Harlem. June 1941, in the wee small hours of the morning. If you could take a stroll down 118th Street, walking west from Seventh Avenue toward St. Nicholas, passing a few brownstones and parked cars, just before you got to the end of the unusually short block, you would reach the Cecil Hotel, an elegant five-story building on the south side of the street. A large, dark blue awning extends out from the building with the words “Minton’s Playhouse” emblazoned on it. You try to pass, but the faint sound of music draws you in. You climb the three small steps leading to the entrance, open the door, and suddenly you’re awash in cigarette and cigar smoke, chit-chat and laughter, and swinging music. You don’t see the musicians at first. To your left is a long bar, occupied by men and women whose days begin at sundown. “Togged to the bricks” in hip suits and kicks, hair conked to the roots and glistening with pomade, these are the politicians, pimps, and hustlers who run the parts of Harlem the Renaissance ignored; with them are the neighborhood regulars who found in Minton’s a place to go after the day’s hard work; and, of course, the musicians, dancers, and miscellaneous entertainers who make their living on stage. To your right is the coat-check room, tended by a pretty young woman with a lovely brown complexion, hair “done up,” who handles your coat and “lid” with great care.
You continue past the bar, past the never-ending debates and convivial conversations, past the dazed and lonesome souls nursing twenty-cent drinks, through a set of swinging doors. Now in the club proper, all you can hear is the music. To your left is a small bandstand, about twelve inches off the floor, and an equally tiny dance floor. Behind another set of swinging doors to the right is the kitchen with its delectable scent of fried chicken, greens, and candied yams. And in the middle are over a dozen tables draped with crisp, white tablecloths, surrounded by chairs. Nearly every seat is occupied, and nearly every patron is preoccupied with the music. There are moments when the music might sound altogether foreign, by comparison to the popular swing bands of the day. But to call it “revolutionary” or “avant-garde” would be an exaggeration. These young artists joyfully jam on the familiar, retaining the head-bopping, toe-tapping, danceable quality of swing music. The drummer, Kenny “Klook-Mop” Clarke, generates sparks like a blacksmith pounding on an anvil—he maintains a driving pulse interjected with off-beat explosions on the snare and bass drum (and interrupted by the occasional slamming of the bathroom door, located a little too close to the bandstand). The ultimate time-keeper is the bass player, a baby-faced kid named Nick Fenton. On trumpet and occasional vocals is Joe Guy, whose full-bodied tone sounds like Roy Eldridge. He’s joined by other horns: a trumpet battle with Roy Eldridge himself, maybe, or Oran “Hot Lips” Page, or Little Benny Harris; a serenade by the great Don Byas on tenor saxophone; or the little known Sammy Davis; or the soulful Herbie Fields, one of the only white cats in the room.
The most jarring sound of all is coming from the upright piano and the kid playing it. Bespectacled and clean-shaven, he’s just a little too thin for his gray pin-striped suit. You may not hear him at first, over the din of horns and drums, but when you do, you’re startled by his broken, jagged lines and sparse, dissonant chords. They sometimes sound like mistakes. The songs are familiar—“Nice Work,” “Sweet Lorraine,” “Stardust”—but the piano opens with strange introductions and his melodic lines compete with countermelodies that sound as if they don’t fit the harmony. There are moments when he sounds a little like Teddy Wilson or Earl Hines, Herman Chittison or even Art Tatum, but these are just momentary flashes. Once he gets into his solo, he elicits winces, chuckles, and nods of approval from the audience. Some folks even shout his name: “Monk! Monk!”1
Welcome to Minton’s: the house, legend has it, that bop built. It shares the distinction, with other Harlem after-hours clubs such as Clark Monroe’s Uptown House and Dan Wall’s Chili Shack, of being the birthplace of modern jazz, or “bebop.” Musicians who never stepped foot in Minton’s speak of it as if they were there. While details are always contested and stories often exaggerated, the names, places, dates, and anecdotes surrounding Minton’s are generally consistent, though frequently inaccurate. Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie stood at its helm, playing circles around the old legends; Bud Powell transformed his piano into a horn at blistering tempos; Kenny Clarke, guitarist Charlie Christian, and bassist Oscar Pettiford revolutionized rhythm; pianist Tadd Dameron wrote and arranged bebop anthems; and the wacky, eccentric Thelonious Monk taught his peers harmony and confused the hell out of everybody. The young Turks often challenged their elders to battle on Minton’s tiny bandstand, leaving idols such as Roy Eldridge and Ben Webster confused by the twists and turns of the music.
