This piece first appeared in Counterpunch on April 20, 2023.
The Timeless Thelonious Monk
by John Kendall Hawkins
There's a documentary coming to PBS's Afro-Pop: The Ultimate Cultural Exchange on May 1 that features a re-emerged 1969 French interview with Thelonius Monk produced for State TV. Titled Rewind & Play it's essentially an interview and piano session. It's written and directed by award-winning French-Senegalese director and screenwriter Alain Gomis, who also directed the indie hit Fe'licite' (2017).
The interview comes at the end of Monk's 1969 European tour. Monk looks tired and is being interviewed in French, which he does speak. He must wait for a translation of insipid questions. He plays piano pieces, with questions from his unexcited interlocutor between pieces. Monk looks bored and confused at times, but, generally, his sound is sometimes solid and sometimes choppy.
The subhead of an Esquire piece by writer Natt Hentoff from April 1960, succinctly summed up Monk's trials and tribulations at that time: "Outside his music there is little but trouble; inside, little but genius." Hentoff begins the article with:
It has become inescapably hip in the past year to accept Thelonius Sphere Monk as one of the reigning council -- and perhaps the lama -- of modern jazz. He has been elevated from a cartoon to an icon, but in the process the man himself has remained as opaque and unpredictable as in his barren years.
Monk was displaced on the cover of Time magazine by the JFK assassination and didn't get there until February 1964. In 1969, Monk was nearing the end of a grand career as a be-bopper, having influenced over the decades many of the greats, including John Coltrane, Johnny Griffin, Sonny Rollins, Art Blakey, Clark Terry, Gerry Mulligan, and many others. But some say that the French interviewer he is with in Rewind & Play is disrespected. I just found it to be a moronic interview. They should have just let him play. If there was dissing going on, it was probably the quality of the sound in the studio. But here is an excerpt from the film that samples his playing:
Still from Rewind & Play (2022): Click Here
Monk has had his detractors. Some jazz pianists hated his style and found it hard to emulate. His technique seems difficult, especially his left hand. Some couldn't grasp the melange of stroppy dissonance and references to, seemingly, Scott Joplin. A major hater was the illustrious poet Philip Larkin who said of Monk:
Thelonious Monk seemed a not-very-successful comic, as his funny hats proclaimed: his faux-naif elephant-dance piano style, with its gawky intervals and absence of swing, was made doubly tedious by his limited repertoire.
[All what jazz : a record diary 1961-1971, p. 20-21]
But, to be fair, Larkin said of almost all the jazz greats of Monk's era, "I disliked them all."
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