Thelonious found himself back in familiar territory—a struggling musician cobbling together gigs here and there. Monte Kay helped out a little, inviting Monk to participate in a series of Sunday afternoon jam sessions he sponsored at Lincoln Square. Monk performed in the first event, held January 7, 1945. He was in good company. The first band was led by Herbie Fields and included such luminaries as Buck Clayton, Don Byas, Charlie Shavers, clarinetist Buster Bailey, as well as familiar faces: Harold “Doc” West, Charlie Parker, and Baby Laurence on taps. Monk alternated with Joe Albany on piano.1 The sessions, which were really intended for dancers, began around 4:00 in the afternoon and didn’t end until 2:00 a.m. But the serious musicians and jazz fans came to listen. The Lincoln Square Sunday jam sessions left a lasting impact on Jackie McLean, then just a teenager developing his skills on the alto saxophone. “People could dance in the back if they wanted to, but most people used to take their folding chairs and move them up near the front to be near the music. That’s what they were there for, not for dancing.”2
Monk was virtually jobless until April, when Elbert “Skippy” Williams asked him to join his much-touted twenty-three-piece orchestra.3 An underrated tenor player out of Cleveland, Williams had come up through the ranks of the big bands. Just a year older than Thelonious, he’d already served time with Eddie Cole’s band in Chicago, Count Basie, Edgar Hayes, Earl Bostic, Lucky Millinder, and, most famously, Duke Ellington.4
Williams’s band struggled to secure regular work. Meanwhile, as Thelonious scraped money together for subway fare and bummed cigarettes from friends, Dizzy and Charlie “Yardbird” Parker had become the newest sensations. “Bebop” was the word on the street, and Bird and Diz were marketed as the world’s greatest purveyors of the new music. In March, they brought a quintet to the Three Deuces that included Al Haig on piano, Curley Russell on bass, and Max Roach on drums. Don Byas occasionally sat in, as well. That spring, the Three Deuces was the hottest jazz spot in New York. On Wednesday, May 16, Monte Kay and Mal Braveman hosted the first of another series of concerts, this time at Town Hall, showcasing “Modern Music.” Under the auspices of the “New Jazz Foundation,” the promoters headlined Gillespie, Esquire Magazine’s “Top New Trumpet Star of 1945,” with Charlie Parker. Leonard Feather emceed and added his own trio to the line-up in order to accompany several guest artists, including Hot Lips Page, singer Dinah Washington, violinist Stuff Smith, and Skippy Williams. Several featured guests did not show up, much to the consternation of the audience, and the Gillespie-Parker Quintet seized the spotlight.5
Monk was not invited to participate in this historic concert, despite the fact that his new boss was among those on stage, nor was he asked to play in the next (and last) “New Jazz Foundation” event on June 22. “ ’Round Midnight” was one of the band’s feature pieces, along with a tune titled “Dizzy Atmosphere,” which Monk swore was derived from his ideas. To add insult to injury, Dizzy began sporting a beret with a little piano clip to accompany his heavy horn-rimmed glasses! Watching Bird and Diz catapult to fame—playing some of Monk’s music—deeply wounded Thelonious. Nearly two decades later, in an interview with the French Jazz Magazine, he was still upset about his treatment in those days vis-à-vis Bird and Dizzy:
I feel like I have contributed more to modern jazz than all of the other musicians combined. That’s why I don’t like to always hear: “Gillespie and Parker brought the revolution to Jazz,” when I know most of the ideas came from me. Dizzy and Bird did nothing for me musically, they didn’t teach me anything. In fact, they were the ones who came to me with questions, but they got all the credit. They’re supposed to be the founders of modern jazz when most of the time they only interpreted my ideas. . . . Most musicians know this, which is why they all adopted “52nd Street Theme.” It’s my music: “ ’Round About Midnight,” “Dizzy Atmosphere.” . . . It’s my feeling that through playing with me, by copying my harmonies, by asking me for advice, by asking me how to get the best sound, how to write good arrangements, and relying on me to correct their music, they composed themes that came directly from me. . . . Meanwhile, I wasn’t even able to find a gig. Sometimes I couldn’t even enter Birdland. Do you realize what it’s like to a musician to hear his own compositions and not to be able to get inside [a club]?6
