In
the winter of 1969, at fifty-two years old and after decades of
revolutionizing the way we hear notes and silence, the jazz pianist and
composer Thelonious Monk
was invited to record a conversation and solo session for French
television. As the outtakes of the program reveal, the occasion quickly
devolved into a probe of Monk’s carefully protected private life.
By
this point in his career, it was commonplace to portray Monk as
stylistically bizarre. He and his music were often presented as
conjoined elements in a broken or stilted grammar of near-madness, as
though strangeness were his currency. The TV program, aired in 1970 as
“Jazz Portrait: Thelonious Monk,” was no different. The interview at the
center was conducted by Henri Renaud, a French jazz pianist, whose
evident idolization and envy of Monk distorts any effort at an honest
conversation. Both the final version and the additional footage that was
left out stand as a testament to the media’s effort to capitalize on
Monk’s perceived oddities by fashioning him into a jester for his
rapacious public.
In the winter of 1969, at fifty-two years old and after decades of revolutionizing the way we hear notes and silence, the jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk was invited to record a conversation and solo session for French television. As the outtakes of the program reveal, the occasion quickly devolved into a probe of Monk’s carefully protected private life.
By this point in his career, it was commonplace to portray Monk as stylistically bizarre. He and his music were often presented as conjoined elements in a broken or stilted grammar of near-madness, as though strangeness were his currency. The TV program, aired in 1970 as “Jazz Portrait: Thelonious Monk,” was no different. The interview at the center was conducted by Henri Renaud, a French jazz pianist, whose evident idolization and envy of Monk distorts any effort at an honest conversation. Both the final version and the additional footage that was left out stand as a testament to the media’s effort to capitalize on Monk’s perceived oddities by fashioning him into a jester for his rapacious public.
“Rewind & Play: ‘It’s Not Nice?’,” a new documentary about Monk by the French Senegalese director Alain Gomis, remixes the original raw footage into a devastating ballad of the artist’s erasure. At the beginning of the film Monk deplanes in Paris. From the opening frames, we witness the gleam in his eye and the rhythm of his gait. As a muse, he is ideal—captivating to observe and aware of his effect on others. A bewildered half smile leaves and returns to his face in intervals, like a refrain. It’s especially sincere at the arrivals gate, and it widens when his wife, Nellie, who has accompanied him from New York, comes into frame. She sports a low Afro, a sleek black coat, and gold-rimmed sunglasses whose chic gaudiness contrasts with her modest demeanor. If Monk is our muse, she is his.
From the outset, it is clear that the unspoken, like the dropped notes in Monk’s music, is the defining characteristic of his approach to private life. When he’s not looking at Nellie, whose presence makes his hierarchy of feelings immediately apparent, it’s difficult to determine the ratio of pleasure to angst in his movements. Film crew in tow, the couple arrive at their hotel. Monk heads to a bar, still armored in his regal half-hearted cheerfulness but on the brink of his alternate register, a discreetly exasperated-ecstatic one. A bystander, not wanting to be documented, remarks in French, “Oh, it’s a hidden camera . . . we mustn’t talk.” Monk has a drink and a hard-boiled egg, never putting down his cigarette. He turns around to pet a dog that someone has brought to the bar, and, as the light brightens, the bloodshot cast of travel and exhaustion is visible in his eyes.
Monk’s dominant energy at this point in the film is a jovial melancholy. In the recent past, his peer John Coltrane and his friends Bud Powell and Elmo Hope had all died, and Monk himself had spent more than twenty gruelling years of touring, playing, living, and composing within the unforgiving confines of an industry that preyed upon its talent. As Robin D. G. Kelley writes in his biography of the jazz legend, Monk had quite literally walked off his pain, sometimes walking so much that he got sores on his feet. Following the death of his idol Coleman Hawkins, Monk was said to have paced for three days. The cameras capture the wry decorum of a man too generous to pursue escapism wholeheartedly and too intelligent to relish sycophants trampling on his soulfulness in pursuit of his glamour. A few scenes in, we get Monk at the piano rehearsing a haunted melody while bystanders perch around the instrument and smoke. Renaud instructs, “Make it look like it’s live . . . That’s the modern way.”
