The Thrills And Frustrations Of A Rediscovered Thelonious Monk Recording

“Palo Alto,” a brand new launch of a beforehand unissued live performance recording of Thelonious Monk and his quartet, from 1968, embodies a number of the vexing paradoxes of his majestic artistry and his radically influential profession. The album, scheduled for launch in July from Impulse Data, was delayed, reportedly owing to contractual points; it is going to now be launched on September 18th, on CD and vinyl by Impulse and digitally by Sony Legacy. Monk, a pianist and composer, was fifty-one on the time of the live performance. He was one of many prime creators—the creator, he stated—of contemporary jazz, i.e., bebop, alongside Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, within the early nineteen-forties, most famously at jam periods at a Harlem membership known as Minton’s. But, whereas these musicians additionally had jobs with well-known huge bands, Monk—the home pianist at Minton’s—was composing, theorizing, and mentoring. These musicians, and others of their circle, recorded copiously, beginning in 1945, however Monk’s recorded output remained scant till the nineteen-fifties. Although musicians had lengthy been conscious of his powerfully authentic concepts and performances, it wasn’t till a 1957 gig, on the 5 Spot, within the East Village—the place his fundamental sideman was the saxophonist John Coltrane—that his central place in fashionable inventive life grew to become extensively acknowledged.

Some causes are bitterly sensible and political. New York had a regulation on the time requiring membership musicians to carry a police-issued “cabaret card,” which some, together with Monk, misplaced after drug convictions (one for marijuana, one other when he was wrongly charged), leading to Monk being barred from jazz golf equipment for a few years. (One other arrest, in 1958, after from his ejection from a resort foyer in Jim Crow-enforcing Delaware, led to one more suspension from membership dates.) On the similar time, Monk endured the widespread rejection of critics and audiences, who lengthy failed to acknowledge his greatness, whether or not in public performances or on data, whilst his friends from Minton’s have been extensively acclaimed. Whereas Parker, Gillespie, and the pianist Bud Powell have been conspicuously virtuosic, their solos thrillingly outpacing lesser artists each in invention and execution, Monk, although no much less expert on his instrument, had a special manner of displaying it. He traded pace for area, which he punctuated with percussive, angular figures that matched their distinctive harmonic complexity (and, generally, harmonic starkness) with extraordinary micro-timing and a wide range of assaults. His model was no easier to realize than these of his friends, however its brilliance was much less evident even to ostensible cognoscenti. Because of this, his recordings have been slower to come back alongside—and, once they did, critics (which is to say, white critics) have been even slower to understand them as greater than merely idiosyncratic and eccentric. Musicians, nonetheless, knew all alongside that he was a decisive creator of musical kinds; Teddy Hill, a bandleader who managed Minton’s, stated, “Monk appeared extra just like the man who manufactured the product relatively than commercialized it.”

Monk’s friends in fashionable music, akin to Parker, Gillespie, and Powell—who, as a teen-ager, studied with Monk—additionally composed, and their compositions shortly grew to become extensively carried out by different musicians. However Monk is probably going one of many two most vital composers of jazz, second solely to Duke Ellington. What’s extra, his personal compositions have been the idea for many of his recordings and concert events. He hardly ever recorded compositions by different jazz musicians, excluding Ellington; he delved solely secondarily into the Nice American Songbook. In his compositions, as in his improvisations, he dealt himself extreme limits, distilling and fragmenting his personal melodies, every time in another way, usually choosing up on phrases from the previous (normally saxophone) soloist. Inside this framework, the liberating pressure of inspiration was ecstatic—but the hazard of narrowness lurked.

