“Can you turn that off? I can’t concentrate.” That was a pretty common request by a friend I used to work with when the Bop jazz would come on. Especially any Thelonious Monk. It took me a minute as well to tap into Monk. At first, his unusual technique throws you off. There is a lot of negative space in his solos, and something just sounds sideways about it. But then you get it. And its absolutely beautiful. To say that his style is unusual is like faulting a boxer for being too violent. Jazz is, by definition, all about the unusual. I always thought of Thelonious Monk as exactly that, a ‘monk’ of sorts that forged his own world of sound completely ignoring the musical traditions of the past. But a new book in the Times Sunday Book Review tells the story of a Monk that not only studied, but enjoyed and played classical music as a student (Chopin and Stravinsky were said be be his favorites). Like my high school art teacher, Mrs. Frank, told me: “You have to know the rules before you can break them.” and the always memorable “You can’t make steak out of hamburger”. Monk knew his music history (he didn’t start with hamburger, he started with Chopin) and understood the past so well in fact that he was able to break from it in a truly unconventional and original style that was way ahead of its time.
Posted by Geezer on October 16, 2009 at 12:58 PM