But in 1941, when Thelonious Monk became the house pianist at Minton’s, most of these stories had not yet occurred. Minton’s regulars tended to be unknown swing musicians, not bebop pioneers. Monk tried to correct the historical record in many subsequent interviews. “Some of those histories and articles put what happened in ten years in one year,” he explained in 1956. “They put people all together in one time in this place. Over a period of time, I’ve seen practically everybody at Minton’s, but they were just in there playing. They weren’t giving any lectures.”2 Monk was one who knew; he had become a fixture there. “Monk seemed to have been there all the time,” trumpeter Johnny Carisi recounted.3 Monk’s more sobering assessment of Minton’s was echoed by literary giant Ralph Ellison. His oft-cited essay on Minton’s Playhouse cautioned fans and scholars alike against popular romantic myths. “[T]he very effort to put the fragments together transformed them—so that in place of true memory they now summon to mind pieces of legend. They retell the stories as they have been told and written, glamorized, inflated, made neat and smooth, with all incomprehensible details vanished along with most of the wonder—not how it was as they themselves knew it.”4
• • •
The Cecil Hotel was a beautiful building in its heyday. Built in 1895, when Harlem was the preserve of New York’s white bourgeoisie, this five-story trapezoid-shaped hotel was designed to accommodate the unique corner of 118th and St. Nicholas, which runs diagonally across Manhattan’s well-known grid.5 By the 1930s, the Cecil had lost much of its luster as well as its patronage, but it was suitably located to become part of Harlem’s vibrant nightlife, especially after the repeal of Prohibition on December 5, 1933. In 1938, a musician and former club owner named Monroe Henry Minton decided to transform the dining room and bar of the Cecil Hotel into a jazz club, which he named Minton’s Playhouse. Minton—known by his colleagues as M.H., or just Henry—wasn’t just any musician. Born in Virginia in 1884, the “old man” was a pioneer among the first generation of black jazz musicians who came up through the vaudeville circuit and made some of the genre’s first recordings.6 A tenor saxophone player, he toured with the phenomenal ragtime clarinetist, Wilbur Sweatman, whose musical imagination anticipated many of the experiments we associate with the jazz avant-garde. The only surviving recording of Minton is in a quintet made up entirely of reeds (clarinet, alto, tenor, baritone, and bass sax, led by Sweatman). The band recorded in 1917, sixty years before the founding of the World Saxophone Quartet. Sweatman himself was known to thrill audiences by playing three clarinets at once.7
Minton was less known for his musicianship than for his role in the musicians’ union. He was the first black delegate to Local 802 and, for many years, the union’s sergeant-at-arms in Harlem, making him the highest-ranking black official in the local. Despite the distrust between African-Americans and Local 802, Minton earned a reputation as a tireless advocate and a generous man, assisting fellow musicians in need of advice or a few extra dollars. And while he became an occasional thorn in the side of the union, officials appreciated his ability to “put many a dollar in the coffers of the local by getting men to become union musicians.”8 Musicians in Harlem especially respected Minton for managing the Rhythm Club, a favorite spot for serious players on 132nd and Seventh Avenue, known for its after-hours jam sessions. The Rhythm Club foreshadowed Minton’s Playhouse. Willie “The Lion” Smith, who was the house pianist there for some time, remembers the club as “a hanging-out place for musicians. . . . They served food for reasonable prices and jazz men could come in at any time and play whatever they wanted without bothering with the usual singers or floor shows. It became the place where young musicians would go to learn and to be heard.”9 The union had a strict policy against jam sessions; musicians were working without pay and playing with non-union musicians. But with M. H. Minton, sergeant-at-arms, at the helm of the Rhythm Club, the policy wasn’t enforced. The club had become an exception years earlier, when the previous owner/manager, trombonist Bert Hall, served as business manager for Local 802. Ultimately, Local 802 officials decided that union officers should not own or operate nightclubs, so in 1932, Minton was forced to sell off the Rhythm Club.10
Minton went back to performing for a few years before opening Minton’s Playhouse in 1938. This time around, unencumbered by union bureaucracy, he wanted his club to embody the spirit and atmosphere of the old Rhythm Club. Initially the house band was led by Albert “Happy” Caldwell, a tenor player best known for his work a decade earlier with Louis Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson, and Jelly Roll Morton. Caldwell was a lively player, but his music was a throwback to the 1920s and failed to draw new musicians in.11 The clientele consisted primarily of the residents of the Cecil Hotel. By 1940, Minton passed the management duties to Dewey Vanderburg, a little-known “mulatto” hustler originally from Missouri. Vanderburg was not a musician but had befriended several musicians who had lived in the Hotel Grampion with him.12 His tenure was short-lived; Minton realized that the only way to recreate the spirit of the Rhythm Club was to hire a musician—a prominent and hip musician—to manage the club. So with the start of the new year, 1941, M. H. Minton announced that the popular bandleader Teddy Hill would be taking over as manager of the Playhouse.13
Hill was an ideal choice. His orchestra had become a fixture at the Savoy Ballroom, and whenever he played the Harlem Opera House, the Apollo, the Lincoln, or the Lafayette Theater, he drew crowds.14 A Birmingham, Alabama native and product of John “Fess” Whatley’s renowned Industrial High School Band, Teddy Hill moved to New York in 1927, where he played tenor saxophone in George Howe’s band (which was taken over by Luis Russell) and recorded with Henry Red Allen. In 1932, he formed his own orchestra and achieved some success as a bandleader, though he was never regarded as an especially distinguished player. He did have the foresight to surround himself with young, innovative players, including Dizzy Gillespie and an exciting new drummer named Kenny Clarke.15
That Hill should willingly disband his orchestra is unsurprising, given the shrinking opportunities for African-American bands, especially after 1940. Taking over Minton’s, however, did not take him out of music. He leapt into the job with the dual intentions of entertaining the patrons and promoting young lions—musicians who might have something new to say. The first thing he did was to hire his twenty-five-year-old drummer Kenny Clarke as the club’s musical director and house bandleader.16
Clarke’s first task was to put together a house band. He hired twenty-year-old trumpeter Joe Guy—a choice likely influenced by Teddy Hill. Guy (né Joseph Luke), an alumnus of Teddy Hill’s Orchestra, was a good trumpeter, a competent vocalist, and an overall entertainer. He played with exuberance and possessed a full, rich tone, though he occasionally got lost in the chord changes. He joined Coleman Hawkins’s big band in 1939, but he was Hill’s homeboy—born and bred in Birmingham.17 The bass duties were handed over to another youngster named Nicholas Fenton, who had been working for Lester Young at the time of Clarke’s call. The child of West Indian immigrants, Nick Fenton grew up on Manhattan Avenue and 119th—quite literally around the corner from the Cecil Hotel—and was a few months shy of his twenty-second birthday when he joined the band.18 There was nothing innovative about his playing; he was a very good time-keeper, but often stomped his foot so hard other musicians found it distracting. Pianist Al Tinney recalled one night at the Famous Door, when Fenton began stomping to the beat: “I looked up and says, ‘Where’s the Indians at?’ [Laughs] And nobody could play to this. I mean, he was a good bass player, but that foot.”19
The piano chair was initially offered to another Teddy Hill Orchestra alum, Sonny White. It was an odd choice. The Panamanian-born pianist (né Ellerton Oswald) worked more in a traditional swing mode. At the time, he was accompanying Billie Holiday, and had just left Sidney Bechet to join Benny Carter’s orchestra. He and Thelonious were only one month apart in age, but White had quite a bit more professional experience. With so many other gigs, White turned Clarke down.20 So Clarke decided to go in an entirely different direction, hiring the virtually unknown Thelonious Monk.