In all fairness, Charlie Parker did give credit to Monk in virtually every interview he conducted, calling him a true “original.”7 And the “New Jazz Foundation” concerts, despite their unequivocal historical value in legitimizing the music, were not all that well attended. But the damage was done. Skippy Williams’s band managed to draw a little attention, enough to secure an engagement at the Down Beat Club playing Monday and Tuesday nights.8 For the entire month of August, Monk was back in familiar settings. But two nights a week wasn’t enough to pay the bills. Fortuitously, Coleman Hawkins returned from California in the spring and was hired to lead a quartet at the Down Beat Club. Although the club announced as early as June that he’d be appearing “nitely” opposite Billie Holiday, he apparently did not open until August 30.9 Hawkins offered Monk the piano chair and the two were reunited with drummer Denzil Best. At the very last minute, Hawkins hired a twenty-six-year-old bass player from Detroit named Al McKibbon. His résumé included a stint with Lucky Millinder’s Orchestra and Tab Smith’s band, but he quit because he wasn’t crazy about touring the South. When he met Hawkins, he was so broke that he had to borrow a bass to make the gig.10
• • •
The war officially ended on September 2, 1945. A celebratory mood pervaded the country, including The Street, where the hipsters were usually too cool to care. War-weary New Yorkers were ready to put the past behind them and embrace the promise of peace, prosperity, and productivity. It was the dawn of a new era, the “American Century,” when the U.S. emerged as the leading global power. Technology became the country’s obsession—the possibilities of space exploration, jet travel, the availability of cheap televisions and high-fidelity recordings. Speed was the order of the day. It was also a period of uncertainty. The atomic age had arrived, revealing an ominous side with the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also promising new sources of power (energy and military).
Jazz was the perfect accompaniment to the new atomic age. It had become faster and more dissonant, without losing its sense of joy and humor. Audiences were drawn to Bird’s velocity and his joyous, spring-like melodies. From Hawk, Monk, and company, came hip harmonies, danceable tempos, and nostalgic references to foot-stomping swing. (Indeed, in late September 1945, Joe Davis released “Drifting on a Reed” and “Flying Hawk,” selling a respectable 9,000 discs, making it the third best-selling record in his catalogue.11) The popularity of the clubs exploded. For anyone looking to celebrate the return of the GIs, to laugh after so many years of killing and dying, here was exuberant fun. Monk pulled listeners in because he made them laugh and wonder if he was for real. Miles Davis would rush over to the Down Beat Club to catch Hawkins and Monk while on his break from playing with Bird. “He used to come in with his horn,” McKibbon recalled, “and he’d sit up on the bandstand and he’d listen to us play, watch what Monk was doing. And sometimes Monk would hit something strange . . . and he’d [Miles Davis] figure it out on his horn, but he’d never play. He would just sit and listen and laugh to himself.”12
In Miles’s version of the story, he did play, and Monk mentored him. “I used to ask Monk, every fucking night, to play ‘ ’Round About Midnight.’ I’d say, ‘How’d I play it?’, because he wrote it, right? And he’d said, ‘You didn’t play it right.’ Next night. ‘Did I play it any better?’ ‘A little bit better, but that ain’t the way it goes.’ And one night I asked him, ‘Yeah, you can play it.’ . . . I [finally] got the sound. . . . It took me a long time to be able to play that song.”13 Miles had great admiration for Monk as a teacher and elder (nine years separated them), and he found his compositions brilliant and beautifully balanced. As someone who spent his days at Juilliard studying the great composers of the Western tradition, Miles believed “ ’Round Midnight” was as challenging as anything Ravel, Schoenberg, or Bach had to offer. In order to play it correctly, Miles explained many years later, “You got to get all the harmonics and everything together. You have to hear the song and play it, and improvise so he [Monk] could hear the melody. . . . You have to play it so you can hear the chord changes and also hear the top. It’s one of those things that you had to hear. You had to learn it and forget it.”14 Hanging out with guys like Monk ultimately convinced Miles to drop out of Juilliard. “Monk taught me more than anyone on the street when I was down there. [He’s] the one who really showed me everything.” He taught by demonstration rather than explanation. He would say very little, and when he did explain something he may say it once. Otherwise, you had to pay strict attention and see everything he was doing if you wanted to learn. “If you’re serious you could learn from him, but if you’re bullshitting you wouldn’t see nothing.”15
