Drumming and Dollars : Thelonious Monk’s Son T.S. Brings Ideas--Some Creative, Revolutionary Ones--to Jazz Music, but They Also Deal With Marketing, Merchandise

It’s unlikely that anyone would ever fail to recognize T. S. Monk’s full name: And the drummer and bandleader--the 44-year-old son of the great jazz pianist and composer--is well aware that the name bears a heavy burden of musical responsibility.

But Monk, who opens a four-night run with his sextet at the Jazz Bakery on Wednesday, has no intention of following directly in the disconnected jazz artist footsteps of his father.

If anything, he would like his self-named band--T.S. Monk--to serve as an example of how a world-class jazz ensemble can also be a successful marketing phenomenon.

It begins, he feels, with the music.

“I look for three things,” explains the voluble, outspoken Monk in a phone conversation from his New Jersey home. “Haunting melodies--that’s what my father told me was the most powerful ingredient in a composition. A wonderful rhythmic groove. And make the piece tight and clear so that people know what’s happening. Add some wonderful solos from a band that has played together long enough to know each other well, and, to me, that’s the mother lode for making good records.”

Next comes the marketing and the merchandising.

“I have T-shirts and sweat shirts and watches and clocks and bangles and bows and all kinds of T.S. Monk paraphernalia that I produce,” he continues. “My new CD has a logo on the back cover, which is very different for a jazz album. Because if the record company doesn’t want to sell me properly, if they want to use the traditional ways of selling an act, then I’ll do it myself. The traditional way of selling a jazz record as though it’s toilet paper--throw it on the wall and see what sticks--isn’t acceptable to me.”

The formula appears to be working for Monk. His critically praised group of musicians--Don Sickler on trumpet, Ronnie Matthews on piano, Scott Colley on bass, Willie Williams on tenor saxophone, Bobby Porcelli on alto saxophone--has been together since 1992, and their three CDs of brisk, Art Blakey-inspired, straight-ahead contemporary jazz have attracted growing numbers of buyers. The current album is “The Charm” (Blue Note). But Monk feels he has had to “stuff some of my ideas down the throat of my record company.”

“Jazz is still trying to figure out how the music business works,” he says. “And it’s 1995. Isn’t that incredible?

“The problem, to me, is that jazz doesn’t keep its finger on the pulse of its consumer. A lot of the difficulties jazz is having today are the result of years of negative signals from the public itself that have been ignored. Jazz has tried to exist minus sex and sensuality, while the public says, ‘We want those things.’ It has tried to exist minus the accouterments of entertainment--the lighting, the staging, the drama--while the public says ‘We want those things.’ ”

And, according to Monk, too many jazz musicians have neglected to inform themselves about the basic business of entertainment.

“You know,” he says, “if you live in an apartment and go down and ask your janitor how much he makes, he’ll tell you. But if you take the average jazz musician into a store and point to his record, sitting there with a price tag on it, and ask, ‘How much do you make if I buy your record?,’ they won’t know. How can that be?

“Here’s how,” Monk says. “We do not fight economically, and we do not fight marketing-wise to sell our product. Everybody else in the music industry is already in the 21st Century, and jazz is still in the middle of the 20th.”

Nor does he believe that the attention received by some emerging young stars has solved what he believes are some creative jazz problems, as well.

“The Josh Redmans and the Christian McBrides are being stuck out there as if they were veterans,” Monk says, “as if they don’t need direction. And, frankly, in the world of music, jazz is quantum physics. It isn’t Algebra I. You wouldn’t take a first-year algebra student and put him up there to give a lecture on calculus. But jazz companies are doing that, and the student body is looking up and saying, ‘I’m getting out of this class because the teacher ain’t qualified to teach.’ ”

Monk occasionally performed with his father in the early ‘70s, but by the end of the decade, he had largely abandoned jazz for other arenas. He led a moderately successful R&B; band--also called T.S. Monk--with his sister Barbara Monk and singer Yvonne Fletcher in the early ‘80s.

When both women died of sudden illnesses, he “did a tailspin” and dropped out of music. The Thelonious Monk Institute, which had been run by his sister, became Monk’s responsibility. It now earns more than $500,000 a year from the licensing of Thelonious Monk recordings and compositions--an ironic twist, after Monk died with a reported $15,000 in the bank--and has funded jazz competitions won by the likes of Redman.

A tall, lanky, articulate product of a Connecticut prep school education, Monk returned to active playing when “somebody would remember that I had played with my father when I was a kid and asked me to play for one the Institute fund-raisers.

“But I wasn’t a kid anymore,” Monk says, “and I couldn’t play like one. And that’s what finally made me sit down and figure out what it was I wanted to do in jazz. I knew I had an unusual package. I had a name that would get me in the door. But I also knew that once I got in, I’d better have something good. So I took five months picking my band. I took all the money it cost to rehearse my band, and I paid to make my own record.”

But the fact that Monk has, thus far, managed to bring a business acumen rarely seen in jazz to the management of his group, hasn’t made him overconfident about the future. He worries about the pitfalls that exist at the popularity end of the jazz spectrum, as well.

“A high percentage of most jazz record companies’ revenue comes from deceased artists,” he says. “From catalogue. And that’s the double-edged sword for jazz musicians--the fact that over time their records will sell with no support whatsoever. The record companies always have that to fall back on.

“Well, I’ve had a little personal experience with that approach,” Monk says, “and I’m just not interested in the fact that after I’m gone, some record company will be able to say, ‘Gee, let’s reissue another one of those T.S. Monk albums.’ The bottom line is that we’ve got to get our act together as an industry. If we do, the music will take care of itself.”

* T.S. Monk Sextet at the Jazz Bakery, 3233 Helms Ave. , Culver City. (310) 271-9039. Monk plays Wednesday-Saturday. 8:30 p.m. $20.