© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
Given how taciturn Thelonious Monk was even when he did consent to an interview, the following one in Valerie Wilmer’s Jazz People finds him to be absolutely garrulous. [N.B.: Valerie writes using English spelling and I have left this unchanged.]
“Thelonious Sphere Monk is not the kind of name you'd easily forget. As someone once sagely remarked : " With a name like that he was made from an early age — all he needed was a hustle."
In Monk's case the chosen commodity was music. One of the outstanding composers and pianists that jazz has produced, he is also that rare entity, a true jazz original. Although his methods of composition have had a profound and lasting influence on the course of contemporary jazz, Monk is unique in having attracted no legion of slavish imitators. As he himself chooses to explain it in his laconic manner: " Musicians play my tunes but they can't play my style. They try to, you know. . . . Some of my things are hard. They're hard in all kind of ways."
Monk (very few people actually call him Thelonious or even Sphere) fits the conventional picture of the jazz eccentric a little too closely for comfort. The first oddity to inspire comment is his famous choice of hats, their size and diversity of style; the fact that the capricious pianist is rarely seen on or off the bandstand without some splendid piece of headgear perched on top of his magnificent, full-bearded head. But whether it be fez, turban or just a plain old-fashioned cloth cap, Monk strenuously protests at the popular notion that he actually sleeps in his hat. He is, nevertheless, an erratic being with a complete disregard for time, eating and sleeping when and where the mood takes him. Because of his well-known unreliability and the length of time taken by the jazz public to catch up with his musical directions, times in the past have been bad for the eccentric genius and the work all but nonexistent.
Now, at last, it's Monk's time. He's famous now. He appears in glossy magazines, wears 150-guinea suits [probably about $1,200 in the late 1960s when this interview took place] and stays at the best hotels. But as his wife Nellie says: " He's no more impressed with himself than he was in the dark days."
Music is his life, and he appears to be concerned with little else outside it, himself and his family. If he ever thinks of the way of the world, he rarely shows it. Speaking of Monk the composer, Quincy Jones, once summed it up: "Thelonious is one of the main influences in modern jazz composition, but he is not familiar with many classical works, or with much life outside himself, and I think because of this he did not create on a contrived or inhibited basis."
The Mad Monk, the High Priest of Bebop — Monk has been called many things through the years he struggled for acceptance, but one title for which he will never qualify is that of the most articulate conversationalist in jazz.
An interview with him takes patience, so few people have bothered. The majority of lay journalists who have been understandably intrigued by this ready-made wayward bohemian tend to give up trying after a dozen or so false starts and rely on mentioning the times he was billed to appear at a club and never showed; then leave it at that. But he has his mellow days. I got Monk to speak.
"I started to take up trumpet as a kid but I didn't play it," he began tentatively when we met during a visit to London. " I always wanted to play the piano and jazz appealed to me. I just like every aspect of it, you can try so many things with jazz. I was about eleven or something like that when I started and I used to play with all the different side-bands when I was a teenager."
Did he ever think he might become a world-famous jazz pianist? "Well, that's what I was aimin' at!"
When Monk plays, you can almost hear him thinking out loud as he selects a note and carefully considers its effect before adding a couple of others, judiciously chosen. Although he received a conventional formal training, Monk plays " incorrectly ", with his fingers held parallel to the keyboard, gently shaping the keys to his thoughts. But he doesn't stab at the keys in the way that some people imagine. It's a flowing thing.
Was he ever taught to hold his hands in the formal manner?
"That's how you're supposed to? " he asked, feigning wide-eyed surprise. "I hold them any way I feel like holding 'em. I hit the piano with my elbow sometimes because of a certain sound I want to hear, certain chords. You can't hit that many notes with your hands. Sometimes people laugh when I'm doing that. Yeah, let 'em laugh! They need something to laugh at."
Monk lived at home off and on until his marriage to his childhood friend and neighbour, the indefatigable Nellie. This is a rather unusual pattern for a jazz musician, but Monk firmly dismisses the suggestion. "I don't know what other people are doing; I just know about me. I cut out from home when I was a teenager and went on the road for about two years."
His mother, who was particularly proud of her well-behaved son, sang in the choir at the local Baptist church in New York City where the family lived. Whenever she had a leading part, the young Thelonious would go along and accompany her on piano. She, in turn, would visit the dives where he worked. "My mother never figured I should do anything else. She was with me. If I wanted to play music, it was all right with her, and Nellie is the same way.”
"Yeah, I played in the Baptist church and I'll tell you something else. I worked with the Evangelists for some time, too. The music I played with them seems to be coming out today. They're playing a lot of it now. I did about two years all over the States; playing in the churches was a lot of fun. When I got through, I'd had enough of church, though. I was in there practically every night. But I always did play jazz. In the churches I was playing music the same way. I wouldn't say I'm religious, but I haven't been around the churches in a good while now so I don't know what they're putting down in there now."
Of Minton's, the Harlem club long held to be the incubator of bop, Monk, like others of his fellow iconoclasts of the time who played there, declared that the music "just happened. I was playing there, so the others just used to come down and play with me. I guess they dug what I was doing. It was always crowded there, people enjoying themselves all the time.”
On stage Monk will often rise from the piano stool and stand listening intently to the other soloists, swaying slightly in what has been termed a "rhythmic dance". He gets exasperated when people comment on such aspects of his personal behaviour. "What's that I'm supposed to be doing?" he demanded. "I get tired sitting down at the piano! That way I can dig the rhythm better. Somebody's got something to say about everything you do!
"I miss a lot of things that're written about me. I don't read papers, I don't read magazines. Of course, I'm interested in what's going on in music, but I'm not interested in what somebody else is writing or anything like that. I don't let that bug me. In fact, I don't see those 'columns' or whatever you call 'em. People write all kinds of jive.
