Leslie Gourse
Thelonious Monk: His Life and Music
Chris Raschka
(Blue Note)
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His personal life aside, Thelonious Sphere Monk Jr. was a tough nut to crack. His angular attack on the piano connected the older stride style of playing to the more dissonant and challenging form of bebop. For much of his career many critics and jazz fans considered his unusual chords bad piano playing, pure and simple, but he was cited by such legends as Dizzy Gillespie and John Coltrane as a profound influence. His challenging compositions confounded many a musician, but they became some of the most beloved standards in all of music. But it’s Monk’s life offstage that makes him especially compelling: his odd behavior, his unusual friendships, and his mysterious abandonment of music years before his death.
Amazingly, Thomas Fitterling’s Thelonious Monk: His Life and Music was the first book published on Monk in English (and it’s a translation from German, published in 1987). The author is a German jazz musician and producer, but his book is so obsessed with Monk’s recorded output and his own opinions of Monk’s performances that it might as well have been written by a clerk in a jazz record shop. The 77-page biographical sketch that opens the book is based almost entirely on previously published books, magazine articles, and other secondhand sources. Only one original interview is noted in his list of sources. As a result the sketch is peppered with misinformation, such as the presentation of an oft-repeated legend about Bud Powell as simple fact: Fitterling states that Powell was once beaten by police as he came to Monk’s aid, leading to permanent mental problems. Numerous other accounts, some outlined in Leslie Gourse’s Straight, No Chaser, have methodically disputed its veracity.
“Billy Taylor, who was living in town by then and playing at the Three Deuces on West 52nd Street, recalled John Simmons as the bassist and Shadow Wilson on drums. They may also have played with the Hawkins group at that time, since it had some personnel changes during its bookings there until mid-August….Monk stayed in Coleman Hawkins’ group, but even he may have been occasionally replaced by others–John Malachi, a Washington-based pianist and a friend of singer Billy Eckstine for one. Malachi played in Eckstine’s big band in the 1940s. Hawk’s group appeared opposite singer Billie Holiday at the Downbeat Club, as Billy Taylor remembered.”
