My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 36

Out of this historical maelstrom of
multinational aesthetic and cultural
traditions and conceptions, Monk
consciously critiqued, individually
reworked, and creatively extended and
subverted the conventions of 20th
century modernist and vernacular
sources (including those of ‘Bebop’)
to forge his own vision of what
constituted ‘modern music.’ The first
principle was a reliance and insistence
on changing the sound of the piano
(and by extension other instrumental
voices in the ensemble) through an
entirely new approach to note
articulation, timbral dynamics, and use
of temporal/spatial elements in his
own improvisations and composing
material for other musicians in his
groups. As a result many early listeners
of Monk’s music — musicians, critics,
and general listeners alike — thought
that Monk was not a very technically
accomplished pianist (again in the
strictly Western European traditional/
classical terms which were the
canonical norm in the United States).
This misunderstanding and profound
ignorance of the actual sources of
Monk’s methods and approach to
instrumental expression and
compositional structure was an
impediment to many people in Jazz
circles until the critical and listening
Jazz public (and many musicians as
well) finally ‘caught up’ to many of
Monk’s innovations by the late 1950s.
By then Monk was already an
established twenty-five year jazz veteran
whose once radical contributions to
voicing, phrasing, and tempo were
finally the ‘new modern mainstream’
of the Jazz tradition.

The extraordinary recordings that Monk
made from 1955-1965 only further
solidified and cemented this reputation
and suddenly made his work de rigueur
for the young, emerging innovators
and radicals of the period. In 1955
Monk finally began to receive the
commercial attention (and monetary
success) that had previously eluded
him without compromising himself
by ‘going commercial’ in any way as an
artist. This reality completely validated
Monk’s famous assertion that one must
‘play [your] own way’ and ensured that
he would enter the rarefied pantheon of
the greatest musicians and composers
in the history of his art completely
on his own terms. It was a profound
lesson in artistic integrity, dedication to
craft, and disciplined perseverance that
would serve as a beacon for an entire
new generation of gifted, ambitious
players and composers in the 1960s,
the ‘70s, and beyond who recognized
that Monk’s greatest and most significant contributions lie not only in his
fierce aesthetic commitment but in not
allowing himself to be corrupted and
distracted by the relentless demands
and pressures of the marketplace. The
result was one of the most singular,
influential bodies of work in the entire
canon of 20th century music.
This essay is an excerpt from a new book-in-progess by
Kofi Natambu entitled A BRAND NEW BAG: How African
Americans Revolutionized U.S. Culture & Changed the
World, 1955-1975.

BLACK RENAISSANCE NOIRE

The visionary quality of Monk’s musical
aesthetic lay in an intensely self-conscious
and self-reflexive effort to simultaneously
question, critique, and fundamentally
rethink the traditionally specific roles
and identities of harmonic structure,
melodic form, and rhythmic content
in modern music and reassert/reclaim
sound itself as the most important
individual and collective element in
both improvisational and composed
ensemble settings alike. For decades
since the 1890s both African American
and European/white American popular,
vernacular, and (semi)classical musics
had been dependent on inherited
conventional modes of organizing
musical patterns through the
predominance of either harmony
(songform structures), melody
(songform lyrics), or rhythm (fixed
metrical time). By the early 1900s
various avant-garde practices in the
United States and Europe had begun
to overtly upset and challenge these
conventions somewhat (by breaking up
and/or distorting/rearranging
the forms themselves) but still largely
in terms of the central role of
fundamentally Western conceptions
and methodologies that favored a
critical embrace (dissonance) or
dismissive denial (atonality) of the
diatonic scale as a ‘negative’ reference
(e.g. Schoenburg, Ives, Webern, etc.).
However, through the then revolutionary
interventions of such major figures
as Louis Armstrong and Ellington by
the early 1920s, Jazz began creatively
embracing and appropriating
conventional music structures and ideas
from a myriad of western sources while
subtly transforming and subverting
them with highly idiosyncratic (and
African derived) methods of either
using dissonant or unorthodox
harmonies as well as crosscutting and
constructivist architectural rhythms (a
structural and expressive device known
as ‘riffing’) in both compositional and

improvisational contexts. It’s crucial
to note that the major black Jazz
composers, improvisors, and arrangers
of the 1920s and ‘30s (Jelly Roll
Morton, Ellington, Sidney Bechet, Art
Tatum, Count Basie, Fletcher Henderson,
Don Redman, Lester Young, Coleman
Hawkins) were very adept at using
these sources while also creating and
improvising entirely new ways of
expressing melodic lyricism and ‘pop’
song forms such as Louis Armstrong’s
brilliant inventions of ‘scat’ singing and
‘swing’ instrumental styles.

35

Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Charles
Mingus, Max Roach, John Coltrane,
Cecil Taylor, and Ornette Coleman the
leading musical figures in a particularly
tumultuous and exciting period of
American art and culture.