|
|
 |
THELONIOUS
MONK
piano
LIFELINE
1917-1982
|
|
|
1917
Thelonious Sphere Monk was born in North
Carolina, but spent his formative childhood years in New York.
He began piano lessons aged eleven, played at rent parties aged
thirteen, toured as pianist to an evangelist, and studied briefly
at the Julliard School.
1947-51
Monk begins to record as a band leader,
but, although branded as the "high priest of bop", he
receives little public acclaim and
is even slighted by some critics.
1957
Interest in Monk awakens, and his quartet
includes, for a while, John Coltrane:
their musical performances (surprisingly) complement each other.
Charlie Rouse becomes his long-standing saxophonist from 1959
to 1970.
1970s
Monk's public
appearances become less frequent as
the 1960s close, and although he tours with an all-star group in
1971-72, his appearances become rare. He plays at the Newport Jazz
Festival and the Carnegie Hall in 1975 and 1976, and thereafter
makes only a solitary unannounced club appearance.
|
|
1940-42
He became a house pianist at Minton's where
he met and befriended Bud Powell, and
played a significant role in the founding
of the bebop school of jazz.
1943-46
Monk works regularly with Coleman
Hawkins, with whom he first recorded, and he also plays with
Dizzy Gillespie, Lucky Millinder
and Cootie Williams.
1951-56
Monk is imprisoned in 1951 for trumped-up
drug offences and consequently is unable to perform publicly in
New York for six years. He continues to record, but with little
recognition, and Prestige eventually sell their artist to Riverside
Records in 1956 for a paltry sum.
1960s
Monk becomes a star turn and sells records
in commercial numbers, contracts
to Columbia in 1962, tours extensively, and even features as a Time
magazine cover story.
1982
Having always been an individualist, receiving
treatment for depressive schizophrenia since the 1960s, Monk spends
the last six years of his life in the house of the Baroness de Koenigswarter
in New Jersey. He dies in 1982. |
Monk
does not sit easily in a narrative history of jazz or jazz piano style.
His stylistic background is the stride piano of, say, Teddy
Wilson; yet clearly any influence is deconstructed or distilled,
and any residue is left with an indelible Monk watermark. If he does
not belong to the stride piano school of jazz, neither does he sit
comfortably in the bebop style, a genre he did so much to create.
His approach to both technique and improvistaion
stands him apart from other pianists who came to light
in the bop era.
Mary
Lou Williams claimed that Monk "really used to blow on piano",
but, with all due deference, it is hard to see how with his posture!
His style is sparse out of technical necessity,
and from this sparsity stems his whole approach to music.
He was definitely not interested in
playing the chord changes that so excited other boppists;
rather he sought to develop thematic and rhythmic compositional ideas.
Indeed the composition itself becomes an
improvisational tool. Straight, No Chaser, one of
Monk's compositions now a jazz standard, is on first hearing a harmless,
catchy 12-bar blues: yet the rhythmic dislocation of the theme opens
up endless possibilities to improvise without having to resort to
rapid scales and harmonic juggling. Similarly many of his compositions
are deceptively simple to listen to, often with infantile and repetitive
melodies, and yet this masks a compositional complexity: Coltrane
hit the mark by referring to Monk as a "musical architect".
His language was truly unique, and if his approach to improvisation
can only be understood in the light of his technique, so too his compositions
can only be understood with reference to his style of playing
His musical vocabulary was wholly personal and, like that of Erroll
Garner, can only be copied wholesale or not at all. Other than in
his approach to improvisation, it is now hard to see where his influence
lies today. |
|