Robin D. G. Kelley’s Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original has been my reading companion for one year. It is a thick book, organized chronologically, beginning with Monk’s family history and ending with his death in 1982. The book tells the story of seemingly every recording session, concert, detail about family life, gigging, venues, and the surrounding historical times. It is fully absorbing, and the details accrue toward several points Kelley makes about Monk, art, history, music, being “American,” race, and being “original.”
I think Kelley is also saying something about doing history. This book honors the details of Monk’s life by the compositional choice not to structure the material around one main thesis. In so doing, Kelley re-writes Monk’s life—where critics and historians and filmmakers had often tried to pigeon-hole Monk, beginning with a thesis and then making him fit whatever they wanted to prove, Kelley is careful to tell the story of a full and complex life and music.
And so I think the text truly honors Monk. It may not be easy or common to think of “honor” as a textual characteristic or presence—but Kelley’s tone and approach aims to be more about Monk than about the historian doing the work of telling. Kelley’s gaze is wide and the feeling, reading such a wide view, is one of fullness—that it might be possible to know something about Monk, and therefore it might be possible to be a unique person and to be known. I deeply admire this about Kelley’s method and tone.
I hesitate to say that I take lessons away from this book—I am a white poet, born into the middle class, though tenuously middle class and without any inheritance or trust fund, and while I struggle at the moment to secure full time work, and my health benefits have been inconsistent and a point of anxiety throughout my whole adult life, I certainly have not lead a life of struggle like Monk.
But I want to say, as an artist whose work is non-commercial, that there are some things to gather up from this book and from Monk’s life and store in my consciousness as fortifications for what may come. As if his musical genius is not enough—prior to reading Kelley’s book, I knew that Monk was my favorite jazz pianist of all time—now I can not only listen to his music, but maybe I’ll even navigate my life remembering some of the things I read and take courage. Such as:
Tradition/Innovation:
Monk innovated and he was traditional. What a lesson for poetry communities who sometimes talk about “experimental poetry” as if it is an aesthetic into which one “graduates” and from which one never waivers. Kelley proves, by providing careful musical analysis, that Monk was an innovator. Kelley gathers testimony from so many musicians about how Monk’s playing was different, how Monk schooled them, how many of them wanted to learn from him—and they did because Monk was a willing teacher. Yet when be-bop rose into prominence as “the modern music,” Monk criticized the way this kind of jazz privileged speed. He often favored slowness, silence, the well-chosen note, the melody, and at the same time, rhythmically, he wanted to find ways to make something slower swing hard.
And later, when “out” jazz, or “the so-called avant-garde” came into being (and I love the way Kelley always signals the positionality of the term “avant-garde” by calling it “the so-called avant-garde”), Monk commented on the ugliness of the sound. He persisted in playing his repertoire, and even when he was older and not feeling well, he provided a lot of musical joy for some crowds not quite pleased with Miles Davis’ fusion approach. And he was still schooling musicians coming up who were eager to learn from his soulful complexities.
(On a side note: this got me thinking about my love of John Coltrane’s music—even his later, “out” stuff—and then my falling in love with Alice Coltrane’s music, whose late album “Universal Consciousness” seems to signal a return to the blues, and to church traditions. How perhaps she followed Coltrane’s inquiry to the very end, and maybe in a “Monkian” twist, returned to roots.)
Roots/The Future:
Kelley describes Monk as a Janus-faced artist: looking ahead while looking back. Like the way he kept both hands going, doing something interesting on the keyboard with the right and the left, making dissonance, using his whole body—his famous elbow crash down on the keyboard—all the while, referencing jazz’s stride piano roots.
Money:
Monk struggled with finances. He rarely got a fair shake from the record industry. He had no health insurance—nor did his family. For me, reading, after a fall and winter of listening to “We are the 99%” which has disturbed me a bit because if the slogan's potential to ignore great variation in class struggle and render the poor invisible, Kelley’s book does good work to tell the details of a life on the financial brink. He does not cut this biographical information short by citing some general platitudes about struggle and the necessity of art, but rather he breaks down the actuals: Kelley reports income figures, enumerates the percentages of “profit” Monk had to pay out to his sidemen, the exact cost of Nellie’s dental care, and so on.
These dollar amounts as details were, to me, some of the most potent poetry I encountered all year.
Along the way, Monk and Nellie and their children were often helped out, financially, by the Baroness Nica. Kelley proves that Nica was a trusted family friend.
Friendship:
This book is also a record of support—often of friendship across race and life circumstance. Artists who privilege innovation and originality often need support from people who have money and who believe in art, who believe in the artist and shape their lives around supporting them. There are numerous anecdotes that express this kind of respect. Some white critics whose life course would never have helped them understand the details of Monk’s life were his greatest advocates—they really heard his music and extended this kind of respect to his being and his life.
The fraternity of artists is also a sub-story in this book—jazz musicians were often there for each other. If the institutions of law enforcement, the courts, health care, education, and even the musicians’ union was not on the side of the black jazz musician, they were certainly on each other’s sides. Kelley shows how Monk grieved the loss of so many of his jazz musician friends. He also relays many other anecdotes of friendship: fundraisers, hospital visits, donations, people coming around to Monk’s apartment to see how he was doing, and extended family helping Nellie and Thelonious out with babysitting, caretaking, moving apartments, helping them out after their apartment fires.
Monk received this kind of support; he also gave it.