Given Clarke’s own musical inclinations, Monk was a better match. Almost a decade earlier, Clarke had developed a style of “dropping bombs,” using the bass drum sparingly to add punctuation at unexpected moments, on or off the beat, instead of using it to mark time. Monk appreciated Clarke for not playing “on the bass drum too hard, which made bands sound very stiff.”21 In the wake of Jimmy Blanton’s innovations with Duke Ellington, it was the bass players who had become “the instrument of tempo.” Drummers were freer to place accents in unusual places. Clarke began experimenting with off-beat punctuations on the keyboard, which “proved disconcerting for the other musicians. It was also confusing for the drummers, who were playing a steady four beats to the bar; any strong, out-of-the-ordinary punctuation would throw them.”22 Monk also reveled in off-beat accents, forcing Clarke to change the way he played: “I had to change my style to play with this clique. Monk’s using accents and things made me play accents more myself, on the bass drum.”23 Indeed, the way Monk “comped” behind soloists seemed as if he were “dropping bombs” on the piano; at times it sounds as if he were playing in a completely different tempo than his sidemen, yet never out of sync with the rhythm.
Clarke and Monk developed a close working relationship, and for all intents and purposes they co-led the band. The band was good, but it wasn’t great. It was still a far cry from what would become known as bebop. Monk and Clarke were the true innovators among the regulars in the group, though they found ways to surround themselves with other innovative musicians (young and old). Now twenty-three years old and still living at home, Monk was ecstatic just to have a steady job in the city. Given Minton’s commitment to the union and to the labor of musicians, Monk probably earned around thirty dollars a week.24 The money wasn’t great, but it was more than he had been making on intermittent club dates, and the band had Tuesdays off.25 By late January or early February of 1941, 210 West 118th Street became Monk’s second home.
Before he could begin work, however, he had to go downtown to the Police License Division at 56 Worth Street to be photographed and fingerprinted by the NYPD in order to obtain a “cabaret identification card.” The police-issued card, which had to be renewed every two years, was required of anyone who worked in establishments serving alcohol. The new requirement did not target musicians alone: chefs, barmaids, waiters and other dining workers also needed a cabaret card. This was new to Monk; the police only started requiring the cards in 1940, when the LaGuardia administration and the police chief decided that nightclub performers were potentially a bad influence and required greater monitoring and regulation. Anti-Communist and anti-labor policies proved to be the other catalyst for the new law. The city’s very active Waiters’ Union, which waged some militant strikes the year the cabaret card requirement was first issued, was regarded by state and federal authorities as a beehive of radical activity.26 Although there were legal precedents for denying persons convicted of a felony or narcotics-related crime employment in bars and taverns, the city had never granted the police the power to deny performers the right to work. Monk didn’t think much about it at the time. It was just another requirement for a gig. He was just happy to work.
• • •
In only three years, Henry Minton had succeeded in creating a modern version of the Rhythm Club, a space where musicians could play for and with each other. But to characterize Minton’s Playhouse as a perpetual jam session would be a gross exaggeration. Although most patrons gathered around the bar in those early days, there were plenty who came to listen to the music, and on rare occasions those who could pony up the fifty-cent fee to cover the cabaret tax got up and danced.27 The band’s repertoire included arrangements of popular tunes, from ballads like “Body and Soul” and “Stardust,” to swinging versions of “I Found a New Baby” or “Stompin’ at the Savoy,” and quite a few vocal numbers. Teddy Hill made sure there were vocalists on hand besides Joe Guy. First, he hired a pretty young singer named Betty Roché, who had come to Hill’s attention after winning an amateur night contest at the Apollo. She fit right in. As her future boss, Duke Ellington, recalled, “She had a soul inflection in a bop state of intrigue, and it was presented to the listener in a most unbelievable manner by a little girl with an adult delivery. . . . She never imitated anybody, and she never sounded like anybody but Betty Roché.”28 Then Hill employed two alumni of Horace Henderson’s band, Viola Jefferson and Duke Groner. All three singers worked at Minton’s throughout 1941. The 35-year-old, Oklahoma-born Groner was the elder of the group, though he had only recently come to New York after the Horace Henderson band broke up. He was living in the Cecil Hotel when Minton’s took off, and often came downstairs to sit in with the band or perform duets with Betty Roché. Teddy Hill liked what he heard and hired him. “We would sing cabaret style,” Groner recalled, “walk around the tables and sing different ballads while the band was playing.”29
Various musicians sat in with the band almost every night, but except for Monday nights, these were not open jam sessions. The “regulars” tended to be musicians with whom the band was familiar: guitarist Charlie Christian, trumpeters Roy Eldridge, Hot Lips Page, and Benny Harris; saxophonists Rudy Williams, Kermit Scott, Herbie Fields, Al Sears, and Jimmy Wright, as well as more noteworthy figures: Lester Young, Ben Webster, Benny Carter, Don Byas, and Monk’s future employer, the legendary Coleman Hawkins. Monk often gave up the piano stool to Eddie Heywood, Ken Kersey, and Teddy Wilson, among others.30 Perhaps the most exciting regular addition to the band was a kid who always came on stage empty-handed: the extraordinary tap dancer and singer “Baby” Laurence Jackson. Barely twenty years old when he began hanging out at Minton’s, Laurence was already renowned in jazz circles as one of the greatest hoofers alive.31
