Thelonious Monk "The Nonet - Live !"

Ruby My Dear (quartet);We See (quartet plus Ray Copeland); Epistrophy; Oska-T; Evidence; Blue Monk (quartet plus Clark Terry); Epistrophy; (November 3, 1967 - Paris) Thelonious Monk - piano. Charlie Rouse - tenor. Larry Gales - bass. Ben Riley - drums. plus Clark Terry - trumpet, Ray Copeland - trumpet, Johnny Griffin - tenor, Jimmy Cleveland - trombone, Phil Woods - alto.

In music the verb "to compose" usually means to write down, on stave lines, an original work. In jazz it invariably starts with a freely and spontaneously composed improvisation. Jazz, as writer Whitney Ballett has pointed out, is the "sound of surprise" but a number of jazzmen have also succeeded as orthodox composers whose works have been published and are played wherever jazz is performed. Chief of the jazz composers is the late Duke Ellington, but not too far behind is pianist-composer Thelonious Monk. Born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina on October 10, 1917, his parents moved to New York when young Thelonious (who was christened Thelious Junior Monk) was five years of age. A year or so later he was picking out tunes on the family piano and by the time he was 12 he was accompanying his mother at the local Baptist church as well as playing at "rent parties", those informal gatherings where tenants who were behind with their payments to the landlord would hold a party in the hope that visitors would contribute to the debt clearance! He spent two years playing piano with a touring evangelist's show ("she healed, we played" was how he summed it up afterwards). He studied music, briefly, at New York's prestigious Julliard School and worked with the quartet of drummer Keg Purnell in the late Thirties then, a couple of years later, he took over as a house pianist at the after-hours club called Minton's, after its founder, Henry Minton. The club was situated in a dilapidated room in the Hotel Cecil on West 118th Street in Harlem and Minton, a former saxophonist and union official, put in ex-band leader Teddy Hill as the club manager. It was Hill who brought in his ex-drummer, Kenny Clarke, and soon many others would drift in after finishing working at the New York dance halls. Charlie Christian, Benny Goodman's incredible guitarist, would bring along his instrument and amplifier and there are location recordings from Minton's, done by a young college student named Jerry Newman, featuring Monk, Clarke, Christian and Dizzy Gillespie.

Here, if anywhere, was the birthplace of bebop. Monk was always looked upon as a nonconformist, but the tunes he wrote were played by the Young Turks of the day. Monk himself, it is said, wrote his tunes specifically for pianist Bud Powell, who could play them all with greater keyboard fluency than anyone else. But Monk's music, as played by the composer, had unique qualities, subtleties of note placing relative to the bar lines, which gave it distinction. Many musicians, notably saxist Steve Lacy and pianist Jessica Williams, have devoted much time to the study of Monk's work with considerable success. Others have merely scratched the surface, learning the melodies but not absorbing the indefinable atmosphere of the music as intended by Monk. Thelonious worked briefly with some of the biggest names in the jazz business, stars such as Coleman Hawkins (with whom he made his first studio recordings), trumpeter Cootie Williams and Dizzy Gillespie. But often his involvement with regular employers got no further than rehearsals. Many respected his enormous and unique musical talent but found his out-of-sequence approach to regular hours impossible to accommodate. "He lived" wrote George Simon, "by the whims of his biological clock, staying up three days and sleeping through the next two when it suited him".

He lived for more than 40 years in the same New York apartment, first with his mother and the rest of his family, then with wife and children. He grudgingly agreed to move out when the building was due for demolition, presumably taking with him the large photo of Billie Holiday which he had stuck to the ceiling. Inevitably Monk's life tended to centre around New York, where he was recorded by the Blue Note and Prestige labels, who had placed their faith in his musical abilities. In 1951 he was falsely imprisoned for the possession of drugs, but despite his innocence of the charge, he was deprived of all his all-important cabaret card for six years, the document which was necessary to allow him to work in any establishment where liquor was on sale. He came to Europe to play at the Paris Jazz Fair in 1954.