Thelonious Monk’s Upbringing & Monkishness

From a very young age, Monk was surrounded by music. His father Thelonious senior regularly played the piano and ukulele and Monk partook in piano lessons within the Western classical canon. Born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, his family of African American immigrants moved to the Upper West Side neighborhood of San Juan Hill in search of opportunities that did not readily present themselves in their rural hometown. By proximity of living in San Juan Hill, Monk was able to experience a breadth of musical ideas from Beethoven, Rachmaninov, and Chopin to operas and traditional Caribbean music that many of the inhabitants of San Juan Hill held very dear (Solis, 2008, p19, Graham, 2017).

His entry into a professional music career came right after he dropped out of high school to pursue music full-time. As a teenager, he occasionally played publicly for rent parties and most notably with a barnstorming evangelist for a diverse audience of African Americans across the country. Upon his return to New York City in 1941, he was hired by Kenny Clarke to be the house pianist for the Harlem club Minton’s, which began to make a name for itself through its after-hours cutting sessions that sowed the seeds for the era of bebop that would eventually take over the world of Jazz. It was with Kenny Clarke and his crew at Minton’s where some of his best known pieces such as “‘Round Midnight,” “Straight, No Chaser,” and “Epistrophy” were born. While many of his peers at Minton’s such as Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker saw the fruits of their labor through a high-profile career as a professional jazz musician, Monk’s contributions to the birth of bebop did not directly translate into a thriving career. While the cause of this is unknown, it can be inferred that it was through his unwavering individualism and the refinement of his iconic piano sound that was the direct consequence of his career trajectory not shining as brightly as his bebop pioneering peers (Solis, 2008, p21-23).

Monk’s virtuosity at the piano has been described as esoteric, riddled with angular harmony, cluster chords and abrasive dissonance, and a harsh and percussive touch to the piano that often sounded like he was attacking the piano instead of playing it. Yet through this inherently polarizing and heterodoxical method has birthed a musical voice so distinct that scholars and musicians alike have been referring to his compositional and improvisational genius as one that encompasses an entire world (Solis, 2001, p.75). Both Monk and his peers alike knew that he did not fit alongside his bebop peers. The poet and jazz critic Stanley Crouch described him as Jazz’s first Picasso (Graham, 2017). Many of his peers were skeptical of his virtuosity and oftentimes did not understand his musical intentions yet were vehement supporters of his musical work. In a 1945 recording session, Miles Davis explicitly had Monk “lay out” during his solo on “‘Round Midnight” due to his abstract harmonies and comping style (Graham, 2017). As the tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin once recounted, “...I [Monk] can play like Tatum if I want…He made a Tatumesque run on the piano and my eyeballs and my ears almost fell off of my head. He said, ‘But I don’t need that.’ … he just played what he wanted to play and he played it perfectly” (Kelley, 2010, p.83).

 Of the musicians who have frequented his bandstand, something that they have all mentioned in regards to his playing style is how great of a timekeeper he was as an accompanist. Additionally, it comes as no surprise that the musicians that Monk regularly sought after also had an incredible sense of time so he could get away with naturally synthesizing idea after idea outside of the well-established time. As Don Sickler puts it, 

[Monk] requires the rhythm section. The whole secret to Monk was [that]

the rhythm section always has to be real swingin’. And that gives him the

basis to let him do his thing…I mean, [an] immaculate, exciting player in

that respect. But that’s not Monk, that’s not his contribution. It’s gotta be

swinging, and he plays, he puts his stuff on top of it, and that’s magic. If the

rhythm section’s rushing and dragging and slipping around and everything

else, then it would simply destroy what he’s trying to do (Solis, 2008, p.36).

Monk’s relationship with time is further nuanced through the way he views the potential for expression within the pieces he intends on playing. Through the lens of his improvisations and compositions, it is apparent that the formal language that drives his musical thinking can be comparable to that of the western art composers that preceded his time. Very many of his tunes can then be described through developing a few melodic, harmonic, or rhythmic motifs in an attempt to capture a certain musical topic or mood (Solis, 2008, p.39). As the jazz critic Max Harrison put it, 

Monk did not offer an assemblage of easily identifiable trade marks in the manner of a popular soloist: his improvisations are new wholes, not just accumulation of pleasing subjects. He was, in short, a composer, not simply because he wrote many 'tunes', or even themes, but because the compositional mode of thinking is evident in everything he did (Duby, 1987, p.65).

Most notable in Monk’s realm of improvisation centers around the use of silence and short repeated licks throughout his improvisation, a novelty that sticks out like a sore thumb across his bebop peers whose intricate eighth and sixteenth note lines resemble textured sinusoidal sweeps. Silence then, was interpreted as a bridge between musical ideas, one that can string a large run of ink spots towards another by giving both the audience and performer a chance to breathe. In contrast, Monk treated silence as a constant in which musical ideas would intrude. Emplacing the silence itself as the idea creates a deceptively nuanced rhythmic and textural sophistication through the paradoxical lack of musical activity (Solis, 2001, p.44-45).

Monk’s use of silence and his focus on the development of simple motifs spanning across multiple heads has left critics with the impression that he is an incredibly elementary pianist that relies on simple gimmicks, striking harmonic choices, and the occasional whole tone run to convey how much he stands out from the rest of the jazz musicians.