Monday nights were different. Monday was the off-night for the Apollo Theater, so Teddy Hill would invite the performers booked that week over to Minton’s for a free buffet dinner and to hang out. Deemed “Celebrity Night,” these were genuine “to-do’s”—the whisky flowed, the crowds gathered, and the music didn’t stop until 4:00 a.m. After the fans and regular patrons cleared out, things got interesting. “[T]here wouldn’t be anyone left in the joint but musicians and entertainers,” Duke Groner remembered. “And that’s when it was just like one big happy Christmas party, every Monday night. You had different bands, different dancers, comedians, and all. It was just a happy-go-lucky thing. Everybody would play—if you were an instrumentalist and you felt like getting out your horn to come up, you were welcome.”32 There were as many as fifteen musicians crammed together on the bandstand, and a few others in the audience anxiously waiting their turn to jump in. Of course, the Monday night jam sessions violated Local 802 rules and union members caught playing without a contract faced fines between $100 and $500.33 The regular union rep at the time, a man named Bob Roberts, made infrequent appearances to bring the open sessions to a premature end, but for the most part, the union looked the other way.34
An irregular but nevertheless important participant in the Monday night sessions was former Teddy Hill Orchestra alumnus John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie, a young trumpeter at the forefront of the development of modern jazz. Monk had met Dizzy about two or three years earlier at the Rhythm Club, which had moved to 133rd Street, but during Minton’s heyday in 1941, Dizzy barely had time to get up to 118th before 4:00 a.m. Not long after Teddy Hill took over, Gillespie was out of town a lot with Cab Calloway’s orchestra, and after he was fired he worked at the Famous Door and Kelly’s Stable, where the last set began at 3:00 a.m.35 Therefore, after work Dizzy headed further uptown to the other Harlem after-hours club noted for its jam sessions: Monroe’s Uptown House on 134th Street. He was joined by several Mintonians, whose muses remained restless well into daybreak. Monroe’s kept its doors open until 7:00 a.m. Like Minton’s, Monroe’s was black-owned and operated, established a few years earlier by jazz entrepreneur Clark Monroe. The informal jam sessions began unintentionally. In 1940, Monroe hired nineteen-year-old Al Tinney to be the house pianist in a trio with trumpet player Russ “Popeye” Gillon and Ebenezer Paul on bass. Tinney was playing what later would be considered modern harmonies,36 which he learned from working with George Gershwin on one of his productions of Porgy and Bess. Tinney also befriended a number of young, innovative musicians who sat in frequently. By early 1941, the trio became a full-fledged small band that included Victor Coulsen and George Treadwell on trumpets, and Ray Abrams on tenor (drummer Max Roach joined the house band in 1942).37 “That’s where we all used to go after hours,” Dizzy Gillespie recalled, “until daylight, to play.”38
The most common story about the infamous jam sessions at both Minton’s and Monroe’s is that the young modernists who ran the bandstand would conspire together to keep lesser players from joining in. According to Dizzy, he and Monk would spend the afternoon together trying “to work out some complex variations on chords and the like, and we used them at night to scare away the no-talent guys.”39 Clarke remembers: “We invented tunes and chords so that people we didn’t want to play with us just couldn’t get up on the bandstand. . . . So when we had unwelcome sitters-in, we used to play different chords and things to discourage them. Now, in the blues, they would maybe play four chords; Monk would play twenty chords and completely lose them. Sometimes he would say to them, ‘Man, get off the stand—you’re not playing right.’ So the guy would say, ‘But I thought we were playing the blues’—and Monk would scowl and say, ‘That’s not the way we play the blues here; we changed all that.’ Monk could be very snide when he wanted to be—nothing fazed him. He’d say anything to anybody if he thought it was right. So people were always excusing him—because he could be very outspoken. That’s the way he was. If he got his face broken every time he did something like that, he would have been dead at twenty-one. Sometimes he was just plain insulting. ‘Oh man,’ he’d say in disgust, ‘you just can’t play.’ That was the way he would eliminate them. It was really a joke.”40
The employment of elaborate chord substitutions and rhythmic innovations in order to weed out the bad players, or so the story goes, ultimately contributed to the birth of bebop. Like everything else having to do with Minton’s, the story is greatly exaggerated and the truth a bit more complicated. Monk always rejected this interpretation of events. As far as he was concerned, “I was playing a gig, tryin’ to play music. While I was at Minton’s, anybody sat in who would come up there if he could play, I never bothered anybody. It was just a job.”41 And for every musician who experienced Minton’s as a cliquish, highly competitive musical culture, there are just as many who felt it was a welcoming place where good musicianship ruled. Pianist “Sir” Charles Thompson never experienced competition, nor had he heard about Monk and others deliberately confusing the less competent musicians. “There was just a bunch of musicians having fun together.” And from his first encounter with Thelonious at Minton’s, he always knew him as a “very, very, very, very nice, quiet man. Never talked too much about anything. Always smiled. I never saw a bad expression on Monk’s face, ever.”42 Teddy Hill concurred: “I’ve never heard him in an argument seriously with anybody yet. He’d much rather take the worst of it than to argue too much about anything. I’ve never seen him excited except when he’s playing.”43 For all of Monk’s alleged critical wrath, he turned out to be a patient and sympathetic teacher to some of the young musicians who struggled on the bandstand. Bass trombonist Ted Kelly remembers sitting in one night and having a difficult time. When the tune was over, Monk pulled him aside and said, “Man, come by the house tomorrow, because you don’t know what the hell you’re doing.” Kelly, who happened to live a few doors from Monk at 247 West 63rd, went by his house for lessons for several days in a row. When Monk thought he was ready, he brought him back up to Minton’s where they rehearsed. Monk then asked Dizzy to give him a job.44
