Song for His Father

‘Why doesn’t anybody ever listen to me?” said Thelonious Monk, his arms flung open in frustration, his eyes raised to the heavens.

The legendary jazz pianist’s gesture of displeasure, preserved in the illuminating 1989 documentary “Straight, No Chaser” (directed by Charlotte Zwerin and produced by Clint Eastwood), is little more than a brief, transitory moment in a recording session expressing annoyance with producer Teo Macero for not having had the tape machines running during a rehearsal.

But the symbolic significance of Monk’s complaint reaches well beyond momentary irritants into a kind of central truth, an essential reflection of both the skepticism and the disdain that greeted much of his music in the early years of his career.

Sometimes described as the “High Priest of Bebop,” Monk was viewed by many as the most off-center of the revolutionary beboppers of the 1940s (a generation of players not known for their conservatism). Stories of his eccentricities are legion, from his common practice of dancing around the piano or leaving the bandstand while members of his group played their solos, to frequent descriptions of a monosyllabic conversational style.

“Thelonious,” says record producer Orrin Keepnews, “had many different levels of intelligibility, but they depended upon who he was talking to and what he wanted to communicate. I’ve heard him grunt and mumble, but I’ve also heard him be perfectly articulate.”

Bassist Charlie Haden, however, reports that he “was on a tour with Monk in 1971 when I was playing with Ornette Coleman. I don’t think I heard him say a word during the entire tour.

“And [bassist] Scott La Faro told me that when he went over to Monk’s place to audition for him, Monk just stared out the window for a long time before asking him to play something. Scotty did, and Monk stared out the window again, then asked him to play something else. They repeated that process four or five times, and the last time, he turned to Scotty and said, ‘Nice talking to you.’ ”

And, when Monk was asked by an interviewer where--outside New York and Los Angeles--he would like to live, Monk replied, “The moon.”

Eccentricities aside, there was no denying the power or the influence of his music. Although his playing occasionally referenced that of James P. Johnson and Teddy Wilson, Monk was an authentic original who was viewed by his contemporaries with a mixture of awe and incredulity.

“Art Tatum summed up the first half-century of jazz,” says drummer Thelonious Monk Jr., the pianist’s son, “and then there was Thelonious. Where did his music come from? Who knows? It’s like we keep looking for a missing link in anthropology. But maybe there isn’t one. Maybe there was just this leap, this sudden change that came out of nowhere.”

On Friday, on what would have been Thelonious Sphere Monk’s 80th birthday, Monk Jr., best known as T.S. Monk, appears at UCLA’s Veterans Wadsworth Theater in a program titled “Monk on Monk.” Leading a 10-piece ensemble, the drummer will perform an all-Monk program. The concert, which will focus on music from Monk Jr.’s new album of the same name (see review, Page 71), is his first effort to devote a complete program to his father’s music.

“It’s been an almost magical experience, playing this music,” he explains. “Once we got to the studio, the energy just flowed.”

And was it hard to address his father’s music in such direct terms?

“Not at all,” says Monk Jr., 47. “He never put any pressure on me. I knew I wanted to play drums when I was 7, when I first saw Max Roach’s setup. From the time I said, ‘Dad, I want to play the drums,’ until I actually started playing with him, he never pushed me. When I was 20, he asked me if I was ready to play, and two days later I was performing with him on a national TV show called ‘Soul.’

“So playing his music has always felt easy and right. In this case, I think it’s because the album has more to do with Thelonious than it does with me. The music is the star of the show.”

The effusive, outgoing Monk Jr., his personal style the precise opposite of his father’s stoic, epigrammatic manner, has persistently attempted to define more accurately the elder Monk’s manner and substance.

“They called him the High Priest of Bebop,” Monk Jr. says. “And that fixed him in the minds of people--the public and the media. But he was mis-tagged. It’s like you have this new kind of creature that no one’s seen before and you say, ‘Gee this looks like a reptile,’ and you tag it that way. And that works for the next 300 years until someone says, ‘Hey, this isn’t a reptile, this is a bird.’

“Because Thelonious was much more than a bebopper. In fact, he was no more just a bebopper than Duke Ellington was just a swing bandleader. Thelonious was one of the founders of bebop, no doubt about that. But if you listen to his music from that period, you can hear that he was also addressing issues that have become part of modern jazz well beyond bebop.”

Despite his accomplishments, despite the fact that he was profiled in a Time magazine cover story in 1964 and was much admired by fellow musicians, Monk’s visibility was largely in a state of eclipse by the time of his death of a cerebral aneurysm in 1982 at age 64.

At that point, his music began to experience a brief renaissance. But it has not really been until the last decade that Monk’s role as one of the central architects of jazz--not just bebop--has been widely recognized beyond the inner chambers of jazz.

