In Walked Monk

That right hand always did seem to have a mind and a life of its own. Not that it didn’t ever know what the left was doing–just that it didn’t always seem, particularly, to care, taking those stabbing jabbing jumps while the other hand held down the melody, music made as erratic as its maker, and as unpredictable. You had no idea where the next note was coming from, no idea where those far-out fingers were gonna flutter and fly and pounce. If you did, you wouldn’t be you, and he wouldn’t be him. Monk’d be you, and you’d be Monk.

Nothing that crazy ever gets crafted without cunning–it takes a lot of discipline to make freedom that’s free like that. And if Robin D. G. Kelley, in Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, has produced a biography that in its density of detail can sometimes be punishing, there’s nothing at all punishing about the places where he manages to bring the right kind of detail–directly observed, considered, formulated–and nowhere more so than in his discussion of Monk’s methodical training:

Monk preferred descending chromatic chord progressions and dissonant, “open-voiced” chords made up of just the root and the seventh or ninth degree of the scale (See Appendix). His chords often elicited chuckles from the audience, but Monk didn’t mind. He later remarked, “Anything that’s very good will make you laugh in admiration, so it must be humor to make you laugh–or maybe it makes you laugh in surprise because it knocks you out.” Humorous, but no less serious. Monk’s chords were a product of years of training, experimentation, and a solid understanding of music theory. Monk knew it, which is why he became so annoyed when critics, musicians, or fans–even the sympathetic ones–described his chords as “wrong” or “weird.”

Yeah, but another question is: did he invent bop–or, at the very least, codify a piano language for bop? It’s a good question, and not mere sophistry, either. Bop was, before free jazz, the last revolutionary innovation to occur in the music, and in 1963, a decade-and-change after its advent, Monk was still complaining about having never received due acknowledgment for its creation. Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker were always identified as founding partners, while on the piano, supposedly Bud Powell was the first man to walk on the moon. But who do you think taught Bud everything the boy knew?…Well, that’s the story Monk told, in his “revision of popular jazz history” (Kelley), and he didn’t quit there–he stretched the tune out and started vamping on the grace notes, before restating the theme and shifting abruptly into another key: not only was he bop’s illegitmate father, but he’s the one that came up with its name–you see, he had a nickname for that tune “52nd Street,” which he liked to call “Bip Bop”: “And I told the cats the name so that’s probably where the name ‘Bebop’ came from.”

One of the great compelling things about jazz history–about all history, really–is the layered conflicting accounts that lend texture to its weave. That’s one of the many things Woody Allen got right in Sweet and Lowdown (1999), his valentine to jazz lore and memory. Kelley has introduced an extraordinary chunk of lore and memory here. There doesn’t seem to be a review of a major Monk performance that Kelley hasn’t read and then, regrettably, quoted from, but his attention to chronology is equally vigilant, and what this ends up meaning for the reader is at last a book that lays out Monk’s strange and turbulent life in a way that makes at least chronological sense.

At chronology’s end, Kelley doesn’t shy away from Monk’s descent deeper down into the severe mental ilnness he’d experienced all his life, even without the assistance, always, of drugs, and even with the support of his devoted wife Nellie. But Kelley doesn’t romanticize the mental illness, either, and that’s important. He writes about the unthinkably acrimonious departure of Charlie Rouse, Monk’s career-long collaborator on the saxophone: Rouse could simply no longer tolerate Monk’s abuse. By then it was too late to musically matter, but this isn’t a story about music merely. Ultimately Kelly plays just the right coda, and, in giving away the ending, the reviewer also opens up a way into the beginning: “For Monk, to be original meant reaching higher than one’s limits, striving for something startling and memorable, and never being afraid to make mistakes. Originality is not always mastery, nor does it always yield success. But it is very hard work.”