The plaintive self-consciousness of this request makes Monk seem like an ancient sage surrounded by fractious acolytes. The film crew stare him down as he plays, as if his genius were a transgression and they are a tribunal. His chords become more sombre, indicating his awareness of their scrutiny. It’s a visually wrenching exchange between performance and spectatorship. Eventually, Monk wearies and leaps up from the bench abruptly, ceremoniously.
In another scene, he sits down and submits to the interview portion of the program. “Do it your way,” he says, in restrained frustration. Among the melodies Monk plays is “Crepuscule with Nellie,” a song he wrote for his wife, and Renaud opens the interview by asking about her. All the romance that Monk conjured with his composition is held up for investigation. His bewildered grin returns and turns into something more detached. Renaud repeats the question.“All I can say is that she’s my wife and the mother of my kids,” Monk offers guardedly. The film crew prod him for another take. He repeats the same simple pronouncement. Do they want him to reiterate the passion that he confessed to with his playing?
Renaud persists, changing the subject to feign mercy. Why does Monk keep his piano in his kitchen, he asks, seemingly anticipating an outlandish pop-spiritual explanation about the energy of the room, a neat anecdote that can be added to jazz mythology. Monk responds matter-of-factly: “That was the largest room in the apartment.” Renaud appears crestfallen. In French, he had added that he’s been to Monk’s “cramped” New York apartment, and inflects the adjective with blunt pathos. Monk’s eyes are starting to spin and rove, not in anger so much as the palpable disappointment of one who has been tricked and cornered by forces he almost trusted.
Gomis does a startlingly precise job of imposing a Chaplinesque burlesque on the breakdown in communication between Monk and Renaud. There’s a muscle to the exchange between shots, takes, and pauses that is reminiscent of real sparring in a ring. Sweat gathers on Monk’s brow, its presence made more overwhelming by the invasive lighting. His eyes narrow into deeper alertness and take on a saddened cast, as the subtle attempts to undermine him accumulate. Tense silences stand in for the bells between rounds.
Relentless, Renaud reroutes to another, equally risible line of inquiry. He wants to know if Monk feels that he was “too avant-garde” for the audience at his first concert in France, in 1954. Now Monk is openly indignant: “It seemed like that I was the star the people was coming to see, but I wasn’t getting the money.” Cut! This scene is the source of the film’s subtitle. Having led Monk to acknowledge his own stature, Renaud halts. “It’s not nice,” he eventually reprimands Monk condescendingly, all of his submerged arrogance and entitlement finally on display.
On the second take, Monk’s recall is more detailed and more resentful. He reiterates the sentiment that he was being exploited, and it seems clear that he’s aware that he is again being exploited in a similar way. “Bernard, I think it’s best if we erase it. What he’s saying is really derogatory,” Renaud interjects in French, a language Monk cannot fully understand. Monk is now smiling with an air of sublimated rage and disbelief, still and statuesque as a tintype. Imagine being berated and told that it’s an honor.
Monk stands up and attempts to walk offstage. “How about us going to this dinner and forgetting this TV program?” he stammers, pained, painful to watch. Renaud physically jostles him back toward the bench. For a moment, their clash is a near-embrace, one that stalemates in Monk’s tentative acquiescence. He’s still standing for his third attempt at the question about his first tour in France. This round, he plays the changes: “The first time I came to France, I was ossified all the time I was here.” Finally, a threat—this retort proves he knows that he’s being asked to stiffen into the same thankless showmanship all over again. He lights a cigarette, his face now assuming an expression of resigned contempt. He recounts his modest beginnings for a few bars, while Renaud maintains a smug distance. Then, with an emphatic “Merci beaucoup!,” Monk liberates himself from the exchange.
“I should care, I should let it upset me” are the lyrics to the song that Monk solos in the next scene. As the television crew orbit the piano, he slurs the standard’s notes, some giggling and the bulk sobbing quietly. While playing, he walks into his own shadow, grinning. Monk’s dignity and agency are apparent in his walk, and he plays like he walks, in round and dreamy notes with a destination clear only to him. These are the brilliant circles for which he named his compositions, and they are aspects of his nature that arouse rapture from anyone with eyes and ears. Asking him to dissect his process on a technical level is tantamount to an act of hostility.