His style, with its disjunct rhythms, oddly voiced chords and quirky melodic phrasing, occasionally crops up, subtly or indirectly, in the work of pianists as disparate as Marcus Roberts, Kenny Barron, Randy Weston, Jacky Terrasson and Geri Allen, to name only a few.

And for all its presumed strangeness, Monk’s music has had extraordinary longevity, with compositions such as “ ‘Round Midnight,” “Straight, No Chaser,” “Ruby, My Dear,” “Blue Monk” and “Misterioso,” among many others, becoming virtual classics.

Most ironic of all, it is Monk, the paragon of bebop eccentricity, whose name has lent credibility and identity to one of the jazz world’s most important mainstream support organizations--the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz.

So why the resurgent popularity of Monk’s music during the last decade?

Keepnews, who was responsible for Monk’s Riverside Records sessions from the mid-’50s, which are generally considered to be some of Monk’s finest work, believes that the quality of the music has finally broken through.

“I feel that ‘ ‘Round Midnight’ is one of the finest pieces of short music written in the 20th century,” Keepnews says.

Monk Jr. agrees:

“Think about how different ‘Monk’s Mood,’ as a melody, is from ‘Ruby, My Dear,’ as a melody, is from ‘Crepuscule With Nellie’ or from ‘ ‘Round Midnight.’ If Thelonious hadn’t written anything but those four ballads, we’d be calling him one of the great jazz composers.”

But Keepnews is a bit skeptical of the rush of Monk music interpretations, which include everything from the Kronos Quartet’s “Monk Suite” to seemingly endless versions of “ ‘Round Midnight”--the latter occasionally heard from lounge bands.

“I wonder sometimes,” he says, “if the reason we’re hearing so many different versions of his tunes is because Monk isn’t around to tell the musicians that they’re playing them wrong.”

Keepnews recalls that Monk never hesitated to let musicians know how his music should be played. In the 1957 session that resulted in the now-classic recording “Monk’s Music,” with its offbeat front line of tenor saxophonists Coleman Hawkins and John Coltrane, Monk responded directly to Hawkins’ difficulty in playing one of the melodies.

“Monk can be heard--on tape--saying, ‘You’re supposed to be the great Coleman Hawkins,’ ” Keepnews says. “And the great thing about that phrase is the word ‘supposed.’ It wasn’t [unnecessarily] arrogant but a kind of necessary arrogance for a great musician to have, particularly one who had been beaten around the head for so many years. And that particular phraseology was as close to the essence of Monk as I can recall. ‘You’re supposed to be the great Coleman Hawkins.’ It precisely explained Monk’s tendency to always expect the best from people.”

Nor does Keepnews buy the still too-common image of Monk as an off-the-wall weirdo.

“Oh, he could be eccentric and difficult,” the producer says. “But he was dedicated to his music and was no-nonsense in the studio. The greatest difficulty in working with him in the studio was that he legitimately didn’t understand what was supposed to be so difficult about his music. He understood it, he grasped it, so how come you couldn’t?”

Like many of Monk’s associates, Keepnews prefers to view him as a teacher:

“Sonny Rollins once said that he thought of Monk as his guru. And this was not too long after Sonny had spent a year in India. And I think that the idea of a guru as somebody who enables you in bringing out the best in yourself is a wonderful description of Thelonious.”

“Monk taught me more about music composition than anyone else on 52nd St.,” Davis wrote in his 1989 memoir “Miles Davis: the Autobiography.” “He showed me everything; play this chord like that, do this, use that, do that. . . . He saw in me somebody who was serious and he gave me all he could, which was a lot.”

The image of Monk as educator is particularly appropriate, given the establishment a decade ago of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, an organization primarily focused on enhancing and increasing the teaching of the music.

“Education has always been the primary goal,” says Monk Jr., the institute’s director. “That’s why we’ve never been oriented toward brick and mortar. The edifices can come later, but the teaching has to come first. We’ve got nine programs going on around the country, and we’ve given out half a million dollars in scholarships just from the jazz competitions alone.”

Later this month in Washington, the 10th annual Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Instrumental Competition will take place, this year devoted to trumpeters. Past winners of the competition (in years focusing on other instruments) have included tenor saxophonist Joshua Redman and pianists Roberts and Terrasson.

Although the Monk catalog of music generates, according to Monk Jr., as much as a seven-figure income annually, it has never been used to support the work of the Monk Institute.

“When I was in those fancy, schmancy schools my dad sent me to,” Monk Jr. says, “everybody’s dad was a corporate executive of some kind. And everybody’s dad, when they were in college at Columbia or NYU or Yale, seemed to spend their time going down to the Vanguard and the Five Spot to hear people like my dad. So I decided from Day One that the Monk Institute would go to corporate America for our funding. And that’s what we’ve always done, with a little help from grants and the NEA.”

