How cool would it
have been if Thelonious Monk had married Fontella Bass? Two of the most
melodious names in music history. They probably would have named their
daughter, Melodious. Okay world, meet, Melodious Bass Monk.
FANTASY SEQUENCE:
An evening at the
Apollo Theater…
MC: “Ladies and
gentlemen, give it up for the newest star in the galaxy of jazz singers, Miss
Melodious Bass Monk, singing her Daddy’s composition, ‘round Midnight, to
the downbeat of Momma’s, Rescue Me.”
I am not a big jazz
fan; but I love Duke Ellington, Billie Holliday, Chet Baker, Coltrane, Stan
Getz and, of course, Thelonious Monk.
In the documentary, Thelonious
Monk: Straight, No Chaser, he, and others, who were described as the
earliest practitioners of bebop, were the first jazz performers who didn’t
play necessarily to “entertain” the audience, but to express their musical
artistry, simply for the sake of expressing it..
In many ways, those
bebop jazz artists were like the Impressionist painters of the late 19th
century. They were less interested in finding wealthy patrons, or some Pope, to
commission them to produce public works of art for the consumption of the
masses. These guys were more fascinated with how light and color, along with
new techniques of applying paint to a canvas resulted in something more intimately
personal, rather than traditional, crowd pleasing artwork in a Paris salon,
that would meet with the belching approval of close-minded, creatively
constipated art critics.
Thelonious Monk and
Vincent Van Gogh are kindred spirits. Both struggled with mental health demons,
and their sanity, to find within themselves, notes, colors, shapes, and sounds
to create unique, influential, enduring art.
Both succeeded.
Jazz, like its
contemporary art form, the cinema, is inherently political. All jazz artists are
underground, anti-establishment rebels protesting the strictures and structures
of conventional music norms, in dingy, smoke-filled cafes and nightclubs.
Most were exercising
their right to Free Musical Speech and Artistic Expression. Some, like
Thelonious Monk, became the Poet Laureates of Jazz.
What I have always
found inspirational about Monk was a statement he made that his often seemingly
asymmetrical, discordant compositions which were, on closer examination,
mathematically logical chord progressions, precise, but intricately complicated
meditations, like a Da Vinci drawing of a futuristic craft that would be
powered by solar winds, was, at its core, his life-long search for the notes
between the keys of his piano. Metaphysical motivation from a true poet. Yeah,
as a writer, I want to find those hidden, abstract words between the keyboard.
Drive my editor and Spell Check crazy.
It was obvious Monk
was mentally ill. On stage, he would get up from his piano, during a solo from
another band member, and turn in slow, clumsy circles, like an autistic toddler.
He suffered from
bouts of depression and mania. Manic depressive. Today, bipolar. At a certain
point in his career, he said he did not want to play music anymore. He did not
say it like he was burned out or had nothing else to compose. He just did not
feel like playing music anymore. Thelonious had become a bored child who no
longer had any use for his favorite teddy bear.
Thelonious Monk died
in 1982. He suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, went into a coma, and died two days
later, peacefully in his sleep.
Legend has it, the
coroner listed the time of death as ‘round midnight.
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