In 1957, Monk’s quartet with Coltrane (who’d been fired from Miles Davis’s quintet due to his heroin dependancy, which he was struggling to kick) held a six-month residency on the 5 Spot. A go to to the membership to see them play grew to become de rigueur for New York artists and intellectuals. (Robin D. G. Kelley tells the story, in fascinating element, in his important and extraordinary biography of Monk.) In an odd and miserable manner, although, Monk was a sufferer of his personal success, modest and belated although it could have been. Monk’s new acclaim enabled him to type a working quartet, however Coltrane returned to Miles Davis’s group, in 1958; Monk employed the saxophonist Charlie Rouse, who was a superb musician, with the talent to barter Monk’s terse however sophisticated compositions and the creativeness to reëxplore them nightly, however he wasn’t an authentic soloist at a degree to problem Monk. As Monk grew fashionable, he and the quartet spent a lot of the 12 months touring. This left him, he stated, with little time or vitality to compose; from the late fifties on, Kelley estimates, Monk labored with a core repertory of solely “about fifteen to twenty” items. In 1962, Monk signed a contract with Columbia Data that offered each monetary stability and publicity. In 1964, he made the duvet of Time—at precisely a second when a brand new era of avant-garde musicians, akin to Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, and the ever-advancing Coltrane himself, made Monk seem to be a holdover from the earlier revolution.

All through the sixties, Monk concert events (a lot of which have been usually recorded unofficially, as within the case of the Palo Alto gig) roughly adopted the identical format, and their high quality is principally within the extent of Monk’s and Rouse’s diploma of inspiration on the given day. (My favourite Monk recording of this quartet is from a European concert tour, in 1969, when he introduced alongside a seventeen-year-old New York drummer named Paris Wright, who, via innocence or bravado, uninhibitedly challenged Monk on the bandstand, stoking Monk’s inventive fires to a excessive blaze.) The Palo Alto live performance doesn’t attain such heights, however it gives its personal distinctive and illuminating pleasures. The story behind its very existence (which Kelley tells within the Monk biography and expands on in liner notes for the album) is outstanding: it was organized by Danny Scher, a sixteen-year-old senior at Palo Alto Excessive College and a white jazz fan, who held the live performance as a fund-raiser for his college’s Worldwide Membership, and whose promotion of it within the predominantly Black neighborhood of East Palo Alto apparently performed a job in easing tensions between the communities. The recording is just forty-seven minutes lengthy, that includes six items. The band was staying in San Francisco and needed to rush again there for a membership date that evening; Scher’s older brother borrowed the household van to select them up and drive them again.

Rouse and the drummer, Ben Riley, launch into the opening quantity, Monk’s ballad “Ruby, My Pricey,” at an unusually bouncy tempo, and Monk makes his entry in double time, soloing with a way of voluble rest. He kicks off the second, up-tempo piece, “Effectively, You Needn’t,” energetically, and, after Rouse’s vigorous solo, Monk winks at his last phrases earlier than revisiting the melody and spinning off from it in lengthy, whirling phrases, which he then takes aside and rebuilds as hypnotic fragments. Monk pares the legato theme of “Don’t Blame Me,” the third observe, to gaunt melodic stalagmites, linked by the deep reverberations of his startling bass line, and resolves to a jaunty, sped-up, stride-like, glitteringly percussive growth. “Blue Monk” begins with Monk remaining in the identical stride-piano vein; after Rouse’s solo, Monk returns with drolly fragmented countermelody and continues with mercurial, polyrhythmic skitters up the keyboard, dissolving to a collection of driving, funky chords strutting down the keyboard with an exuberant heft.

By the point this recording was made, most of the musicians closest to Monk—Davis, Coltrane, Sonny Rollins—had modified their enjoying considerably, transferring forward into the wilder waters of jazz modernity. Monk spoke unwell of the avant-garde. He didn’t carry out with its luminaries (there have been one or two temporary, belated, unrecorded exceptions), and he didn’t search a lot contact with the brand new era of vastly completed musicians who have been making their mark in bop-rooted types. It’s onerous to know whether or not his style congealed or whether or not his belated success prompted him to remain the course till he fell out of trend. Additionally, within the mid-sixties, he started to endure the exacerbated results of bipolar dysfunction, and his habits grew to become more and more erratic. His exercise dwindled within the nineteen-seventies; he gave his last concert events in 1976 (I used to be on the second to final) and died, of a stroke, in 1982. But his artistry is woven into the very core of jazz historical past. His compositions proceed to be extensively performed—and their efficiency has an odd, singular, and highly effective impact. Their concepts and, for that matter, their melodies are inseparable from his distinctive, completely and immediately distinctive manner of enjoying the piano—they seemingly transmit his very presence. Monk doesn’t simply affect fashionable jazz; he inhabits it. His music is the digital gene-splicer of contemporary jazz.