington and Wynton Marsalis). The reason for this unity is that Monk, harking back to such older jazzmen as Louis Armstrong, preferred to improvise on the melodies of the songs he played rather than on their underlying chord progressions. For my part, I treasure Monks tough-minded, unabashedly unpopular artistry, both as a composer and as a pianist, in much the same way that I respond to Pollocks abstract-expressionist paintings. Unlike the simple riff-based tunes of the swing era or the virtuoso obstacle courses of such beboppers as Gillespie and Charlie Parker, Monks compositions are laconic, painstakingly wrought miniatures whose splintery dissonances and oddly tilted rhythms are often strongly reminiscent of 20th-century classical music (though he does not appear to have been influenced by, or even closely aware of, any modern classical composers). Like most jazz musicians who write their own material, Monk is better understood as an improvising musician than as a composerbut one whose best performances have a structural unity that is compositional in its total effect. And so it didbut not in the way that he expected. Just as distinctive was Monks approach to the piano. The sharp-edged, excitingly astringent wit of his hard-swinging compositions, which bore such gnomic titles as I Mean You, Off Minor, and Well, You Neednt, had already won him the acclaim of musicians and critics, who rightly regarded him as a key figure in the development of modern jazz. He had a unique improvisational style and made numerous contributions to the standard jazz repertoire, including "'Round Midnight", "Blue Monk", "Straight, No Chaser", "Ruby, My Dear", "In Walked Bud", and "Well, You Needn't". Oscar Peterson, for one, dismissed him as limited technically. Moreover, his bizarre behavior, fascinating though it was to Times editors, surely had much to do with the reluctance of some listeners to take his music seriously. Despite their common provenance, these pieces had little in common with the bebop of the 40s. Born in North Carolina in 1917, Monk moved with his family five years later to New York City. This was, however, to change later on when personal and professional circumstances would shift dynamics for this renowned composer. Kelleys Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original2 is one of the longest biographies of a jazz musician ever to see print. Today he is universally considered to be one of the greatest artists in the musics history, and his best-known tunes, most notably Round Midnight and Straight, No Chaser, are played the world over.1. So does Monks mental instability somehow explain his music? Hewould continue working on a number of similar albums throughout the 1960s, aided by bassists John Ore and Larry Gales, while also shifting drummers between Frankie Dunlop and Ben Riley. You will receive a link to create a new password via email. In the early 1950s, Monk contributed to a self-titled album, together with another piece, Thelonious Monk and Sonny Rollins. Monk's compositions and improvisations feature dissonances and angular melodic twists and are consistent with his unorthodox approach to the piano, which combined a highly percussive attack with abrupt, dramatic use of switched key releases, silences, and hesitations. In this respect, he was no less a high modernist than Robert Lowell, Jackson Pollock, or any of the other artists whose self-destructive behavior and widely publicized struggles with mental illness were to become intimately bound up with the general perception of modern art. Well into the 50s, jazz had been a genuinely popular music, a utilitarian, song-based idiom to which ordinary people could dance if they felt like it. Tough-minded, difficult, unpopular, yes; the work of a madman, no. A primary-source biography that seeks to answer the first of these questions has now been published. However, it was only when he signed contracts with Blue Note Records that his first recording, Genius of Modern Music: Volume 1entered the early Bebop Jazz scene. In 1964 a pianist with the unusual name of Thelonious Monk appeared on the cover of Time. Explore the scintillating July/August 2022 issue of Commentary. From then on, most of the stories published about Monk made mention of his strange behavior. These tracks, amongst a large number of others, are said to have redefined Jazz trajectories not just in Monks time, but also today to a noticeable extent. The combination was a dangerous one, and thereafter his behavior grew increasingly and at times alarmingly erratic. He studied piano briefly as a boy, then spent two years playing gospel piano for an itinerant evangelist, after which he returned to New York and set up shop as a jazz musician. My time for fame will come, he told an interviewer in 1948. He was only the fourth jazz musician to be so featured, and unlike his predecessors, Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, and Duke Ellington, he was unknown to the public at large. ?At the end of one of these periods, Monk is so exhausted that he is likely to sleep straight through three days. It is surreal for Jazz lovers not to have heard of the famous Thelonious Sphere Monk, a creative Jazz musician and composer who was active throughout the interim period of 1940s to the early 1970s. In 2006, for