Indigenous Music
Hentoff, Nat
INDIGENOUS MUSIC , NatHentoff The Onliest Monk' To say that jazz musicians are individualistic is redundant. Still, some individualists are much more singular than others. And none, in my...
...In the notes, Orrin Keepnews, who was Monk's record producer for a long time, points out that Thelonious, though "misunderstood and undervalued for many years by quite a few musicians and almost all critics...
...On public television earlier this year, Merle Haggard and the Strangers performed before our Iife-is-just-a-bowl-of-cherries President...
...Two years later, "There's a New Day Comin' (no more bumming/we'll all go to work...
...Said the latter to Monk: "Would you play some of your weird chords for the class...
...He had no patience with the silly questions interviewers usually asked, and so he seldom gave interviews...
...The melodies were bold, often careening, and almost always unforgettable, but they were not easy to play because Monk's music was all of a piece...
...Only residents of Pennsylvania and New York have to add their local sales tax...
...Connee sure beats Nancy...
...Monk's notes wait to come down—until the time is just right...
...When he relented, Monk would be asked questions like: "Where's jazz going...
...and I just told him I couldn't do it...
...The band was cooking, Merle having been a disciple of Bob Wills...
...Until the time came when he didn't want to do that any more...
...Not now, in the 1980s, when modern jazz—derisively called "Chinese music" by Louis Armstrong in the 1950s—has become so assimilable that you can hear diluted versions of it in television scores for cop movies...
...Just like in Bob Wills's time...
...His music, though rooted in Harlem stride piano and the blues, with particular wry affection for Duke Ellington, was like no one else's...
...Everything is so carefully integrated...
...along with Fred Astaire ("Let's Face the Music and Dance"), and Arthur Tracy ("Pennies from Heaven...
...From the beginning, when musicians would make fun of him for his "wrong" chords, Monk's credo was clear and unyielding: "I say play your own way...
...I saw him recently at the Cookery in New York, and this spry, elderly man can still make you believe he's just come from a passionate tryst in the late, late afternoon...
...I remember going with Monk to a class on jazz at Columbia University that was being given by a pompous, prating Englishman...
...And in the same year "The Gold Digger's Song (We're in the Money—Old Man Depression, You Are Through...
...So, if Reagan's crooning of recovery doesn't lift your spirits, try Dick Powell, Al Jolson, Ted Lewis, Hal Kemp, Ruth Etting, and the sensuous Connee Boswell in this set...
...Tracy's worth the album, but there's lots of other good times from the breadlines here...
...He always had his own rhythm, and he liked to get up and dance to it in the middle of a set...
...You can't make anything go anywhere...
...And plenty of space in the music...
...Bing Crosby is here, too ("Did You Ever See a Dream Walking...
...Bob Wills, from whom "Western Swing" came, knew a lot about the Depression, but he rode it pretty well, his tangy, sinewy music having been a tonic for folks waiting in line in the Southwest...
...The two-volume set (21-5047) is available only by mail from Book-of-the-Month Records (you don't have to be a member), Camp Hill, PA 17012...
...One night, as John Coltrane came off the stand after a set with Monk, he was shaking his head mournfully...
...Tracy's darkly cheerful (yes, that's what it is) interpretation of the movie's title tune regenerated his career, and the "Street Singer" is now playing clubs around the country...
...I complained to Monk...
...That same shock of self-recognition happened to baritone saxophonist Sahib Shi-bab...
...You have an instrument, don't you?' Monk said...
...The usually impassive Monk was furious: "What do you mean 'weird...
...Maybe it's going to hell...
...and Merle also zinged the President a bit with a song about certain economic troubles certain folks are having...
...Nonetheless, if Monk's decidedly undiluted music is new to you, you may be startled by its jagged beauty...
...On LP for the first time is some of what he and his Texas Playboys were doing from 1936 to 1946 (Bob WillslAaah //a«//CoIumbia Historic Edition, Columbia FC 374681...
...I asked him why...
...I got lost, just for a moment, and it was like falling down an elevator shaft...
...Wills was the first to fuse, really fuse, hot jazz (particularly the horns) and country music...
...I don't know where it's going," Monk once snapped...
...So he stopped...
...His only answer was: 'You a musician...
...He sure did...
...They range from Bing Crosby's most compelling performance in all his thousands of recordings, "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime," to "Are You Ma-kin' Any Money" by Chick Bullock and his Levee Loungers...
...Among his colleagues on these 1952-1961 sessions are Miles Davis, Oscar Pettiford, Kenny Clarke, Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, and Gerry Mulligan...
...15.95 plus $1.75 shipping and handling...
...Nothing silken here...
...You got a union card...
...I had a part that was unbelievably difficult...
...They're perfectly logical chords...
...And Monk had no patience with musicians who were afraid to stretch, afraid to take risks...
...As one musician put it, "When you learn one of his songs, you can't learn just the melody and chord symbols...
...You have to remember the inner voicings and rhythms exactly...
...always knew exactly who he was and what he was doing...
...He wouldn't say...
...Either play it or throw it away.' And he walked away...
...And last year he died...
...It just happens...
...M Choice Cuts I wouldn't bring this album when you next go calling at the White House, but Songs of the Depression: Happy Days Are Here Again has a certain contemporary thrust— even though the recordings were made from 1929 to 1937...
...his works are compositions in the sense that relatively few jazz 'originals' are...
...In addition, the intervals were very wide besides...
...In 1931, for instance: "Headin' for Better Times" and "(Potatoes Are Cheaper, Tomatoes Are Cheaper) Now's the Time to Fall in Love...
...And none, in my experience, was more utterly sui generis than Thelonious Sphere Monk...
...Play it!' To my surprise, I eventually did...
...All are original recordings from bygone years...
...To play with Monk, you had to have huge ears and enormous powers of concentration...
...For another wondrously, sometimes chillingly, reverberating collection of songs from hard times, there is the score for the ingenious Herbert Ross movie, Pennies from Heaven (Warner Brothers 2HW 3639...
...I had a part he wrote for me that was impossible," alto saxophonist Gigi Gryce once told me...
...Finally, I was able to play it...
...But then, in the 1970s, he stopped playing...
...One difference between then and now is the persistent, if illusory, optimism in the pop songs of the Great Depression...
...To the nonmusician, however, Monk's music presents few difficulties...
...Or as that pungent gnome Pee Wee Marquette used to introduce him at Birdland: "Ladies and gentlemen, the onliest Monk...
...In the new Thelonious Monk Memorial Album (Milestone M-47064), there are such Monk epiphanies as 'Round Midnight, Brilliant Corners, Ruby, My Dear, and / Mean You...
...The jazz public finally did pick up what Monk was doing...
...It was the damned Republicans' fault then, too...
...Don't play what the public wants—you play what you want and let the public pick up what you are doing—even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years...
...What's its future...
...I had to play melody while simultaneously playing harmony with him...
Vol. 46 • July 1982 • No. 7