The Monk Institute’s partnership with the Los Angeles Music Center, announced in May, establishes jazz as an equal partner with the other performing arts at the center.

“Full partnership status was important,” Monk Jr. says, “but it was also important that we have interdisciplinary programs. Because it said that they were willing to share the artistic and cultural wealth through interdisciplinary programs. And that’s what jazz is about--influencing and being influenced by the culture around it.”

Asked about the relatively slow start to the partnership’s activities--the first event took place two weeks ago at the Ahmanson Theatre--Monk Jr. simply shrugs off the question.

“We’ve always functioned that way,” he says. “And we’re not going to change our style just because we have a lot of bright lights on us. We’re going to do this slowly, and do it properly, so that everything we do is five-star. We take our time, involve the right people, and we don’t bite off too much at one time, because we’re looking for this relationship to go on in perpetuity.

“Ultimately, I think our programs will probably be wider in scope than the Lincoln Center program,” he said, referring to the mainstream-jazz-oriented program directed by Wynton Marsalis.

Monk Jr.’s belief in the scope of the Music Center partnership traces in part to the presence of pianist Herbie Hancock as creative director. Hancock’s interest in a wide array of music will, he says, bring similar breadth to the programs as they unfold.

But he also believes that an open-minded attitude toward the many forms of jazz is what his father would have wanted:

“If I tried to limit our outlook to one agenda, or one composer, or one kind of music, Thelonious would kill me. Because he was always interested in everything, in every kind of music.

The elder Monk’s broad musical perspective began early. He was performing with first-rate players as early as 1941, when he was 24 years old. But his real emergence took place in the mid-’40s, when he was paired with Bud Powell as a primary inventor of bebop piano style.

Monk, who was born Oct. 10, 1917, in Rocky Mount, N.C., had come to the piano early, learning to play by ear before he began to take lessons at age 12. At that point, the family had already moved to New York.

“He came from a classic African American family that migrated north in the ‘20s,” Monk Jr. says. At that time there was almost like a community of farm people who had moved to the city. They were close and communal with one another.

“My grandmother moved into West 63rd Street in 1922, and we didn’t let that apartment go until 1985. So that was almost 65 years that the family stayed in that one neighborhood. It was a neighborhood that Thelonious loved, and when they started to build Lincoln Center right down the street, he was convinced it was because of all the music and the good vibes that were in that neighborhood.” (The good vibes presumably continue. In June 1983, the city of New York renamed that portion of West 63rd street Thelonious Sphere Monk Circle.)

Monk Jr.’s image of Thelonious Monk as a father affords a dramatic contrast to the more familiar portrait of him as the eccentric jazz musician:

“He was a good dad. In the years when he had trouble working, he stayed home, because my mother had to work. So Dad did a lot of Mr. Mom. He changed a lot of diapers, played a lot of games and did a lot of housecleaning.”

Then, in an image that resonates with Monk’s familiar practice of doing little dance steps around the piano while other musicians were soloing, Monk Jr. describes what are, for him, particularly happy memories.

“We were always marching through the house,” he says, “singing and dancing, with me up on his shoulders. And he would take us on the road with him. I was in the clubs with him from the time I was around 6. So there was always a heavy-duty family vibe. There was never an ‘Oh, Daddy’s an entertainer’ vibe.”

Monk’s most productive years were from 1945 to 1965, when he produced most of his compositions. By the early ‘70s, however, for reasons still unclear, Monk showed less and less interest in playing and apparently stopped completely about 1976.

There are reports that his various eccentricities masked an underlying mental illness, and there can be little doubt that he was deeply affected by frequent use of a variety of controlled substances throughout his life. In the last few years before his death on Feb. 17, 1982, he spoke rarely, even to the close musician friends who visited him.

But his legacy, in the music and in the Monk Institute, remains.

“Has anyone who has listened to Thelonious Monk ever been fooled that it was anyone other than Thelonious?” asks Monk Jr.

“And now he’s getting that kind of pop cult appeal--like Billie Holiday, Andy Warhol, like Charlie Chaplin--becoming part of the tapestry of American culture. What Elvis was to rock ‘n’ roll, Thelonious is becoming to jazz. It’s like the guys who were with him--Miles, Trane, Dizzy--used to say: ‘There’s nobody more himself than Monk.’ ”

*

* Thelonious Monk Jr. and the Monk on Monk Tentet, including guests Nnenna Freelon , vocals; Howard Johnson, saxophone and tuba; Eddie Bert, trombone; Jeff Stockham, French horn and trumpet; Bobby Watson, alto saxophone. Friday at the Veterans Wadsworth Theater, 226 Eisenhower Ave., Brentwood, (310) 825-2101. Other performances: Thursday at the California Center for the Arts, Escondido; next Sunday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, Irvine; Oct. 14 at the Lobero Theatre, Santa Barbara.