My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 34

In 1936 Monk began playing on the
road as a touring professional with an
evangelist from the Sanctified Church
named Reverend Graham (known
publically as “The Texas Warhorse”)
who sang and preached in various
churches while Monk’s trio played
rollicking gospel and rhythm & blues
tunes behind her. It’s important to note
that as early as 1934 Monk and his trio
had already worked at small gigs and
dances in New York, usually earning
small amounts in tips and cover charges.
Monk remained with the evangelist’s
troupe for over two years traveling all
over the country in both cities and
small rural towns alike. This day-to-day
immersion in the challenging demands
of black folk vernacular styles as both
accompanist and ensemble leader gave
the dedicated young musician very
valuable experience and provided the
early aesthetic foundation for his
eventually unique and independent
styles of composing and improvising
music in the Jazz tradition.

In 1938 Monk, homesick from the lonely
rough and tumble life of the road,
returned to his beloved New York and
soon based his own playing style on
the stride piano traditions established
by such living African American piano
legends (and Monk’s personal idols) as
James P. Johnson (who happened to
live near Monk’s west side Manhattan
neighborhood at the time) and Fats
Waller. In addition, Monk was being
deeply influenced by the pianist/
composer/bandleader Duke Ellington
who also rooted his piano style in
the stride tradition, a profound black
vernacular music aesthetic of the early
1900s. It was the highly innovative
modernity of Ellington’s fecund ideas
in piano harmony, rhythmic structure,
and orchestral arrangements that
inspired Monk in a particularly special
way and revealed the possibilities for
him to continue and expand on his
own experimental efforts.
In 1940 the now 22-year-old Monk
became house pianist at Minton’s
Playhouse, a small Harlem nightclub
and nightly gathering place for many
aspiring young Jazz musicians and
composers who came together on a
regular basis at the club to jam and
experiment with new musical ideas
during afterhours at all night and early
morning sessions. These sessions soon
became legendary as the place where,
in the mid-1940s, the revolutionary
Jazz style ‘Bebop’ was born. Monk’s
deep involvement with this movement
during endless jam sessions in the early
and mid-1940s made Monk’s name well
known to other musicians who became
very familiar with his challenging
compositions and unusual solo playing.
This was of course long before the
general listening public became aware
of his talents. From 1940-1945, an
intensely creative period in which

BLACK RENAISSANCE NOIRE

money on their daughter’s lessons since
Marion had no real interest in playing
music, but it was very apparent to
the teacher that her younger brother
Thelonious had “a prodigious talent.”
This quickly led to the highly precocious
youngster enrolling in music courses in
school and taking professional lessons
from a series of private teachers. Since
Monk also excelled academically in
math and physics it wasn’t long before
Monk began formally composing
music, using his command of harmony
and melodic ideas to augment his
already extraordinary rhythmic sense.
By the time Monk turned 19 in 1936 he
had already written a number of major
compositions, most notably “Ruby My
Dear,” that were destined to become
Jazz classics.

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Like everything else about him — from
his highly original name to his
stubbornly independent, innovative,
and utterly idiosyncratic approach to
nearly every aspect of his extraordinary
life and career — Monk was his “own
man” from very early on. Moving
with his family from North Carolina
to New York at the age of five in 1922,
the precocious Monk always went his
own way and made his own decisions
about how he wanted to live — even
as a child. Thus, during his junior year
in the spring of 1934 Monk left the
academically rigorous and prestigious
Stuyvesant High School in New York
(which was and is a very competitive
citywide magnet school which only
admitted the best and most gifted
students in the city) to pursue a
professional career in music. He was
just 17 at the time but had already
impressed a number of his teachers and
musical peers as a young man of great
talent and potential. Coming from
a very proud and independent black
working-class family who loved music
and insisted that their three children
take music lessons (both of Monk’s
parents worked and Thelonious, Sr. —
Monk’s father — also played piano),
Monk initially resisted his mother’s
suggestions that he play violin and later
the trumpet (neither of which Monk
liked). However, young Thelonious was
utterly fascinated by his sister Marion’s
piano lessons which she took on the
family’s upright piano and the ten year
old much preferred listening to her,
especially when her music teacher came
to their house. By the age of 12 in 1930
Monk had already learned to play the
piano very well on his own by ear and
keen observation. Highly impressed,
the music teacher, a Mr. Wolfe (who
was then a student at New York’s
famed Julliard School of Music), told
Monk’s parents not to waste any more