In November, Clark Monroe hired Hawkins’s band to replace Bird’s group, but the opening was delayed because police temporarily suspended the Spotlite’s cabaret license. The Spotlite was one of four clubs—the others were the Down Beat, Three Deuces, and the Onyx Club—that police raided on the suspicion of drug trafficking. Dozens of people were picked up and for a couple of weeks the clubs could not serve liquor or host live music.16 By the time the Spotlite reopened and Hawkins’s band got back to work, they were ready to leave town. Norman Granz invited Hawk back to California, this time for a three-week national tour that would open in Los Angeles on November 26 and terminate in Victoria, British Columbia.17 This time, Monk did not hesitate; he was ready for California.
On the way, they participated in an all-star concert at the Philadelphia Academy of Music. The reviewer for Metronome complained, “The trio was hampered not a little by pianist Thelonious Monk.”18 From there, they played a bar in Washington, D.C. The owner’s explicit racism made the gig less than comfortable for the group, although Monk—always the practical joker—found ways to turn the tension into levity. As Al McKibbon remembered it, “We played in a bar where the owner was prejudiced as hell, man. He just hated Blacks, you know. He had a big easychair behind the bar that was his private chair, he sat in it. Every intermission, Monk would go and sit in that chair. [laughter] It’d break me up. He’d just sit there and smile. And steam would be coming out of the guy’s ears.”19 They could laugh at the absurdity of the situation, yet it was a sign of the times. After having battled Nazis in Europe, black soldiers were returning home to the same old Jim Crow. The homefront of the Double Victory campaign had yet to be won. Even in the nation’s capital, some restaurants would not serve African-Americans, hotels denied them rooms, and the police constantly harassed them. In some instances, black men in uniform were targets of hate crimes because they refused to “stay in their place.” And to further exacerbate racial tensions, returning veterans and postwar demobilization meant significant shortages of jobs and housing. African-Americans suffered more than most because they were typically the “first fired, last hired.”
Norman Granz empathized with the plight of black people, and viewed his Jazz at the Philharmonic series as a blow against racial prejudice. His initial vision was to take jazz out of the nightclubs and into the concert hall. He wanted to give Negro music pride of place, and in the process, convince concertgoers that the brown men and women on stage were artists—American artists. He also believed that this music could bring people together across the color line. He launched his series in the early part of 1944 with a number of concerts held at Music Town, an auditorium on the predominantly black Westside of Los Angeles. But the real catalyst for the series was a benefit concert he organized on July 2, 1944, on behalf of a group of Mexican-American teens wrongfully arrested after the “Sleepy Lagoon” murder case. Seventeen kids were rounded up after a young gang member had been found dead. Despite little or no evidence, they were convicted of second-degree murder. The case became a cause célèbre attracting several notable figures, including Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth, and Anthony Quinn. The concert was a huge success, drawing an enthusiastic and racially mixed crowd of more than 2,000. It was the power of jazz at work, and Granz was a true believer. He was only twenty-six years old, one year younger than Thelonious.20