Even Kenny Clarke’s recollections of what happened at Minton’s were inconsistent. In a 1963 interview Clarke insisted that, “There’s no truth to the story that we purposely played weird things to keep musicians outside the clique off the stand. All we asked was that the musician be able to handle himself.”45 Yet the legend is too popular to die. Every Minton’s devotee has a tale about a guy who played poorly. Dizzy Gillespie spoke about “the Demon,” a regular who would often jump on the bandstand with everyone but “couldn’t play to save his life.”46 Al Tinney recalls some of the best musicians getting lost in the music during these sessions. He recounts several occasions at Monroe’s when some of the guys “would go out and get a little high, and they would come back and they didn’t know what they were playing some of the time. They would say, ‘Where we at?’ or ‘What channel is it?’ They forgot what tunes they were playing at particular times.”47
Monk was less concerned with keeping poor players at bay than with achieving new sounds or working through musical problems. He’d show up at Minton’s in the afternoons to practice and usually stayed well past closing time. “I’ve had to come back and plead with him,” complained Teddy Hill, “to quit playin’ the piano so I could close up the place ’cause it was against the law to keep it open any longer.”48 From Minton’s, he would visit friends who had a piano, sometimes waking them up at an ungodly hour just so he could work out a problem or a new composition. He lived on about five hours of sleep and often skipped a meal or two. Thelonious was known to fall asleep at the piano.49 On the other hand, Monk’s sleepless nights and early-morning visits to friends were also early signs that something wasn’t right. Monk experienced episodes of manic behavior, intense creativity, and a feverish energy, followed by a day or two of sleep.50 These “crashes” may indicate early signs of bipolar disorder, but it is hard to say with any certainty, since no one in his family observed behavior that might be described as “depression.” While recognizing the severity of his depression in later years, his sister Marion observed that as a young man, Thelonious “was very seldom, you know, depressed or anything. If he was he didn’t act it around the house.”51
Very few psychiatrists, let alone lay people, understood the causes and nature of bipolar disorder at the time, so it is not surprising that musicians, fans, and especially journalists interpreted Monk’s behaviors as quirky personality traits or evidence of eccentricity. The horrible conditions under which jazz musicians labored only exacerbated his illness. The jazz club was a veritable health hazard: Alcohol was not only the clubs’ primary commodity and their raison d’être, but club owners often encouraged musicians to “run a tab,” which was then deducted from the night’s pay. Narcotics and other illegal drugs were readily available, and in spite of occasional raids, the police tended to look the other way as long as they were paid off. And despite the presence of a union, jazz musicians were expected to play four sets, each over an hour. Some gigs did not end until 4:00 a.m., and during the winter months, the movement in and out of clubs can place undue strain on the body.52
Occasionally, Monk would disappear from the bandstand, sometimes going outside to smoke reefer. But more often than not, Teddy Hill found him sitting in the kitchen writing music.53 His favorite spot for thinking and talking about music was the basement at Minton’s, a small, diamond-shaped room with low ceilings, which Hill eventually turned into a separate after-hours club. Monk used the space to practice with other young musicians and rehearse various bands he tried to put together. It was here that he, Dizzy, Kenny Clarke, and others worked out chord substitutions, alternative voicings, and harmonic devices that could “modernize” swing music. In particular, Monk preferred descending chromatic chord progressions and dissonant, “open-voiced” chords made up of just the root and the seventh or ninth degree of the scale (See Appendix). His chords often elicited chuckles from the audience, but Monk didn’t mind. He later remarked, “Anything that’s very good will make you laugh in admiration, so it must be humor to make you laugh—or maybe it makes you laugh in surprise because it knocks you out.”54 Humorous, but no less serious. Monk’s chords were a product of years of training, experimentation, and a solid understanding of music theory. Monk knew it, which is why he became so annoyed when critics, musicians, or fans—even the sympathetic ones—described his chords as “wrong” or “weird.”55
Monk applied his harmonic innovations to older standards and pop songs, which formed the basic repertoire for the nightly jam sessions. They played tunes such as “Nice Work If You Can Get It,” “I Found a Million Dollar Baby,” “Body and Soul,” “Indiana,” “My Melancholy Baby,” “Sweet Lorraine,” “Sweet Georgia Brown,” to name a few. Despite his chord substitutions, he remained surprisingly loyal to the original tunes. Indeed, not unlike pianist Al Tinney at Monroe’s, Monk relished the sonorities of songs like “Nice Work” partly because Gershwin wrote these with so-called “modern” harmonic devices such as the flat ninth.56 Of course, to Monk’s ears the “flat ninth” wasn’t so modern. His two years on the road playing sanctified music familiarized him with the flat ninth and other dissonant harmonies.
