My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 35

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Monk wrote many new compositions
including his signature classic “’Round
Midnight” in 1941 and continued to
work in relative obscurity at Minton’s
and other small clubs in Harlem and
in the famed midtown 52nd street
clubs and bars where his angular
dissonant harmonies, dynamic
rhythms, and soaring, lyrical melodies
quickly made him a leading and
influential figure among the modernist
Jazz cognoscenti. Working closely with
such fellow pioneers of this exciting
new music as the extraordinary
drummer Kenny “Klook” Clarke,
revolutionary guitarist Charlie
Christian, iconic saxophonist Charlie
‘Bird’ Parker, and trumpet legend John
“Dizzy” Gillespie, Monk soon became a
major mentor to many young emerging
musicians like the then newly arrived
19 year old Miles Davis in 1945.
By this time scores of musicians were
experimenting with new harmonic
structures, melodic ideas, and
rhythmic conceptions. The intense
cross-fertilization of styles, ideas, and
musical structures were deeply rooted
in the modern experimentations
with form and content that were
sweeping all the arts of the period in
literature, painting, dance, and cinema
and “Bebop” (or as the musicians
themselves simply called it “modern
music”) was at the forefront of this
cultural and aesthetic revolution.
It was abundantly clear, as Monk
himself told a number of interviewers,
that his style was “more original” than
many of the standardized, generic,
and conventional forms of the Bebop
movement. Yet Monk was already one
of the primary architects of the best
and most creative aspects of this
movement and was a major source of
distilling, synthesizing, and extending
the ideas and structures from the
myriad of historical musical sources
that this generation of modernist
musicians consciously absorbed, honed,
and developed: Jazz swing styles
inherited from the 1920s and ‘30s (e.g.
Louis Armstrong, Ellington, Art Tatum,
Lester Young, Count Basie, Coleman
Hawkins, etc.) both ‘popular’ and
‘avant-garde’ advances in 20th century

classical music (e.g. Stravinsky, Varese,
Hindemith, Ives, Bartok, Prokofiev,
Ravel, Debussy, etc.), and new black
vernacular uses/appropriations of the
rich blues and rhythm and blues/rock
‘n roll traditions, as well as various
forms of gospel/spiritual music.
All this and more went into Monk’s
complex and powerful compositions
that, while quite intricate and even
difficult in harmonic terms, somehow
remained both very lyrical (if quirkily
idiosyncratic) melodically, as well as
creatively connected to black vernacular
dance rhythms. This combination of
stylistic elements became a trademark
of Monk’s compositions and
improvisations and led him to finally
getting an offer in 1947 to record as
a leader of his own ensembles. Now
thirty years old and a mature young
artist in many respects (though still
unknown to people outside of the
music), Monk recorded two albums
worth of his original compositions (and
a few standards) with the small recording
label known as Blue Note. Boldly
entitled The Genius of Modern Music,
Volumes I & II these records put Monk
on the mainstream music map for the
first time and introduced the man
often rather archly referred to in Jazz
publications and the mainstream media
as “The High Priest of Bebop,” to a
new Jazz audience that were just
beginning to respond to the innovations
of the modernists in the music. Despite
this new limited recognition, Monk
was still barely making ends meet and
was desperately struggling to stay above
water economically. However, Monk
categorically refused to give up his
musical identity or compromise his
artistic vision in any way despite many
pressures to do so. His first recordings
were often lauded (or greatly
misunderstood) by the critics and
journalists who continued to interview
and write about him for a wide range
of magazines and newspapers both
in and outside the general Jazz world.
The laconic, witty, and candid pianist
was always considered great copy for
the media. However Monk remained
almost invisible to any mainstream
audience of music lovers.

This situation of severe commercial
isolation and economic marginalization
during a very creative and productive
period of composing and performing
his music was juxtaposed to a
concomitant rise in status and prestige
among fellow musicians, composers,
and critics that continued well into the
1950s. Monk continued to record on
a regular basis for the important small
recording labels Blue Note, Prestige,
and Riverside. Thus he began the series
of major, classic recordings that quickly
established his reputation as one of the
most significant Jazz composers and
soloists in modern music. It was also
during this time that Monk first began
to be mentioned as the most important
composer in the music since the great
Duke Ellington revolutionized the Jazz
orchestra in the 1920s. At the height
of the Bebop craze from 1948-1954 and
the justly rapid ascension of Charlie
“Bird’ Parker and Dizzy Gillespie as
living icons of the movement,
Monk made an equally revolutionary
breakthrough himself in an utterly
independent personal style that drew
from Bebop conventions (as it did from
Swing, Rhythm and Blues, classical,
and gospel traditions) but were at the
same time completely fresh and
different in form and content from his
numerous influences. These recordings
were made with many of the most
important, original, and talented
musicians in Modern Jazz — Parker,
Gillespie, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins,
Milt Jackson, Art Blakey, Kenny Clarke,
Percy Heath, Max Roach, and Kenny
Dorham, among others — and in many
ways served as the basic creative and
aesthetic foundation of where Jazz was
to evolve and grow after 1955.
Thus by the mid-fifties Thelonious
Sphere Monk II was a man who already
had a very clear and completely
masterful command of the modernist
and vernacular traditions that
characterized the revolutions in both
popular and avant-garde music during
the post wwii era. This knowledge and
understanding on both an innovative
theoretical and performance level
profoundly transformed the 1955-1975
era in Jazz and made Monk, along with