The band opened in Los Angeles at Philharmonic Hall to a crowd of 2,600. It was the largest audience Thelonious had ever had to face, and perhaps the most enthusiastic. Hawkins’s group shared the stage with pianist Meade Lux Lewis, Helen Humes, and a band fronted by tenor player Corky Corcoran.21 Lucky Thompson was added to the group in order to re-create the dueling tenor style they had when Don Byas was in the band. As was Granz’s custom, the concert culminated in a huge jam session, featuring Hawkins and combining members of both bands, including guitarist Barney Kessel, Willie Smith (alto), Vido Musso (tenor), and former Hawkins sideman Howard McGhee.22
The opening concert proved to be the pinnacle of the entire tour. Philo Records sponsored the tour, though their budget was limited. Philo provided a rickety bus that carried them to San Diego for a performance, but could not make it all the way up the coast to Portland, Oregon. They had to travel the last two legs of the trip by train. For Granz, who cancelled the Southern leg of the tour because of segregation, the trip became a lesson in the realities of West Coast Jim Crow. When the band arrived in Portland, fatigued and famished, they were refused service at the first restaurant they entered.23 Although most hotels were for whites only, a few catered to black guests. Given Granz’s meager budget, only the headliners like Hawk could afford a hotel anyway. So the band members did what most black jazz musicians have always done: they turned to local ministers and found lodging in private homes in the black community.24
The group was booked to do two shows at Portland’s Mayfair Theater on a Tuesday, December 4—a matinee at 4:15 and an 8:30 show. Granz didn’t fill the Mayfair, but the concert drew a pretty good crowd for a Tuesday evening, thanks to all the advance publicity he put out. Ads appeared in all the local papers, including one in the black-owned People’s Observer that promised an “All Colored All Star ‘Jazz Symphony’ ” that could “play everything from Brahms to Boogie!”25 Hawkins and Eldridge were clearly the headliners, but the other artists were given equal prominence. Although the critic for the Portland Oregonian mistook the ad to mean that they would play “Brahms to Boogie,” he nevertheless, found the performances satisfying, singling out Hawkins and Thompson for special praise (“Coleman Hawkins and Lucky Thompson conked them with their saxes.”)26
The critic for the Oregonian never mentioned Thelonious or even made a passing reference to the pianist. But Monk did not go over well with much of the audience. According to one report, Roy Eldridge grimaced every time Monk played chords and the crowd chuckled. However, among the serious musicians who made a pilgrimage from all over the Pacific Northwest to see this concert, Monk became one of the main attractions, second only to Hawk. Eighteen-year-old Floyd Standifer, a young trumpet phenom in the making, remembers sitting in the audience completely taken with Monk: “Here was this odd-looking guy who was making this room laugh. I learned about Monk from a magazine [probably Music Dial]. I hitchhiked in from Gresham, where I was going to school and playing in a band. It took me a while to realize that what I first thought were mistakes and missing notes were right according to what he was trying to do. He was getting a sound and energy out of the piano that couldn’t be heard any other way.”27
The next evening, the group found themselves in more relaxed surroundings. Granz booked the band for a week-long gig at the Dude Ranch, a black-owned club on North Broadway. Located in the heart of Portland’s black business and entertainment district, the Dude Ranch possessed a nice-sized dance floor, an elevated bandstand surrounded by rows of tables, and a balcony where gourmet dinners were served. The décor played on the “wild, wild west” theme, with oversized murals of black cowboys and waitresses dressed to look like Dale Evans in cowgirl get-ups. An appreciative audience filled every seat.28