Minton’s also provided a fertile environment for the budding composer. Legend has it that Thelonious had already composed some of his best-known tunes in the mid-1930s, while he was a teenager. Yet he did not publish or copyright anything until he started working at Minton’s. Monk himself confirms this: “I started composing around 1942 when I was at Minton’s.”57 His first two tunes were actually copyrighted in 1941, but he probably did not count them because they were collaborations with fellow Mintonians. The first, and most famous, was written in collaboration with Kenny Clarke and copyrighted on June 2, 1941. Initially called “Fly Rite” and then “Iambic Pentameter,” Monk finally renamed it “Epistrophy.” Clarke claims credit for the melodic line. He said he came up with the melody after Charlie Christian showed him a fingering while fooling around with a friend’s ukulele.58 Monk is given credit for writing the piano accompaniment, which reflects his fondness for chromaticism.59 The title, “Epistrophy” or “Epistrophe,” means “turning about” in Greek, and refers to a literary device in which a word or expression is deliberately repeated at the end of successive phrases, clauses, sentences, or verses.60 A less common definition could be found in the 1929 edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary: “2. Music. A phrase or section repeated at the end of the divisions of a cyclic composition; a refrain.”61 Combine the literary and the musical and we have a title that beautifully describes the structure of the melody. Constructed out of repeated phrases, the melodic line turns in on itself. It wasn’t an easy song to improvise on—the chord changes are entirely chromatic.62 Nevertheless, it became a Minton’s favorite, and the house band used it as the opening and closing theme between sets.63
Less noteworthy is a forgotten jump tune called “Harlem Is Awful Messy,” which Monk co-composed with Hot Lips Page and Joe Guy. Complete with humorous lyrics, “Harlem Is Awful Messy” was the trio’s vain attempt at a commercial hit. “Harlem Is Awful Messy” turned out to be a bust. Page submitted the copyright application on September 16, 1941, but the song was never recorded.64
Although Minton’s did become a kind of laboratory for new music, what was played in 1941 can hardly be called bebop. According to singer Duke Groner, Minton’s “never turned out to be absolutely a bebop place, because certain guys that would come around weren’t bebop musicians. So everyone was welcome. If a guy was a hard-swinging tenor man or alto man or trumpeter or trombone, whatever, he was welcome coming to play at the place.”65 For all the basement sessions, Monk never believed they were creating a completely new music; rather, they were doing what jazz musicians have always done—finding a voice, trying to play what nobody has heard before, and entertaining people. “I had no particular feeling that anything new was being built,” Monk explained. “It’s true modern jazz probably began to get popular there. But as for me, my mind was like it was before I worked in Minton’s.”66 Kenny Clarke agreed: “You know, we hadn’t really set out with the idea of developing any particular style of jazz. . . . [I]t was really unconscious.”67
Great music is what put Minton’s on the map. Monk attributed much of his own notoriety to the Monday night jam sessions: “As a result, all the different bands that played at the Apollo got to hear the original music, and it got around and talk started going about the fellows at Minton’s.”68 Word certainly “got around,” and so did the music, thanks to a Columbia University student named Jerry Newman. A twenty-three-year-old junior who loved jazz and played trombone in the university marching band, Newman owned a portable Wilcox-Gay Recordio “disc-cutter” that made recordings directly onto acetate discs. At first, it was just a hobby; he recorded radio shows and invited musicians over for informal recording sessions. Through those sessions he met Duke Groner, who brought him to Minton’s. Newman used to entertain the audience by lip-synching to his own homemade recordings of celebrated figures, including President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Bob Hope. His act became a regular part of the floor show.69 Newman’s compensation for his comic performances was the privilege to record the music at the club and at Monroe’s Uptown House. He would set up his equipment on the bandstand in the afternoon and then spend much of the night cutting 12-inch aluminum-based acetate discs.70 The larger discs had a longer recording time than the 10-inch commercial 78s, which were limited to about three minutes per side. By recording the original 12-inch acetates at 33 1/3, Newman was able to squeeze up to fifteen minutes of music on each side, allowing for more extended improvisations. He also cut “paper” discs, which he sold or sometimes gave to the musicians.71 The paper discs were actually plastic-coated. They cost seven cents and were not very durable, but many musicians appreciated the opportunity to hear themselves play—particularly young artists like Monk who had yet to record professionally. Newman remembers one recording in particular, a “half-hour version of ‘I Surrender Dear’ that Monk made with tenor saxophonist Herbie Fields, that he [Monk] wore out playing back during intermissions. He’d say, ‘it’s pretty good, and that tenor boy really goes.’ I still have it, but it can never be issued on account of its condition, plus the fact I ruined it by playing trombone on it.”72 When Newman decided to issue some of these recordings on the Vox label, or on his own Esoteric label years later, the musicians’ excitement wore off once it became clear they would not be paid.
