this monday at the hideout/thoughts on thelonious
A 4-piece band explores the superficially (as well as deeply) nutty concept: Monk vs. Monkees. We'll be doing versions of some better-known songs of each, as well as mashing the two together in unexpected ways. I don't think there are that many musicians around that can convincingly touch on both these styles, with feeling and vigor, but I've got a stellar cast playing with me on Monday -- I won't say who, but if you've seen many of my Hideout shows then you've probably seen them. The piano will be played some, for obvious reasons, but not too much, for almost equally obvious reasons.
Cramming my hillbilly head with Monk heads all week has been like a refreshing but disorienting holiday. (First time out for that sentence.) The appreciation I've long had for him, as a casual fan, and a guy who could play only a couple of his tunes on the guitar, has deepened as I've learned more and somewhat harder tunes (knew "Blue Monk," for instance, but didn't know "Think Of One"), read a little about him, and reflected on his gift and his accomplishment. With the caveat that I know jazz about like Pat Boone knows metal, I'll throw caution to the wind and tell you some of what I'm thinking.
It seems that only so much can be said about Monk's mastery before the red-flag words, like "peculiar," start to color the discussion. ("Genius" is a related backhanded euphemism, as Gary Giddins notes in his typically keen and educational appraisal, collected in Visions of Jazz. Not far from there to the wide-eyed neighbor on the 11 o'clock news meaningfully intoning, "He was always a loner.") So, to give proper stress to what's primary about Monk at the risk of banality -- he invented a fresh and wonderful way of playing his instrument, and wrote a few dozen of the great songs of the twentieth century. In both, instrument al technique and composition, he drew on the same bag of homemade tools; "percussive touch, concentrated dissonances, bold rests," Giddins's six-word phrase, looks irreducibly complete to me. If you try to list other musical pioneers who made similarly prodigious contributions in the realms of instrument and song, you'll see that "peculiar" doesn't come into it -- the list is really too short to be subdivided, or to suggest norms.
Onto the odd. One of the things you notice about learning the head of, say, "Straight, No Chaser," is that effect of those goddamned rests, and the displacements of and tiny variations on a childishly simple five-note phrase, is to make the 12-bar head quite frustrating, the first day or two, to get lodged in your fingers and mind. Whereas one of the things you notice about having learned it is that the rests and displacements feel exactly right. You could hardly think of another way to do it. It sits in your head, germinating and generating new "meanings."
This kind of qualified learnability -- at cost and concluding in unforgettability -- is, everywhere and always, the hallmark of a great composition. That includes the one-or-two-days part. Tunes you can learn in an hour are as often as not trivial, and any random group of notes on a page of staff music can be internalized in a week. But it'll take you a day or two, if you haven't heard it, to commit Paul Simon's "Still Crazy After All These Years," or Raymond Scott's "Bumpy Weather Over Newark," to memory; and once you do, you're a richer person for the trouble.
That the building blocks of all these beautiful songs are sharp 11's and wild interval leaps and startling out-of-the-blue chord clusters is a bit of a mystery. I mean that when you put it on paper like that, or when you try it yourself, as many pianists after Monk have, all those devices appear as the pinnacle of uncreativity: gimmickry, a short cut (as Coleman Hawkins referred to Coltrane's technique), an easy retort against lushness and the obligation to tradition. I guess that it comes down to Monk's having made his own world, there on 63rd Street. He sealed himself off from European and scholastic influences with determination, according to Giddins. The vocabulary that resulted is accordingly sealed-off, imaginary-universe-like. But the heads in which it's put to use are as pretty as "White Christmas," as simple as classic TV themes, and -- the entrancing paradox -- as logical as either.
Something a musician friend said about Monk's soloing: he plays with all of the knowledge and none of the experience. I think that's pretty profound, and nails it. Listen to Monk come upon, as he often does, a pair of notes he likes, and repeat them joyously seven times, like a kid dabbling with color. To know as much as he knew, but to be able wipe away the experiential crust, to summon the sincere joy, each time you sat down before the keys...it would take some kind of two-brained lunatic.
On my XM show a couple years ago I made a farfetched remark relating Monk and Doc Watson -- both Carolina boys. I know the Internet is no place for reckless, out-on-a-limb speculating. And I know that Thelonious left North Carolina at age 4, or 6, depending on whether you go by the New York Times or Giddins. But Monk and Watson, born 5 years apart, must have listened to a lot of the same music when they were young. Country Monk -- untrammeled ground, but really not so crazy. People from the country hold music in a different light than people from the city. Country people are more immune to the fashionable, to shiny new concepts flown in from abroad and trumpeted in glossy journals. Country people don't care so much what you make of them -- they are likelier to wear the hat they want and dance when they feel like. And most of all, country people are not easy to shake from the conviction that music is inseparable from fun. Hot, wild, sexy, unvarnished fun. What long odds against a guy with Monk's considerable handicaps -- absent father, racist society, dismissive professional peers, banishment from professional work in NYC clubs for most of his peak years, the usual philistinism of the record-buying public -- giving the world something 1) new 2) beautiful 3) insidiously grammatical 4) fun. But that's what happened.
