My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 33

THE JAZZ COMPOSER AS VISIONARY

By

KOFI NATAMBU

By 1955 the legendary pianist-composer Thelonious
Sphere Monk (b. October 10, 1917) had been playing
music professionally for over twenty years.
“They were always telling me for years
to play commercial, be commercial.
I’m not commercial. I say play your
own way. Don’t play what the public
wants — you play what you want and
let the public pick up on what you’re
doing — even if it does take them
fifteen, twenty years.”

— Thelonious Monk

“Monk is a virtuoso of the specific
techniques of Jazz, in challengingly
original uses of accent, rhythm, meter,
time and of musically expressive
space, rest, and silence…He is a major
jazz composer, the first since Duke
Ellington…His repertory abounds with
intriguing melodies, truly instrumental
pieces…To play Monk properly,
musicians justly testify, you have to
know the melody and the harmony
and understand how they fit together…
It is a sign of the great Jazz composer
that his sense of form extends beyond
written structure and beyond individual
improviser, to encompass a whole
performance…So it is with Monk.”

32

— Martin Williams

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THELONIOUS MONK: