Marsalis’s band switched gears, taking up Monk’s “ Rhythm-a-Ning,” and suddenly the audience was present: “They went fucking bananas.” Marsalis and his band knew their way around R&B and tried to show it, but the crowd was barely paying attention. The saxophonist Branford Marsalis tells of playing as the opening act for Kool and the Gang. His songs are instantly catchy and hummable his work captivates hardbitten contemporary music fans, jazz-and-blues purists, and non-jazz listeners alike. Today’s scene is vibrant but far more splintered, tending toward experimental small groups pushing the boundaries of improvised music in ways that Monk would seem to have appreciated.īut Monk’s continued sway is inseparable from the undiminished appeal of his own work. At the time of the Ellington centennial, Wynton Marsalis’s Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, a repertory big-band in Duke’s style, bestrode the world. Philosophically, the current moment in jazz seems to reflect Monk’s ethos, too.
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The greatest living jazz musician, Sonny Rollins, was a sideman and student of Monk’s, while Kamasi Washington, the music’s hottest young property, recently told The Root, “If you’re a jazz musician and you think you’re not influenced by Thelonious Monk, either you’re not a jazz musician or you are influenced by Thelonious Monk.” Vijay Iyer’s avant-garde excursions borrow from Monk’s percussive experimentalism. Fellow pianist Jason Moran combines Monk’s wry hipness, virtuosity, and feel for the blues, including in a powerful multimedia work, “ In My Mind: Monk at Town Hall, 1959,” that explores his relationship with Monk’s music, the history of black America, and recordings of Monk rehearsing and dancing, the sounds of which Moran’s band blends with its own. Monk’s piano style, with its crunchy dissonances, forceful attack, open spaces, and off-kilter rhythms, has deeply imprinted itself both on pianists and on other instrumentalists and vocalists. “We’d be seeing more for Monk’s 100th birthday if we hadn’t been celebrating Monk more than any other jazz composer for the last 20 or 30 years,” the pianist, composer, and writer Ethan Iverson, tells me. In 2006, he was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize. That has also made him a major influence on every composer working in jazz and improvised music. His catalog-some 60 to 70 songs, many of them familiar to even moderately serious jazz fans-forms the spine of the contemporary repertoire. Today, Monk is by far the most covered jazz composer. Perhaps, however, the subdued celebration looks less like neglect and more like evidence of how Monk, once the quintessential outsider, has come to dominate American jazz, 100 years after his birth and 35 years after his death.
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There are a handful of commemorations, including some ambitious ones, but they do not match what other, similar icons received-for example, Duke Ellington’s 1999 centennial, or Louis Armstrong’s in 2001, which coincided with Ken Burns’s Jazz series. Where is Monk today? This month marks his centennial-his birthday was October 10-and given his importance to jazz and American music broadly, the occasion is strangely, disturbingly quiet. From then until his death at just 64, in 1982, he struggled increasingly with ailments physical and mental, stopped writing new music, experienced increasing critical disdain, and finally disappeared from view for nearly a decade.Įight Books for Indulging a Bad Mood Charlie Tyson
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Jazz was over as a mainstream force in American culture and so, arguably, was Monk. By the time the story ran in February 1964, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” had begun a dominant run as the Beatles’ first No. But after John Kennedy was shot, Time bumped Monk. 1 hit was the old standard “ Deep Purple,” and jazz still seemed dominant. When the cover was slated to run in November 1963, the nation’s No.
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Though widely respected by musicians, the pianist and composer had always remained an outlier even in the jazz world, set apart by his singular musical vision as well as his eccentricity, yet his Time cover seemed to represent his ascension to the heights of American culture as a whole. The peak of Thelonious Monk’s fame came in 1964, in his 47th year, when his painted portrait-dourly glowering or shyly guarded, depending on the beholder-improbably graced the cover of Time magazine.