Bill McClendon, jazz lover and editor of the Portland People’s Observer, wrote kindly about the performance at the Dude Ranch and the larger significance of the musicians’ presence in Portland. While he praised the Mayfair concert, which “knocked enthusiastic listeners to their benders,” he described something magical at the Dude Ranch. That night Hawkins’s band, Meade Lux Lewis, and Helen Humes “put on one of the most spectacular jam sessions that has been witnessed in this part of the country. Never before in the history of the Northwest has there been as much jazz music played per square minute by any group.” He took time to heap praise upon each and every artist, including Monk, whom he described as a “fine pianist with a lot of ultra-modern ideas . . . and a lightning-like right hand.”29 But the most startling and telling commentary came not from McClendon but from pianist Meade Lux Lewis. He stood up in the club in the middle of his set and delivered a speech about the racism the band experienced in Portland: “Many people here are elated over our music, but the musicians and the guys who understand what we can do know that we have not played like ourselves throughout. When we first arrived in Portland, some of our troupe members were refused service in a restaurant because they were Negroes. I don’t have to tell you the story about hotel accommodations. I hope . . . It didn’t matter that our combination was an aggregation of some of the finest exponents of American jazz. Neither was there any consideration to be shown us because we performed for the utter enjoyment of Portlanders.”30 For Lewis, who spoke for the entire traveling troupe, the welcome they received from the black community at the Dude Ranch changed the whole tenor of their experience. “In the first two performances here,” he concluded “we were working with a ‘what the hell’ attitude. Tonight the atmosphere is entirely different and I am sure you see what I mean.”31
Thelonious certainly knew what Lewis was talking about. He thrived on this sort of hospitality, especially so far from home. On the last night of their run at the Dude Ranch, he met a young black couple named Ed and Bernice Slaughter. They reminded Monk a little of Sonny and Geraldine back home—they were hip, smart, easy to talk to, and were parents of a little boy. Ed Slaughter owned the Savoy Billiard Parlor on Williams, and was famous around these parts for having the hippest juke box in town.32 He ordered his records through mail order companies and kept abreast of the New York jazz scene. The Slaughters were among the few who had heard about Monk before he arrived.
After the last of the customers filed out of the club, the Slaughters stayed behind with journalist Bill McClendon and Thelonious. “We sat there all night,” Bernice Slaughter remembered. “They closed at 2:30, and afterwards Monk sat there and played for us. Just me and my husband and McClendon were there. And he played two or three hours. After that, he walked home with us and we sat around and talked, played some records.”33 They spoke of many topics. “Well, he was a multi-dimensional man. He was into talking about literature and politics. That’s one reason he and my husband got along so well. They both liked to read and talk about what they’re reading and enjoy it. . . . Monk and my husband had great rapport. The jokes and everything. They really got along well.”34
Monk had to catch a train early in the morning, so the Slaughters stayed up with him until he left for the train station at the crack of dawn. About an hour later, there was a knock on the door: “There was Monk standing there with a bag of groceries for breakfast and three hats on his head! And a big grin. We were surprised. We opened the door and here he was with eggs and bacon. So I fixed him breakfast.” Monk stayed a little while longer, eating and laughing with his adopted West Coast family, but he had to get to Seattle to meet the rest of the band to make the final gig in Victoria, Canada. The only way to get there on time would be by plane, so Ed Slaughter drove Thelonious to the airport. It was quite a spectacle—two black men, one with three hats stacked on his head, trying to purchase an airline ticket to Seattle in 1945. His son, Ed Slaughter, Jr., remembers:
The only way my dad could get him on the plane is that he told the airline reservationist that he was a scientist and he had to go to Seattle for a meeting with the government [laughter]. The airport was very small in those days. So they paged him, “Thelonious Sphere Monk,” and he’s got these hats on his head and he’s got his suitcase with a belt wrapped around his suitcase and a cardboard box with rope on it. When he walked across the room to board, everybody in the airport stopped what they were doing and watched him.35
Monk made it to Victoria, but the concert was a complete bust. The turnout was so small that Granz canceled the rest of the tour and swallowed the loss. As a parting gift, he gave each musician a first-class train ticket to their destination of choice.36 Monk chose home.