instance, Monk was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize for having produced a body of distinguished and innovative musical composition that has had a significant and enduring impact on the evolution of jazz. This citation ignores the fact that his main body of written work consists of around two dozen melodies composed between 1941 and 1957, scarcely more than half of which have ever been played with any regularity by other musicians. By 1941 he was working at Mintons Playhouse, a Harlem club where a group of younger players were experimenting with a new style of jazz that came to be known as bebop. Monk himself insisted that his personal eccentricities were as purposeful as his playing. That reputation, while solidly based, is also easy to misconstrue. Compared with Duke Ellington, who produced some 1,500-odd pieces ranging in scope from popular songs to large-scale multi-movement instrumental works, Monk can scarcely be considered a composer at all. Although his incredible sense of composition was noticed by a few fellow musicians, other unfortunate events such as the suspension of his New York Cabaret Card, resulted in his expulsion from performing in most New York clubs and bars. As early as 1948, a reporter for PM, working from a press release written by the wife of Monks record producer, called him erratic and uncommunicative, suggesting he was already experiencing the mood swings from which he suffered for the rest of his life: Monk seldom sleeps more than five hours a day and has occasionally gone as long as three days without any sleep at all.?.?.?. Alas, like most very long biographies, Thelonious Monk is encrusted with unselective detail that contributes little to the readers understanding of its subject. Was Thelonious Monk mentally illand if he was, is that fact relevant to our understanding of his music? But I also know that something important and irreplaceable was lost when the serious yet accessible music of Armstrong and his fellow musician-entertainers was transplanted from the dance floor to the concert hall, there to become a species of high art. Thelonious Monk at Minton's Playhouse, 1947, Monk at Minton's Playhouse, New York, 1947. Not for the most part. 1 Monks key recordings are included in Monks Moods (Proper, four CDs), an imported box set available from Amazon that contains his first recorded performances of all of the compositions mentioned in this essay. His love for Jazz music and a generally original and principled approach to playing the piano often made him unpopular amongst the conservative, one-sided critics of Jazz in the beginning of his career. He made his first recordings as a leader in 1947, and between then and 1954 he recorded most of the compositions for which he is known today.
The only other album having any significance before Monk retired was Underground, released in 1968. Thelonious Monk Jr., his son, spoke of the pianists cycles of depression and euphoria, recalling times when you look your father in the eye and you know that he doesnt exactly know who you are.. In 1963, he performed with another orchestra, resulting in compositions such as Big Band and Quartet in Concert, taking Monks reputation another level higher. Having learned the piano at a very early age, Monk began his musical journey playing soothing Jazz tunes in local clubs like Mintons Playhouse, where he would improvise and experiment for long hours just to develop some sense of direction. It was here that he came in to close contact with renowned musicians likeDizzy Gillespie andCharlie Christian, and really got a grip of how he wanted to progress through his career. For the next three years, Monk would have on and off residencies at the Five Spot caf, and worked there on spectacular albums with an orchestra. Sometimes its to your advantage for people to think youre crazy, he told an interview. It is true that he composed far less after 1957 and that his playing ultimately grew repetitive to the point of tiresomeness, in part because of his deteriorating mental condition but also because he chose to play his best-known tunes over and over again instead of expanding his repertoire. But after his death in 1982, those who knew him best described his conduct in terms indicating that it amounted to more than mere eccentricity. He shared that attitude with many other members of his generation of jazz musicians, who saw themselves as artists rather than entertainers, and whose attitude would come to be generally embraced by succeeding generations of jazzmen. Please enter your email address. Some of his other productions during this time included studio albums such as Criss Cross (1963), whereas some of the live collections included Miles and Monk at Newport(1963) andLive at the It Club(1964).
Not only does Kelley have next to nothing of interest to say about Monks music, but his book also contains numerous historical excursions that place Monks life in the larger context of American history in general and black history in particular, most of which could have been shortened to useful effect. But by the 60s, it had evolved into a challenging concert music whose complexities repelled many of the same youngsters who were now listening to rock, and Monk was one of the musicians chiefly responsible for that change.