Each of these “clusters” contain melodic and harmonic scale degrees. The core A section melody consists of the scale degrees 3, 2, b6, 5, while the chord root scale degrees underlying these melodic notes are 2, 5, 1, following the standard ii - V - I jazz chord progression. When combined together and sorted in ascending order, the scale degrees of a given A section cluster can be described as {1, 2, 3, 5, b6}. While the bridge does not explicitly have this five note cluster at first glance, it can be interpreted as having a set of notes that fall within this A section cluster of notes. The first eleven beats of the bridge, for instance, can be interpreted as 1, 2, 3, 5, b6, 6, which contains A, B, C#, E, F, F# as the bridge moves from A Major to C minor. Leaving out the F# gives us the recognizable A section cluster. Alternatively, the A and F can be omitted to form the tetrachord B, C#, E, F#, which can be seen transposed throughout the latter half of the bridge from bar 21 onwards (Abrahms, 2015, p8-9).

The recursive structure of “Ruby, My Dear” thus begins to reveal itself through the manifestation of the aforementioned clusters and tetrachords. For the case of the A section cluster, the set of tonal centers in the A section of the melody plus the first three measures of the bridge parallel the relationship in musical intervals that the melody has. In other words, if we let A denote the set of all tonal centers in the A section of the melody and the first three measures of the bridge, A would contain Eb, F, Ab, A. If we let B denote the set of notes in one of the melodic transpositions of the A section, B may contain G, F, Cb, Bb. Abrahms makes a note that the notes in A share the same intervallic relationship with the notes in B, implying that Monk’s harmony across his 32-bar ballad is mirroring the contour of the A section melody at a slightly slower rate (Abrahms, 2015, p.11-12).

Monk is a clear instance where an attempt to imitate a mere subset of his vocabulary can be seen as immature, which to some extent can be attributed to a musician’s journey in finding their own voice. Even if Monk’s esoteric language can be written off as an outlier, where should the line be drawn for a musician to know when they truly have found their own musical vocabulary as opposed to blatantly imitating that of another? While I personally think that this discussion is one that must be internally resolved after a healthy amount of self-reflection, I do think that there is a line in the sand when studying another musician’s craft. An obvious byproduct of the work of Thelonious Monk has been the clearest case study for a musician’s sonic lexile as it clearly marks a noticeable difference between those who copy the musical vocabulary of others as opposed to those who infuse the audible themes into their own playing. 

Numerous musicians across a plethora of musical communities in and out of jazz have cited Monk as a source of musical inspiration to some extent, but none have held Monk as highly as that of Steve Lacy and Roswell Rudd, some of the first musicians to consistently perform his repertoire and form a repertory band in tribute to Monk. Both musicians saw their musical traction escalate in the 1950s during the traditional jazz revitalization, with Lacy playing alongside Monk in some of his final albums with Columbia. Both Lacy and Rudd’s free and postmodern improvisational style can be easily attributed to an extensive and attuned attention to Monk’s technique. 

Lacy’s respective recording of “Ruby, My Dear” is one of the most distinct manifestations of Monk’s mark on jazz (Solis, 2008, p.186-187). His soprano saxophone is bright, textured, and playful as it hops along the audible spectrum that is Monk’s 32-bar ballad. The runs throughout his solo are dotted with silence akin to the solos that Monk would play, yet his lines are pointed and adventurous in a way that displays a musical maturity that is reflective of an artist synthesizing their own liberties from their peers. As Lacy stated in an interview with Solis, “You can’t copy somebody else’s liberties, you know, you have to earn them by yourself. You really have to work hard for your little liberties” (Solis, 2008, p.191). Successfully finding a musical voice can then be seen as striking a balance between the culture and traditions of a piece of repertoire and the nuanced interpretation that reflects a musician’s coming-of-age. 

Even though Rudd has no recording of “Ruby, My Dear” to his name, his frequent collaborations with Lacy and their shared appreciation for Monk’s ideas has left the two of them with nuanced interpretations in finding a musical voice. Both Rudd and Lacy cite Monk as someone that has drastically shaped their sonic identity, yet the two of them diverge as to what they listen for in Monk’s tunes. Lacy was first brought up through Monk’s repertoire and found an appreciation for his melodic writing, while Roswell was the one who was more interested in his inner harmonic voicings (Solis, 2008, p.187). It is then no surprise that while the two musicians argue that it is important to find musical meaning that is representative of oneself, Lacy stressed interpretive liberties as a byproduct of sustained study, while Rudd described this freedom as an ongoing search within Monk’s finely wrought musical parameters (Solis, 2008, pp. 189–191). Which for the case of Rudd and his exploration can be seen throughout School Days, where Rudd is seen boasting a confident yet distinct flurry of licks that push and pull with many of Monk’s works.

Monk as a musician and a composer is without a doubt a polarizing one to say the least. Yet his legacy on jazz–let alone music as a whole–has been something that has been quietly felt across his peers. To me, he’s a reminder that imbalances between melodic and harmonic playfulness and wholesale palletability can still be pitched in such a way that is conventionally engaging to listen to. His music is a reminder in two parts for me as a creative. On one hand, it is a testament to how distinctive and influential it can be for an artist’s identity to be unapologetically themselves, while on the other, it is a case study in philosophy; a multilayered workshop in synthesizing new possibilities that equalize self identity and the ideas that you have taken from the world.