• • •
Monk arrived home in time to spend the holidays with his family, to reunite with Nellie, and to return to work at the Spotlite with Coleman Hawkins’s quartet. They played opposite trumpeter Henry “Red” Allen. A veteran of the older swing bands, Allen was linked to the burgeoning “traditionalist” movement calling for jazz musicians to reject bebop and return to their New Orleans and Chicago swing roots. Between Allen and Hawkins, Spotlite patrons were treated to the old and the new. When Allen moved to the Onyx in late January, Clark Monroe decided to go all-modern, hiring Dizzy Gillespie’s sextet to fill his spot.37
According to Gillespie, Monroe offered him sixteen weeks—the first eight with the sextet and the second eight with a reconstructed big band. He was, after all, one of the hottest commodities in jazz at the moment. Yet Diz had had a dismal “Hepsations” big band tour of the South in 1945, thanks to Jim Crow, disorganization, and music deemed undanceable by Southern patrons. He had followed it with a booking in Los Angeles in the winter. Billy Berg hired a sextet led by Dizzy and Charlie Parker for an eight-week stint beginning on December 10.38 It was supposed to be a kind of introduction of the 52nd Street modernists, the bebop invasion of the West Coast. The popular myth is that the music was too far out for West Coast audiences and that patrons stopped coming to the club (c.f. Clint Eastwood’s Bird). In fact, Billy Berg’s was packed every night. And it wasn’t as if L.A. jazz fans were completely unfamiliar with the new music—Hawkins’s group with Monk had played the L.A. Philharmonic two weeks earlier to an enthusiastic crowd. What is true is that Berg wanted more commercial music, and Dizzy and Bird tried to satisfy his demands by adding a few vocal numbers to their repertoire, but they could only compromise so much. The biggest setback for the tour, however, had nothing to do with music. Toward the end of their engagement, Parker experienced a severe mental breakdown and ended up at Camarillo State Hospital for an extended stay.39
Before Dizzy left California, however, he replaced Bird with Lucky Thompson (fresh from his Portland stint with Monk and Hawkins), and made a few records for Ross Russell’s independent Dial label on February 7, 1946. One of the tracks was Monk’s “ ’Round Midnight,” to which he added his own eight-bar introduction and a nine-bar cadence or ending. Dizzy had originally written the introduction as the cadence to “I Can’t Get Started,” but it worked even better as an opening to “ ’Round Midnight.” Both additions were so popular that Monk himself made them integral to the entire composition in his own performances.40 The Dial version marked the second studio recording of Monk’s work, but Thelonious himself had yet to record any of his own tunes.
Monk did receive publishing royalties to which he was entitled: about two cents per record to be split with Cootie Williams and Bernie Hanighen. To add insult to injury, a couple of weeks after Dizzy’s band opened at the Spotlite, Leonard Feather arranged a recording session for Coleman Hawkins and did not include Monk. Billed as “Coleman Hawkins’ 52nd Street All-Stars,” Feather chose Jimmy Jones to play piano.41
Monk was grateful to have a steady job, but being passed over for another recording session was a hard pill to swallow. An even harder pill was witnessing the sensational press Dizzy received once his band took residence at the Spotlite. As soon as the sextet expanded into seventeen pieces, the big band became the headliner, while Hawkins’s group was slowly pushed to the margin. Hawk wasn’t jealous of the attention Gillespie was getting, but he did openly express his dislike for the big band, which he found a bit ragged and disorganized. “Dizzy sounded great with just six men,” he told a reporter from Metronome magazine. “Now he has a big band that plays the right kind of music but sloppily.”42 And he wasn’t wrong. As the band’s arranger and organizer, Walter “Gil” Fuller, explained, “they wanted a big band in there, and they gave us a week or a week and a half to get it together. . . . Dizzy can’t remember what happened. He didn’t even know what the music was gonna sound like and never showed up for rehearsals until Friday, the opening day.”43
When they got around to forming a band, they had no arrangements, and no budget to pay an arranger to put together some music. Gil Fuller turned to Billy Eckstine, hat in hand. The Eckstine band had broken up and Fuller knew that their arrangements were among the best of modern big band music. Eckstine generously shared what he had, which included compositions by Tadd Dameron, and both Fuller and Gillespie contributed compositions.44
Gillespie and Fuller recruited some of the finest young brass and reed players.45 To Dizzy’s delight, Kenny Clarke had just been discharged from the army and was ready to play again. Although Clarke had been away from the scene three years, his rhythmic conception was precisely what Gillespie wanted for the band.46 Now all he needed was a pianist. Bud Powell was on piano, but his tenure there was short-lived. “The money was a little erratic, and Bud was super-erratic,” Dizzy recalled in his memoir.47 Gillespie began looking for Powell’s replacement.
