Most of us think of jazz as a genre predicated on extemporization—the horn man breaking into an inspired chorus set apart from the rhythmic structure of the song, the pianist using an established chord progression for extended flights of improvisatory fancy.
But the real bedrock of jazz is not improvisation but composition. How songs are written matters immensely: The gifted improvisers can only indulge in their seemingly freeform creations if they have something solid at bottom on which to work. This is especially clear when we look at the music of Thelonious Monk.
Born 100 years ago this month, Monk is considered one of jazz’s most influential songwriters. His best-known song, “ ’Round Midnight,” is a relatively conventional ballad. But it is Monk’s fractured, angular compositions—songs like “Straight, No Chaser” and “Green Chimneys,” with their obsessive repetition of phrase fragments—that became one of the definitive sounds of modern jazz.
Monk has the rep of the eccentric, cerebral jazzer, with his singular internal wanderings—whatever went on in his unique mind—resulting in off-kilter songs with unpredictable beats and quirky rests. His music was uncanny but somehow still logical.
In his early 20s, Monk was a stride pianist, and a good one. This is a formative Monk even his fans don’t consider very often, playing after-hours at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem. In those impromptu early-1940s sessions at Minton’s there was an emphasis on blues, and it was the blues—albeit a curious strain of blues—that became Monk’s foundation.
Bebop was underway during the war years, courtesy of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, who unleashed themselves on records as soon as the musicians’ recording strike ended in 1944. Monk took a little extra time to get going. But get going he did, cutting some sides for Blue Note in 1947 and 1948 that were later released as Genius of Modern Music: Volume 1. The album title was no idle boast. Monk had done something no bebopper had thought to do save as the occasional aside: slow down the medium’s frantic rhythms, elongating some, compacting others, to bring in a tunefulness that could be surprisingly melodic.
Monk’s Blue Note sessions produced a lot of songs that have always struck me as both standards and standards-in-reverse. Can something tailored to one person’s way of compositional thinking be an evergreen for all? But this is one of the great paradoxes of Monk’s music: When you hear something like “Epistrophy,” “Misterioso,” or “In Walked Bud,” you are hearing something recognizably and particularly Monk’s but also something embracingly universal. These pieces have a peculiar familiarity; they feel like music that had always been sounding in your head if you had only stopped to notice it.
Bud Powell—the Bud who “walked in”—was out one night with Monk in 1951 when the pair was arrested for possession of drugs (which belonged to Powell). Monk, unwilling to testify, lost his cabaret card. This meant he couldn’t gig in New York City, usually a deathblow for a jazz career. But this setback forced him to make writing his chief outlet.
Monk’s stint at Riverside Records from 1955 to 1961 resulted in more songs that toggled between the personal and the universal. He became someone who wrote—and rewrote—his songs within the context of each performance, even from take to take.
Songs like “Crepuscule with Nellie,” from the Riverside years, pricked up the ears of John Coltrane, who sensed a new pathway. Coltrane at the time was part hard bopper, part hard thinker—hard bop often being about the nitty gritty of the blues rather than formulations of new kinds of music. “Crepuscule” feels both completely improvised and not improvised at all, and for Coltrane it represented the possibility of reconciling his two halves. He became Monk’s acolyte.
Perhaps Monk’s 70 or so compositions could have been 250 or more, but over the bulk of the 1960s he reworked a lot of what he had already written. He was celebrated as a personality, something like Louis Armstrong albeit with less crossover appeal. Maybe with that variety of lionizing, Monk felt less of an impulse to compose. Then again, when you listen to the 1960s version of Monk, you encounter steps to the side and recalibrations that are as different in their way from what came before as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is from Stephen Hero. This was populist modernism.
Monk’s final recorded efforts came in 1971. He was still relatively young and would live for another decade, dying at 64. But Monk always had a curious relationship with time, as anyone who has heard his songs, with their unique contortions, can attest.
Colin Fleming is the author of the forthcoming Buried on the Beaches: Cape Stories for Hooked Hearts and Driftwood Souls.