Illness/Wellness:
It is possible that Monk “inherited” bipolar disorder from his father. But Kelley shows us that more of an impact, for sure, was Monk’s grueling schedule, the fact that drugs were pumped into the black community by the government, and that so many “doctors” took money from jazz musicians to supply them with suspect care and “vitamin shots” that contained illicit drugs. I doubt that the health care industry has reformed itself much from those times—it seems like a minor miracle to find a doctor who will act with ethics and have enough time and attention to actually provide holistic, good care. I thought about this as I read.
How healthy can artists be? And artists of color, or artists who don’t come from money, at that? I feel this struggle all around me, in the poetry community, among artists in this country who feel barely visible, barely allowed to be artists, let alone to be healthy and deserving of good care. Nellie eventually took Monk’s health, to a large degree, into her own hands. Over and over, this kind of vigilance, family, and community support and intervention is what saves a person on the brink—which is an experience close to the edge of security and what I think it feels like, often, to be a living, working artist. In this way, artists, even if they grew up with money or still have it, can extend a lot of understanding toward the poor in this country.
Pro-artist causes are linked, crucially, with anti-poverty causes.
Quitting:
I paid attention to the stories of jazz musicians leaving jazz. I appreciated this recognition of the sacrifice that art takes, and the struggle that perhaps is sometimes just not worth it. Kelley discusses Monk’s own version of quitting—when he was older, really not feeling well, living out in Jersey in Nica’s house so that he could have some quiet while Nellie tried to run a juice business out of their Manhattan apartment, Monk stopped playing piano. Barry Harris was also living there at the time, and Monk would listen to Harris play, but resisted his coaxing to join him. Kelley is pointing something out that is valuable, and often suppressed in the narrative of an artist’s life: while art making might be the very thing that moves the blood through an artist’s veins, it is also tiring, exhausting even, and it is possible for an artist—even an absolute original and musical genius such as Monk—to stop.
Politics:
Monk was not detached from politics, and from the Civil Rights Movement—he played in many benefit concerts and followed the news of the day closely—but when asked, his answers focused on his role as musician, as artist. He did not want to be a politician, a social worker, an activist. He did not believe he needed to. But many times others were not content to let him be an artist—as if that was not radical enough.
Respect:
Monk could seemingly sense when respect was being extended to him, and he knew when it was not. Monk stayed silent and evasive during interviews where he could sense the interviewer’s agenda: to make Monk out to be this or that, crazy, more of a piano player than a composer, more of a traditionalist than an innovator. He evaded questions, and increasingly, as the years went on, even in his personal life, he stayed silent. When pressed by one of his musician friends later in life to “Say something!” Monk replied, “Something.” But when he wanted to, when he felt respect, he was open, funny, and told stories and expressed his opinion freely.
Context:
How you see a person, what you hear, and what you think about them may be linked to what you have decided to believe about that person as a type. This is called prejudice and in an era of liberalism and political correctness, we are often quick with the disclaimer, “I am not prejudiced.”
But what we think of a person is linked not just to who they appear to be at first glance, but how willing we are to learn their context, hear their stories, and listen and try to know. Of course this applies to race. This applies to ideas of wellness and mental illness. This applies to class. To ideas of “the genius of the artist.” This applies to music and art criticism, and how history gets made. Where it might have been easy to see Monk’s behavior as this or that, Kelley relies on the researchable facts and the probable situation that always allows for the fullness of Monk’s life.
This generosity is inspiring—I take it as a practice to emulate. As writers, researchers, and as teachers and even citizens, in our rush to make sense of a person and figure out what to say and do in response to their being, how many times do we cut a person off, make assumptions, and believe what we hear from others? Kelley provides all of Monk’s episodes, behaviors, and actions with context.
Kelley’s long book is an example of the beautiful slowness of knowing, a practice of slowness that fosters a resistance to quick conclusions.
For example, a painter was commissioned by a magazine to do a portrait of Monk. During the sitting, Monk fell asleep. The painter later said he found this strange. Kelley answers this bit of historical data with the “counter-thesis” seemingly in plain site: Monk was tired. His schedule was grueling. He had to gig in order to take care of his family and pay the bills. Why wouldn’t he be prone to nodding off?
And another joyous example: Kelley does a wonderful job in the beginning of the book tracing the origins of Monk’s famous dancing on stage—his spinning—his seemingly spastic moves. One of Monk’s earliest tours as a pianist was with a woman Pentecostal preacher. They played in churches where the band would accompany the sermon and the altar calls. Monk was not a believer, but he felt the music, and witnessed the dancing—the “ring shout” and “shout step” styles. So, later, white critics and those unfamiliar with Monk’s past, and unfamiliar with the somatic shapes of this cultural context, called Monk’s “antics” notable, mysterious, bizarre, and/or entertaining. For those who would not know this history, Kelley lets them in, reframing Monk’s very being—his body, his music—and Kelley’s example perhaps encourages us to do more research before our next set of conclusions when encountering another.
Toward a Conclusion:
I come back around to the idea of history’s gaze—I think Kelley has performed an embodied, slow-paced, wide-angle history which compliments the music of Monk: angular, evading neat conclusions, but dedicated to providing something beautiful for the listener in its truth. How wonderful: these dual epistemological ways forward—into history making and into art making, with Monk’s music at the center.
While I have left the church behind where I first learned the song, I love Monk’s rendition of the hymn “Abide with Me.” And so today, and hopefully for a long time, I want to “abide”—listening for the way to make and live something new, listening to Monk.