Nevertheless, the recordings are extraordinarily valuable because they provide the first record of Thelonious Monk. Some of these original discs are not dated, but those that are were recorded between April and June of 1941, a few months into Monk’s gig. One of the earliest sessions, recorded on Wednesday, April 30, features Monk with the regular band (Guy, Fenton, Clarke), with Hot Lips Page, Benny Harris, and Herbie Fields (tenor sax) sitting in, on “Sweet Lorraine.” The tempo is the kind of plodding speed Monk loved. In an eight-bar introduction, Monk playfully embellishes the melody with dissonance and humor. In the body of the tune, Monk creates a busy harmonic universe behind the soloists, sometimes creating little countermelodies using block chords, sometimes restating the melody. At the bridge, Monk takes off, much like his hero, Herman Chittison, with intricate phrases and slightly off-meter runs that dance across the entire keyboard. Monk was proud of those runs. In an interview with Les Tomkins many years later, he pointed to those passages in response to the naysayers who claimed he had no technique: “I guess those people are surprised when they hear certain things that I’ve done on records. They must feel awful silly about saying I don’t have no technique. Because I know you’ve heard me make some fast runs. You can dig how stupid the statement is. I’m one of the cats that used to start them playing like lightning. We used to play like lightning all night long up at Minton’s sometimes. I got tired playing fast all the time. You get so you automatically play fast. You can’t play no other way.”73
Monk might have gotten tired of playing fast, but he also tired of the criticism. For years to come, many of his sidemen bore witness to those vulnerable moments when Monk wanted to prove the critics wrong while simultaneously exposing the fallacy that lots of notes at high velocity necessarily make better music. Tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin recalls one night in the late 1950s when Monk suddenly said to him, “ ‘See, I can play like Art Tatum if I want.’ And I said, ‘Get out of here, Thelonious! Stop kidding around!’ He said, ‘Well, check this out.’ He made a Tatumesque run on the piano and my eyeballs and my ears almost fell off of my head. He said, ‘But I don’t need that.’ So he played what he had to play, that’s all it is. He didn’t need to be making flourishes and doing pianistic aerobics. He just played what he wanted to play and he did it perfectly.”74
We can hear even more of these fast, intricate runs on “My Melancholy Baby,” which the band recorded that same night, April 30.75 Little Benny Harris sits in on trumpet and Clarke keeps more of a 2/4 swing beat on his hi-hat, giving the song a kind of vintage feel. After all, it is one of the oldest standards in the book, dating back to at least 1912.76 Monk is the first soloist, this time taking an entire chorus. What he plays here is unmistakably Monk, but his debt to Chittison once again is apparent. Indeed, the similarities between what Monk plays and Chittison’s 1938 recording of “My Melancholy Baby” are striking.77 They both stay rooted to the melody while busily filling in space with intricate runs and other embellishments that not only exploit the entire range of the keyboard, but are deliberately jagged or uneven. The difference, however, is that Monk exaggerates all of these elements: his playing is even more jagged, more uneven, less dense in terms of providing more breathing space between notes, and he takes even greater intervallic steps. We hear the first examples of Monk’s signature “whole tone” runs—scales based entirely on whole steps.
On Saturday night, May 4, Newman captured one of Monk’s finest, and longest, performances—a lively version of Gershwin’s “Nice Work If You Can Get It” with the regular house band.78 Monk’s mastery of “Nice Work” suggests that it was a song he played often. He would continue to play it for many years. It is a perfect vehicle for the kind of descending harmonic movement and sonorities that he loved so much. Throughout the song a listener can really hear Monk—not just his fingers at work, but his voice. Like a lot of pianists, he tended to sing solfeggio while he played, though a more precise description might be groaning, moaning, and humming. As he got into a song, he became louder, sometimes threatening to compete with the piano. His old mentor, Willie “The Lion” Smith, saw this as a sign of a serious player: “a pianist who growls, hums, and talks to the piano is a guy who is trying hard to create something for himself.”79
If there is anything these recordings reveal, it is Monk trying to create something for himself. Besides employing substitute chord progressions and inventing new ways to improvise on a melody, Monk attempted to alter the structure of each song and create a new role for the piano in the rhythm section. He had no interest in “comping”—accompanying a soloist by simply feeding him chords—and if a soloist depended on the piano to provide the harmonic foundation, then working with Monk could be a challenge. As Dizzy explained, “If you’re playing with Monk and you don’t know the changes, shame on you. You’ll never hear them from him.”80 What Monk plays behind Joe Guy on “Nice Work,” for example, sounds like a solo, space filled with two-handed tremolos, jagged runs up and down the piano over several octaves, restatements of the melody, and little phrases that work as countermelodies. To Monk the piano was “orchestral” in that it had the capacity to embody all the elements of an entire band.81
For all of Monk’s innovation and experimentation, his biggest challenge was backing singers. People came to Minton’s to be entertained, and when singers like Duke Groner and Betty Roché belted out a romantic ballad, patrons expected a beautiful accompaniment. While Groner and Roché appreciated Monk’s creativity, they did not think much of him as an accompanist. As Groner explained: “Well, it was a little difficult to do some vocals with Monk, because Monk was a way-out pianist, which he still is today. Betty and I both would have to tell him to play a little straighter and not put too much of his Monk stuff in there, you know. Because he would get to playing and he would get his weird chords and everything, and sometimes as a singer it would kind of throw us off. He would say all the time that he was right on the ball. But sometimes he was off-key.”82
In late May, vocalist Helen Humes of Count Basie’s band sat in at Minton’s, and Monk backed her up without incident and apparently without complaint. The sensational Don Byas, another Basie band member, augmented the group on tenor, and Harold “Doc” West—a Minton’s regular—may have occupied the drum chair in place of Kenny Clarke.83 Monk launched a stunning rendition of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust” with a four-bar introduction in which the melody was barely recognizable, but then he stayed out of Humes’s way, uncharacteristically. Ironically, Thelonious was never a fan of “Stardust,” which he once described as “a sad song . . . if you know anything about music and harmony.” He complained outright that the “music is lousy.” “You have to do a lot of figuring how to play that in order to make it sound good.”84