"I've got a wife and two kids to take care of, and I have to make some money and see that they eat and sleep, and me, too — you dig? What happens 'round the comer, what happens to his family is none of my business. I have to take care of my family. But I'll help a lot of people, and I have. . . . But I don't go around. . . . What's the matter with you? No! I'm not interested in what's happening nowhere. Are you worried about what's happening to everybody ? Why do you ask me that? Why should I be worried? You're not! Why do you ask me a stupid question like that — something that you don't dig yourself? I don't be around the comer, looking into everybody's house, looking to see what's happening. I'm not a policeman or a social worker — that's for your social workers to do. I'm not in power. I'm not worrying about politics. You worry about the politics? Let the statesmen do that — that's their job. They get paid for it. If you're worried about it, stop doing what you're doing! "
And just as he refuses to concern himself with politics, Monk is, on the surface, equally indifferent towards racial problems. " I hardly know anything about it," he said, brushing the subject aside. "I never was interested in those Muslims. If you want to know, you should ask Art Blakey. I didn't have to change my name — it's always been weird enough! I haven't done one of those 'freedom' suites, and I don't intend to. I mean, I don't see the point. I'm not thinking that race thing now, it's not on my mind. Everybody's trying to get me to think it, though, but it doesn't bother me. It only bugs the people who're trying to get me to think it."
Monk is an extremely self-willed person. Rarely does he do anything that does not interest him. He seldom goes to parties and when he is neither working nor walking around Manhattan, a favourite pastime, he is at home with Nellie and their two children, Thelonious Jr. and Barbara. Now, past fifty, he seems hardly aware of the substantial increase in his income in recent years and says that money makes no difference to his way of life. "If I feel like it, I'll spend it," he said, "but I spend it on what anybody else spends it on — clothes and food. My wife and kids spend a lot of money, but I really don't know how much I make. I'd go stupid collecting and counting my money. I worked at seventeen dollars a week when I was a kid, make thousands now. At fourteen, fifteen years old I could do anything I wanted with that money. It wasn't bad for that age. I really don't want to do anything else other than what I'm doing. I like playing music. Everything's all right. I don't look like I'm worrying about anything, do I? I don't talk much because you can't tell everybody what you're thinking. Sometimes you don't know what you're thinking yourself! "
A faithfully perceptive wife, Nellie added : " You wouldn't know whether he was happy or not at any time. He's always been very agreeable. Even in the direst situations you can't see if he's worried from looking at his face. Maybe you can tell from a chance remark, but he isn't a worrier. We have a theory that worry creates a mental block and prevents you from being creative. So worry is a waste of time."
When he is not working or enjoying family life, the pianist likes to walk around. He will sometimes stand for hours on the corner of West Sixty-third Street, just thinking about music. Everyone in the neighbourhood knows who he is, but Monk speaks rarely to passers-by. And when he starts to walk, " I just walk and dig." He and Nellie also belong to America's vast army of television addicts. "I haven't been to the movies in a long time," he admitted. "I look at TV, see everything there just laying in the bed. You have to get up and go to movies, where you fall asleep in your chair. That way you're in bed already. But I never get enough sleep. I haven't slept eight hours through in a long time."
Does he ever get a vacation? "Not with pay! "
In the years when Monk found it hard to make his musical mark he once hit the headlines in a more sensational manner when he was arrested on a charge of possessing marijuana. The drug had apparently been planted in his car and he was released from jail after only a few days, but the story, being part of the sinister image of the jazz musician, stuck. "Being in jail is a drag," Monk recalled ruefully. "I'm sorry for anybody that's in jail. I was only in for a few days and that's been so long ago, but, you know. ... In the United States the police bothers you more than they do anywhere else. The police heckle you more. You don't have that much trouble anywhere else in the world except the United States. The police just mess with you for nothing. They just bully people and all that kind of shit. They carry guns, too, and they shoot people for nothing.
"New York violent? It has to be violent if the cops are making the trouble. They pick on anybody. I don't be worrying about it any longer but they'll start trouble with you if they want to. They don't talk to you nice, they talk to you any kind of way. You don't run into trouble so much if you're kind of famous, but people that is kinda down, they just pick on them. But New York changes. Any place changes a lot because you have different generations coming up with new ideas. The police ain't quite as bad as they used to be, but they'd probably get better if they put more intelligent people on the force."
Monk is noncommittal about his favourite composers and musicians. " I listen to 'em all," he says, yet it is hard to believe that he ever goes out of his way to listen to the music of other people. One evidence of this could be that his own work is so self-contained, so very personal, but he finds little time to add to his repertoire today. He continually records the same tunes ("so somebody will hear 'em "), and when asked to bring a new Monk tune to one particular recording session, turned up with the hymn "Abide With Me " which, he blandly informed the assembled company, was written by one William H. Monk. It was recorded.
For the last ten years or so, Monk's music has become easier to listen to, though it is not necessarily any simpler. What he is doing is as engaging as ever, though far less provocative than when he was upsetting the rules.
"If you think my playing is more simple, maybe that's because you can dig it better," Monk said and laughed. " It takes that long for somebody to hear it, I guess. I mean for them to understand it or for you to get to them for them to hear it, because you might be changing and then stop playing, and they'd not get a chance to hear it."
The massive, bearded figure leaned back in his chair and grinned expansively. "But," he added. "I never be noticing these things; I just be trying to play.'' He sank back into an untidy heap, looking for all the world like a huge, well-dressed grizzly bear who had somehow found a home in the recesses of a plushly padded armchair at the London Hilton. For Monk, it was time, indisputably his time. He closed his eyes. He slept.”