Everything he has to testify he has volunteered as song and gesture, spinning circles again and again for us, until we might comprehend the pattern between notes that only he can access and that only he can elaborate into work of understated and jarring beauty. The soft pink hue of aged videotape appears over Monk’s image, like the flag of a new nation under jazz. Beads of his sweat fall on ivory keys, and his fingers move with even greater agility. More perspiration falls, and the room goes silent.
Cameramen and journalists often make the mistake of thinking that they can package an artist into an icon, bestowing upon their subject an image that might be converted into money or fame. Biographers and documentarians make this mistake, too. The elegance of “Rewind & Play” lies in its effort to back away from this territory of error and subjection, and in doing so to dim the obnoxious, prideful lights of the tradition of star-making. The film closes with a montage of Monk’s silent gestures, which exhibit a tenderness and deliberateness so arresting that you almost forget you’ve just watched him provoked into a muted war with the idea of himself. We hope that Monk himself was able to forget that subtly riveting trauma, but it’s doubtful. What we witness in “Rewind & Play” is likely one of the incidents that instigated Monk’s withdrawal from public life, seven years after “Jazz Portrait” was filmed. When, during that retreat, the producer Orrin Keepnews called him to ask if he would like to talk about “the old days” Monk’s succinct response was “No, I wouldn’t.”
Many years later, in 1986, the pianist Cecil Taylor was filmed watching a Monk concert on video. He gasps in appreciation and smiles like a giddy child: “He has on wonderful shoes, he has on wonderful shoes!” I think Cecil has it right. His outrageous praise lets him meet Monk on his own terms, in a sense of rhythm and style so exclusive that even its withholding character is a display of care and sympathy toward admirers. Monk, his music, and his silence epitomize an adage attributed to Louis Armstrong—if you have to ask what it is, you’ll never know.
And Beloveds, I highly recommend you read Robin D. G. Kelley's autobiography of Monk. Here's a review from the New York Times.
lovu dearly,
Kendke
Monk’s Moods
Thelonious Monk, the great American jazz artist, during the first half of his junior year at Stuyvesant High School in New York, showed up in class only 16 out of 92 days and received zeros in every one of his subjects. His mother, Barbara Monk, would not have been pleased. She had brought her three children to New York from North Carolina, effectively leaving behind her husband, who suffered bad health, and raising the family on her own, in order that they might receive a proper education. But Mrs. Monk, like a succession of canny, tough-minded, loving and very indulgent women in Thelonious Monk’s life, understood that her middle child had a large gift and was put on this earth to play piano. Presently, her son was off on a two-year musical tour of the United States, playing a kind of sanctified R & B piano in the employ, with the rest of his small band, of a traveling woman evangelist.
The brilliant pianist Mary Lou Williams, seven years Monk’s senior and working at the time for Andy Kirk’s Clouds of Joy orchestra, heard Monk play at a late-night jam session in Kansas City in 1935. Monk, born in 1917, would have been 18 or so at the time. When not playing to the faithful, he sought out the musical action in centers like Kansas City. Williams would later claim that even as a teenager, Monk “really used to blow on piano. . . . He was one of the original modernists all right, playing pretty much the same harmonies then that he’s playing now.”
It was those harmonies — with their radical, often dissonant chord voicings, along with the complex rhythms, “misplaced” accents, startling shifts in dynamics, hesitations and silences — that, even in embryonic form, Williams was hearing for the first time. It’s an angular, splintered sound, percussive in attack and asymmetrical, music that always manages to swing hard and respect the melody. Monk was big on melody. Thelonious Monk’s body of work, as composer and player (the jazz critic Whitney Balliett called Monk’s compositions “frozen . . . improvisations” and his improvisations “molten . . . compositions”), sits as comfortably beside Bartok’s Hungarian folk-influenced compositions for solo piano as it does beside the music of jazz giants like James P. Johnson, Teddy Wilson and Duke Ellington, some of the more obvious influences on Monk. It’s unclear how much of Bartok he listened to. Monk did know well and play Rachmaninoff, Liszt and Chopin (especially Chopin). Stravinsky was also a favorite.
Robin D. G. Kelley, in his extraordinary and heroically detailed new biography, “Thelonious Monk,” makes a large point time and time again that Monk was no primitive, as so many have characterized him. At the age of 11, he was taught by Simon Wolf, an Austrian émigré who had studied under the concertmaster for the New York Philharmonic. Wolf told the parent of another student, after not too many sessions with young Thelonious: “I don’t think there will be anything I can teach him. He will go beyond me very soon.” But the direction the boy would go in, after two years of classical lessons, was jazz.