The recordings from Minton’s, which number about twenty-three in all, prove that in 1941, Thelonious was neither a young version of Teddy Wilson nor a fully realized version of himself. He had begun to form the core of his musical conception, developed out of his own personal and collective explorations of harmony, rhythm, and the actual mechanics of the piano, as well as existing styles and musical traditions. The influence of Herman Chittison, Earl “Fatha” Hines, Art Tatum, even Count Basie is evident in many of these Minton’s recordings. And they only represent a fraction of what was happening that year. Jerry Newman insisted that, “The released sides don’t come anywhere near indicating how good he was in those days.”85
By mid-summer, the jam sessions at Minton’s, as well as at Monroe’s Uptown House, had become renowned in New York City and beyond. Pianist and writer Herbie Nichols, one of Thelonious’s first real champions, mentioned them in his weekly column for the black-owned New York Age: “The jam session has finally come to the attention of our swing magazines.” Everyone who was anyone in the jazz world found their way to these Harlem after-hours joints, choosing to “miss their sleep” rather than miss out on an opportunity to jam with Roy Eldridge, Coleman Hawkins, and the like.86
Besides some publicity in the black press, Monk and the Minton’s house band enjoyed some radio play, courtesy of Jerry Newman—though it was limited to Columbia University’s campus. In February of that year, the Columbia University Radio Club formed and began broadcasting jazz to the dormitories. In June or July, Newman and friends from the club decided to introduce the music of Minton’s to their listeners, which meant recording sets with the house band in the afternoon and running the acetates up the hill to be played on campus that evening, as if they were coming from Minton’s “live.”87 The audience consisted of a few bemused day-time regulars and the Columbia students, who tried in vain to recreate the lively atmosphere of Minton’s with audible chatter and enthusiastic applause after each song. With Jerry Newman and an anonymous student alternating as master of ceremonies, the Columbia crew recorded four “sets”—each one opening and closing with “Epistrophy.” In order to make everything fit on the discs, the musicians tightly controlled each set, performing between four and seven songs (including the opening and closing theme), with each song running between one-and-a-half and three minutes. The emceeing duties were less than professional. At the end of one set, the anonymous emcee closed with: “This has been the Jumpin’ Jive of Joe Guy and Kenny Clarke and their orchestra, featuring Nick Fenton on bass and a guy named Monk on piano. I’m sorry, I haven’t found out his last name.”88 Though perhaps meant in jest, Newman reveals a lack of respect for Thelonious, who actually co-led the band with Clarke.
Despite the announcer’s errors, it is a shame these recordings did not reach beyond campus. They included a few genuine jewels that did not appear on Newman’s later releases. Joe Guy’s “Rear Back,” with its somewhat risqué lyrics, is the only surviving example of Monk playing blues in this period. His solo and accompaniment are sparse, reminiscent of Count Basie. Monk’s improvisations build closely on the melody. Elsewhere, these recordings show how Monk backed vocalists—and why so many complained. Monk’s many runs and his inclination to play the melody in unison threatens to overwhelm Duke Groner, who sounds as if he’s singing with his hands over his ears.
Perhaps the most revelatory tune from these sessions is “Meet Dr. Christian,” one of Charlie Christian’s riffs on “I Got Rhythm” changes. One of Monk’s later and most recorded compositions, “Rhythm-a-ning,” begins with four bars that are practically identical to “Meet Dr. Christian.” In turn, the first eight bars of Christian’s tune are lifted verbatim from a horn riff Mary Lou Williams wrote for an arrangement of “Walking and Swinging,” first recorded by the Andy Kirk Orchestra in 1936.89 Monk’s appropriation of Williams’s phrase represents a rare example of musical “borrowing” from an artist who prided himself on originality.
• • •
The fame of Minton’s house band did not translate into outside gigs or a recording contract for Monk. He continued to live at home with his mother, although now he enjoyed a bit more space since Marion married in 1939, moved into her own Phipps apartment, and gave birth to her first-born son, Alonzo, on May 31, 1940. Still, Thelonious spent most of his days and nights in Harlem, roaming from house to house playing piano, and eventually crashing at Sonny’s apartment on 136th. He continued to date Rubie Richardson, but she rarely made her way uptown.90 As Monk became more involved with his music, according to Teddy Hill, he “lost touch with everything else.” Hill recalled a couple of times when Monk arrived at Minton’s in the company of his girlfriend, but would forget she was there and leave without her.91
Monk’s other obsessions, unfortunately, were gin and reefer. Drugs and alcohol were occupational hazards for jazz musicians; they worked in arenas in which alcohol was pushed and illegal drugs were readily available. There is no evidence that Monk became an addict, but he was known to drink quite a bit. Kenny Clarke recalls many nights accompanying Thelonious to the subway after a gig and “Monk would be very, very drunk.” They would stand on the uptown platform, talking, until it was time to cut out, at which point an inebriated Monk would climb down from the platform, cross the tracks, and pull himself up onto the downtown platform. Clarke was always amazed he never electrocuted himself on the third rail.92 Trumpeter Johnny Carisi, one of the few white musicians at Minton’s, remembered the club as a real drinking den. “At Minton’s there was a lotta getting loaded. As a matter of fact, Monk taught me how to drink. At the end of a set, he’d say, ‘Come on, come to the bar.’ I’d say, ‘Monk, I don’t drink much.’ He insisted. He’d say, ‘What? Call yourself a jazz player . . . ’ And the next thing you know he had me drinking double gins.”93
Whether it was the drinking or falling asleep at the piano or the occasional disappearances from the bandstand, or simply a desire for a new sound, Teddy Hill let Monk go before the end of the year was up. Monk continued to show up at Minton’s and he was always welcomed, but he was no longer on the payroll.94
By the end of 1941, Minton’s was no longer the same; the music never dulled but the crowds waned a bit, as was the case for many jazz clubs across the country. 95 Then came the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and with it the sobering reality that America was at war.