Monkin' Around

This past October 10 would have been the 90th birthday of Thelonious Monk, jazz pianist, composer, and eccentric extraordinaire. My adoptive home state of North Carolina lays some claim to this musical giant, as he was born in Rocky Mount. The fact that he moved to New York City at the age of five and thereafter made that grand city his home has not deterred us Tar Heels in the slightest; on the contrary, our six-week, eighteen-event Following Monk celebration has to be one of the more impressive homages to Monk ever mounted.

For my money, the one 'don't miss' event of the festival was last night's recreation of Monk's famous ten-piece 1959 Town Hall concert, performed by the Charles Tolliver Orchestra. The missus and I were so stoked for the event that we made sure to attend a Stanley Crouch lecture the previous night, anxious to gain some valuable insight into the music we'd be hearing. We had reason to be hopeful; Crouch is a heavyweight jazz critic, and the subject of the lecture was indeed supposed to be the Town Hall concert. Alas, someone must have failed to inform Crouch, because while he spoke entertainingly (and sometimes informatively) on subjects ranging from Shakespeare's genius to Louis Armstrong's genius to the differences between blacks and whites to the fact that even light-skinned blacks are a little put off by dark-skinned blacks to the superiority of live music to recorded music to the names of perhaps every famous musician and writer he has ever met, he never really got around to the Town Hall concert. He was considerate enough to circle around to the subject of Monk every so often, for which those of us who remembered that we were attending a Following Monk event were very grateful. The lecture was free, and the dictum 'you get what you pay for' was evinced.

Fortunately, it cost good money to see the concert, so we had cause to expect value, and we got plenty of it. Pianist Stanley Cowell got things started with a fluid reading of "In Walked Bud," then was joined by the rhythm section for a lovely, lazily swinging "Blue Monk." Tenor saxophonist Craig Handy joined them for "Rhythm-a-Ning," demonstrating some very impressive chops and exquisite control of the tone of his instrument; he deftly went from sweet to flattened out to honking in his pursuit of some ugly beauty, and it was all good. Over the course of the night he would continue to impress, a vexing occasional tendency to showboat notwithstanding.

After that, the full band hit the stage to perform the set heard on Thelonious Monk Orchestra at Town Hall. The solos were different, of course, but the arrangements were pretty much dead on; Tolliver reportedly had access to some of Monk's rehearsal tapes for the original show and that helped him get the transcriptions right. The section playing, especially on up-tempo numbers like "Little Rootie Tootie" and "Friday the 13th," was in itself worth the price of admission. Everyone in the band was a player; my favorite was alto saxophonist Todd Bashore, who did a great job of weaving the melody of the tunes into his improvisations.

It didn't hurt that the Town Hall concert contains a few of my favorite Monk compositions: "Blue Monk," the glorious ballad "Monk's Mood" (although, truth be told, I much prefer the Monk/Coltane duet version of the song to this orchestrated version), and "Thelonious," an incredibly catchy melody that for vast stretches consists of a single note. The last of these is especially well suited to a big-band setting; you could easily imagine the Basie or Ellington bands tearing it up on that one.

Throughout the event it was clear—as it always is when you hear Monk's music—that Thelonious Monk was a truly singular artist, someone so unique in his approach to his art that it's very difficult to be influenced by him without coming across as an imitator. I'm trying to think of others who fit that description: Vincent Van Gogh and the Beatles spring immediately to mind, but after that I'm drawing a blank. It's a little sobering to realize that two of those three were batsh!t crazy. In one of his rare moments of focus on the topic at hand, Stanley Crouch answered a question about whether he thought Monk might have been slightly autistic. "Oh, no!" Crouch said animatedly, and then, after a pause that showed some serious comic timing, added "He was a paranoid schizophrenic! [another comic pause] But he wasn't autistic." He wasn't much of a Tar Heel, either, but last night at least I was glad we Carolinians don't sweat such details.