Brass Trax

Throughout his life and since his death, Thelonious Monk has been many things to many people. A jazz jester whose flamboyant onstage dancing betrayed a lack of musical seriousness. A hermetic prophet, the “high priest of bebop,” whose every word was laden with wisdom. A composer and pianist whose art brut style came from a naive primitivism. The genius who elaborated the harmonic underpinnings of bebop. But the truth about Monk, argues historian Robin D.G. Kelley, is far more complicated.

Kelley’s massive new biography Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original is first and foremost a demystification of the composer’s life. Kelley, who holds a chair at the University of Southern California, spent 14 years researching the book, and it’s the most comprehensive biography yet of its subject. Kelley argues that even Monk’s fans do the jazz pioneer a disservice by placing him on a pedestal. Monk’s music and life can better be understood by learning his story—in all its gory nuance—and understanding it in the context of Monk’s America.

The biography is rich in context. Kelley begins the book with a meditation on two Monks: Thelonious and Julius, the latter a “fine pianist, satirist, male model, and a bit of an eccentric.” Though they probably never met, Thelonious and Julius had something in common: Julius’s kin had owned Thelonious’s. And thus, Kelley transports the reader to the antebellum south to trace Thelonious Monk’s family as it made its way from slavery plantation to slavery plantation before enduring the tumultuous period of Reconstruction and its vengeful aftermath and eventually settling in High Point, North Carolina, where Thelonious was born.

From there, Kelley offers a grittily detailed account of Monk’s childhood: the Great Migration to New York, the racial powderkeg of Manhattan’s San Juan Hill neighborhood in the 20s, trips to the country courtesy of the Fresh Air Fund, and the long hours at the Columbus Hill Community Center mastering the art of piano playing. These early chapters include some of Kelley’s strongest writing, and he sets the scene for Monk’s later development with the naturalism of a 19th century novel.

There’s no doubt that Monk was a troubled man. Monk lived with his mother well into adulthood, struggled with drug and alcohol abuse throughout his life, wandered into friends’ houses at all hours of the night and morning to play piano, and occasionally fell asleep on the bandstand. Kelley believes that Monk had bipolar disorder, which accounts both for his strange behavior and his attraction to getting high. But Kelley doesn’t celebrate Monk, the tortured genius. Far from it. He stresses the banality of Monk’s life—his time at home and with friends, his connection to the jazz community and to his neighborhood—to counter the idea that he was some sort of taciturn hermit enthralled by divine madness.

Monk’s music did not catch on at first. For the first two decades of his career, Monk was seen as a “musician’s musician,” whose music was too strange to enjoy on its own merits. Critics believed that Monk simply could not play the piano, that he had no “technique” and that he was playing the wrong chords. Even by the end of the 50s, when bebop’s ubiquity had made Monk’s dissonant harmonies commonplace, critics chided Monk for playing stride piano like an old ragtime musician. Musicians disliked the way Monk pounded out time with his foot and sang solfeggio along with his melodies.

Kelley goes to great lengths to stress the continuity in Monk’s playing and its rootedness in a jazz tradition that Monk held dear. Playing stride piano wasn’t an affectation of Monk’s; it was how he came into jazz, an integral part of his musical language. As Kelley writes, “Thelonious had always epitomized the Janus-faced musician, looking simultaneously at the future and the past. He had assiduously promoted the modern while taking pride in his ability to sound like James P. Johnson.”

Kelley also rightly points out that Monk’s infamously spare style—one critic accused him of having “two left hands”—has its origins in the way Count Basie played behind his band. Kelley reports on hours of tapes from Monk’s personal collection to attest to Monk’s skill and craftsmanship. Monk was no idiot-savant; he was a thoughtful and hard working artisan.

For all the time it took the world to catch up with Monk, his time in the spotlight was short. During the late 50s and early 60s, Monk had one of the best-known names in jazz. He won multiple critics’ polls as jazz writers finally began to understand what jazz musicians had known for decades: Monk could play. Fame was, of course, no guarantee of free passage for a black man in America, and Kelley tackles racism bitingly. “A few months earlier, he had been beaten in Delaware by police,” Kelley writes of a 1959 concert devoted to Monk’s music; “now he took his place among a very tiny pantheon of artists that included Duke Ellington and Fats Waller.”

Monk’s story is also the tale of two women, his devoted wife Nellie and Pannonica de Koenigswarter, better known as “Nica,” the so-called “jazz baroness” and Rothschild heir. Kelley evokes the tender rapport that Thelonious and Nellie shared, choosing the right anecdotes to illustrate the way their partnership infused Monk’s life and music. Nica, for her part, served as Monk’s patron and best friend, an odd fixture on the jazz scene who endured rumormongering and racist barbs throughout her life. Kelley tells the stories of Nellie and Nica with the same care that he gives to Monk, illuminating their personalities for the reader.

Monk may have sounded like the new thing in 1959, but the 60s left him behind. Rock, R&B, and new movements in jazz left little room for an eccentric bebopper like Monk to play, and he eventually retreated to the seclusion in Nica’s New Jersey home, beset by physical and mental illness and without the spirit that animated a younger man to reinvent the piano. Monk couldn’t stand the new direction jazz took in the late 60s. After sharing a bill with Miles Davis, during the early years of Davis’s electric period, Monk quipped “So everybody’s playing to the chord. You’re just playing to the chord. I know what you’re doing. I don’t care what you’re playing. It’s got to be pleasing to the ear. And that stuff you all’s playing sounds like shit!” Monk, the master of the flatted fifth, who brought dissonance to jazz, was making an argument for jazz that sounds pretty.

Kelley’s book does Monk a service by demystifying his life and solidifying his legacy, but it’s also a boon for the jazz fan who wants to be transported to the early days of bebop. The book is a doorstop, but every page bristles with the sorts of details and anecdotes that paint a rich picture of mid-century life for black working artists.

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