Monk was well enough known and appreciated in his lifetime to have appeared on the cover of the Feb. 28, 1964, issue of Time magazine. He was 46 at the time, and after many years of neglect and scuffling had become one of the principal faces and sounds of contemporary jazz. The Time article, by Barry Farrell, is, given the vintage and target audience, well done, both positive and fair, and accurate in the main. But it does make much of its subject’s eccentricities, and refers to Monk’s considerable and erratic drug and alcohol use. This last would have raised eyebrows in the white middle-class America of that era.
Throughout the book, Kelley plays down Monk’s “weirdness,” or at least contextualizes it. But Monk did little to discourage the popular view of him as odd. Always a sharp dresser and stickler for just the right look, he also favored a wide array of unconventional headgear: astrakhan, Japanese skullcap, Stetson, tam-o’-shanter. He had a trickster sense of humor, in life and in music, and he loved keeping people off-balance in both realms. Off-balance was the plane on which Monk existed. He also liked to dance during group performances, but this served very real functions: first, as a method of conducting, communicating musical instructions to the band members; and second, to let them know that he dug their playing when they were in a groove and swinging.
Even early in his career, Monk often insisted on showing up late to gigs, driving bandleaders, club owners and audiences to distraction. And on occasion he would simply fall asleep at the piano. He would also disappear to his room in the family apartment for two weeks at a time. When he was young, these behaviors or idiosyncrasies were tolerated and, more or less, manageable. But the manic, erratic behavior turned out to be the precursor of a more serious bipolar illness that would over time become immobilizing. From his father, Thelonious Sr., who was gone from the scene by the time Monk was 11, Thelonious Jr. seems to have gotten his musical gene (there always seems to be one in there). But he also inherited his father’s illness. Monk Sr. was committed to the State Hospital for the Colored Insane in Goldsboro, N.C., at the age of 52, in 1941. He never left.
Kelley, the author of “Race Rebels” and other books, makes use of the “carpet bombing” method in this biography. It is not pretty, or terribly selective, but it is thorough and hugely effective. He knows music, especially Monk’s music, and his descriptions of assorted studio and live dates, along with what Monk is up to musically throughout, are handled expertly. The familiar episodes of Monk’s career are all well covered: the years as house pianist at Minton’s after-hours club in Harlem, which served as an incubator for the new “modern music,” later to be called bebop; the brilliant “Genius of Modern Music” sessions for Blue Note, Monk’s first recordings with him as the bandleader; the drug bust, where Monk took the rap for Bud Powell and lost his New York cabaret license for six years; his triumphant return in 1957 with his quartet, featuring John Coltrane, at the Five Spot; the terrible beating Monk took for resisting arrest in New Castle, Del.; the final dissolution and breakdown. Likewise, the characters in Monk’s life and career are well served: his fellow musicians; his family; his friend and benefactor, the fascinating Pannonica (Nica) de Koenigswarter, the “jazz baroness,” at whose home in Weehawken, N.J., Monk spent his final years. He would die, after a long silence, in 1982, in the arms of his wife, Nellie.
Musicians — particularly jazz musicians of Monk’s period, and most especially Monk, taciturn and gnomic in utterance by nature — tend not, as writers do, to write hundreds of letters sharing with intimates what is going on in their hearts or heads. A biography of Monk, perforce, has to rely on the not always reliable, often conflicting, memories of others. Instinct is involved, surely as much as perspicacity, in sifting through the mass of observation and anecdote. The Monk family appears to have shared private material with Kelley that had hitherto been unavailable. This trust was not misplaced. There will be shapelier and more elegantly written biographies to come — Monk, the man and the music, is an endlessly fascinating subject — but I doubt there will be a biography anytime soon that is as textured, thorough and knowing as Kelley’s. The “genius of modern music” has gotten the passionate, and compassionate, advocate he deserves.
THELONIOUS MONK -The Life and Times of an American Original
By Robin D. G. Kelley
Illustrated. 588 pp. Free Press
$14.89 on Amazon although if possible order/buy it from a Black owned book store.
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