UPON listening to Round About Midnight and Straight No Chaser, two of Thelonious Monk’s master pieces recently, the realization became crystal clear that there is now a growing polarity between the quality of today’s jazz and that of yesterday. This calls to question the issue of deterioration arising from lack of genuine commitment.
Perhaps the mistake that jazz people made in the ‘70s was that they changed the content to try and reach a larger audience. It is still happening today with each musician trying to convince the jazz world that his own fusion is the ideal. It’s all hype. And before they push it too far, they should be reminded that the hype of popular music – where everyone says you are the greatest singer when you’re really singing every song out of tune and still selling millions of records – does not fly in the jazz world. You don’t mess with the content of jazz where improvisation along prescribed progressions is sacred and as serious as your life! As a matter of fact, since saxophonist Charlie Parker, trumpeters Clifford Brown and Miles Davis, saxophonists Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Sony Rollins and of course pianist Thelonious Monk, jazz has remained static, without any significant innovations.
All of these people contributed something new to the evolution of jazz – at some point – to add value to an art form whose robust image has continued to strengthen, energize and elevate the qualities of other forms of music. While devotees and emerging musicians have been able to come to terms with the complexities and intricacies posed by the music of these innovators, many are still trying to comprehend the avant garde piano and inventive compositions of Thelonious Monk decades after his death. The truth is that his music was designed for the future. And today is part of that future!
To find Monk’s antecedents, the most direct link is Duke Ellington and perhaps Willy “The Lion Smith” and Jimmy Yancy. But in each case, this influence is completely stripped of European accretions. Monk is more African in his thought process and musical inclination than most people think. He is not interested in the conventional pattern of playing methodically along chord progressions. He observes the vital demands and tenets but his approach is queer, individualistic and strange. Monk accomplishes his task using elements of surprise which include silence, suspense, atonalities, chords and dischords. Monk does not believe in flowing lines of symmetry in trying to articulate his improvisational challenges; he believes in the economy of notes, but not in the style of Ahmad Jamal or John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet who employ single notes: Monk is known for coming down heavily with chords, queer chords some of which have become the subject of special study in music schools and colleges today. Second perhaps to Duke Ellington, Monk has contributed more compositions to the jazz world than any other jazz artist. And his compositions are intriguingly remarkable!
“Everything I play is different,” Monk once said. “Different melody, different harmony, different structure. Each piece is different from the other one. I have a standard, and when the song tells a story, when it gets a certain sound, then it’s through…completed.” One of the things that sets Monk’s compositions apart from the vast slew of jazz standards and originals is that they are compositions in which harmony,melody,rhythm and instrumental sound are all part of a carefully conceived whole. Monk once told a musician who insisted on playing the usual string of chord changes, “You can make a better solo if you know the melody.” Saxophonist Steve Lacy who absorbed this experience from his association with Monk as sideman speaks from the participant – observer perspective:”I have respect for his melodies. I knew enough not to just regard them as chord progressions, but as songs to be presented. One of the things about his music is the way that it’s put together, the way things evolve out of other things, the way he’ll build a whole bridge out of one little part of the first section. His tunes are fabulously put together, really. Some day people will realize just how well put together they really are.”
One significant criticism musicians and fans level against Monk is the fact that his compositions are usually too intricate and difficult to comprehend. But Steve Lacy who recorded an entire album of Monk’s music for Prestige Records before working with him rejects the notion that the pieces are hard to play: “They are not really. It’s just that if you learn one or two of them, you don’t understand them. But if you learn thirty of them or so, they are not hard after that. You understand how simple they really are, how logical in his own system. They are extremely logical, they just figure, and even when some of his tunes might have eight bars, seven bars and seven bars, twenty - two bars together, yet they are the most natural things in the world after you get used to them, and they’re just right. There’s another tune that has a three- and –a-half bar bridge, and if you try to figure it out and count it out, you’ll get lost, but if you just relax and give in to it, it’s perfectly natural.”
The most important jazz musicians are the ones who are successful in creating their own original world of music with its own rules, logic and surprises. Thelonious Monk is one of them!
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