As for the Monkees -- they're included in all this only by cheap syllabic coincidence -- I guess that shit is okay.
15 comments
interesting post, i think you get to a lot of the heart of monk's music. (for me as a listener and a musician who learned a monk tune or three at the high school level.) hawkins' comment on trane! there are a couple new monk biographies out.
not "country" exactly, but i assume you're familiar with eugene chadbourne. the N.C.-based protest-music/free-jazz/country&western/comedy folk singer and guitar/banjo/dobro player. he has to have played monk heads by the dozen.
Monk is magical. The geographical parallel with Doc is interesting. On the country/bluegrass instrumental front, I think Clarence White is a worthwhile comparable as well. Like Monk, his playing typically comments on the flow of the music in suprising, unconventional ways, somehow without losing that flow. Time Between, one might say. You expect a riff or musical comment to fall at a certain time within a song and instead you get something entirley different and vastly more fulfilling.
Sure wich I could make this gig (and that I could bring Terry Adams along).
hi robbie, met you recently in JC and Charlotte...
nice words on Thelonious... he the man. i highly recommend Robin Kelley's recently-published and exhaustive biography. The last sentence of chapter 1 confirms: 'Thelonious Monk, Jr., age 4, would not be a southerner after all.' still... i think he was always a Carolina boy at heart.
seems Monk wasn't so closed-off from European or classical influences, he was a terrific reader and loved Chopin, Stravinsky and a list of others. i think he followed the famous bebop creed to learn all the theory and technique you can, and then abandon it. Monk did create his own vocabulary... his own world, but like his Carolina heart, his music retains a very traditional element. he loved playing standards and incorporating stride technique in just about every song he played.
his tunes really do get inside you. i play 'Crepuscule w Nellie' a half-step down in A on guitar and it lays out so well you can do it with your eyes closed. a lot of his stuff is guitar-friendly indeed. 'Monk's Mood' is another... the list goes on.
here's my crude version of 'Ruby My Dear' for pedal steel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTOZOx8ZqUI
the gig sounds like a lot of fun. will the other Robbie be joining you? what's the instrumentation? oh, and the Monkees are pretty cool too... have a blast!
I prefer the Monkees, if truth be told.
I mostly listen to country and rock music. I haven't listened to much Monk, but I did listen to about 6 songs of his a week ago and had some quick thoughts. And I'm not sure if the album I played is typical of him. I noticed that the songs are short and formulaic in structure - a quirkly melody with harmony played on two horns, followed by some free flowing solos, then the theme played again, the end. It made me think of The Minutemen. I paid more attention to the composed parts, the melody/harmony parts at the beginning - really tight. And I invisioned the horn players going "really? that's what you want me to play? Well...OK, let's do it?" I really like that the songs/performances are short. -- Not sure I follow the comparison with Doc Watson or the Monkees.
Next show could be Sun Ra and Sunn O)))).
Then Roland Kirk and Roland White.
The sky's the limit...
I saw your show last night and had a great time. Best $10 entertainment value anywhere!
What's the name of the Monk piece you played a guitar duet on and the drummer and bass player sang Last Train To Clarksville at the end? That was inspired hilarity not seen onstage since the days of the late Frank Zappa! In my head here on Tuesday morning, all's I can think of is the Dizzy song A Night In Tunisia...that can't be right.
Hey, there's one! Vince Gill w/ Dizzy GIL-espie.
Thanks so much,
E
Also loved the show. Title suggestion: "Crepuscule with Nesmith."
Last Coltrane to Clarkterryville.
How about the Monks? Perhaps "Boys Are Boys and Girls Are Choice" would work in this context?
I can't make these, living on the east coast, thought the Slow Train Coming show I managed to catch and how fucking great was that.
Chet Atkins and Chet Baker seems like an obvious follow up.
Answered my own question:
The guitar duet was Well You Needn't. The bass and drums sang Last Train To Clarksville along with the melody at the end of the song. High hilarity!
I always remember Greg Tate's quote about Monk. "He fucks with time." As opposed to The Monkees. They just monkey around.
(Matt, loved Crepuscule with Nesmith)
The Village Vanguard was packed with people waiting to hear Thelonious Monk. That night, the tenor saxophonist in the Quartet was Pat Patrick, a friend of mine from Sun Ra's Arkestra. He was sitting next to me with horn in hand waiting for the leader.
After about ten minutes, we saw Thelonious across the room, wasting no time heading for the stage. As he was passing us to hang up his coat, Pat gave him the familiar greeting, "Hey, what's happenin'?"
"Everything is happening all the time" Monk said, continuing his forward motion toward the closet behind the drums. Then, turning around with raised index finger, he added "every googleplexth of a second!"
- liner notes from "Always Know"
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