Meanwhile, Monk was playing with Hawkins, listening to Dizzy’s band during his break, and giving unsolicited advice. More importantly, Gil Fuller had begun to tap Thelonious for music. “Monk was a freak for tunes,” Fuller explained. “He had all kinds of strange shit going on. And we got all the things from him.”48 Fuller, like anyone else who patronized the Down Beat Club or the Spotlite, had heard Hawkins’s band play some of Monk’s originals. Tunes like “ ’Round Midnight,” “I Mean You” (or “Stickball”), and “You Need ’Na” occasionally entered the band’s repertoire.49 In the fall of 1945, Fuller offered to publish some of Monk’s compositions with Consolidated Music, a firm he had recently co-founded with Gillespie. Despite Monk’s bad experience with Teddy McRae, he decided to try again. Although Fuller never claimed co-composer’s credits, he nonetheless put himself down as a claimant on all songs, entitling him to half of what would have been a two- to five-cent royalty on each recording. In late October 1945, Fuller registered a song Monk was calling “Manhattan Moods.”50 Less than a year later, Monk was calling it “Ruby, My Dear.”51 He returned to “Ruby, My Dear,” not because of any nostalgia for Ms. Richardson, but because the lyric worked. The first four notes say those three little words, and he wanted to find a lyricist someday who could transform the haunting melody into a haunting refrain.
Toward the end of February, when it became clear to Fuller that they needed more material for the band, he leaned on Monk for tunes. Thelonious came through with two more. He gave Fuller another ballad, this one tentatively titled “Feeling that Way Now.”52 At one point he’d called it “Y Don’t U Try Now,” then “Why Do You Evade the Facts.”53 A copy of the score found among Mary Lou Williams’s papers provides a fully-elaborated composition with the voicings and left and right hand written out in Monk’s handwriting. For this version Monk struggled to incorporate “Sarah” into the title: “Be Merrier Sarah,” “Sarah Made the Error,” and “Be Fairer Sarah.”54 (Sarah Vaughan? A pseudonym for someone else?) It didn’t stick and he eventually settled on “Monk’s Mood.” The other tune he turned in to Fuller was called “Playhouse,” dedicated to his old haunt up on 118th Street. Fuller dug “Playhouse” because it was a danceable, upbeat tune with a strong Caribbean flavor. He saw it as a vehicle for the kind of Latin/Afro-Cuban rhythms he and Dizzy would eventually explore with the big band over the next couple of years. Six years would pass before Thelonious recorded “Playhouse,” and by then it would become “Bye-ya.”55
By the time Dizzy’s new big band was ready to open in April, Hawkins had left the Spotlite and joined Norman Granz’s touring “Jazz at the Philharmonic.”56 It was only logical that Gillespie would hire Monk to take over for the eternally absent Bud Powell. After all, Monk knew the music, he had a long-established relationship with Kenny Clarke, and Gil Fuller had already pulled in Monk’s tunes with the intention of arranging them for the band.
“I had no trouble outta Monk, not too much,” Dizzy recalled, “but Monk wasn’t showing up on time either. It was against the law to show up on time.”57 Gil Fuller concurred: “Monk never did show up on time. Anytime we got ready to hit, we’d hit without a piano player. ‘Where’s Monk . . . ? ’ He just wouldn’t show up on time. . . . So Dizzy’s mad.”58 Indeed, Monk became notorious for being late. His behavior marked a sharp contrast from his work habits under Coleman Hawkins. Hawk never complained about Monk being tardy, and he always appeared professional and focused.
Dizzy tolerated Monk’s tardiness, despite pressure from Clark Monroe to fire him. But some members of the band disliked his playing. For sidemen used to pianists who copped Bud Powell’s style, Monk’s approach was completely unorthodox. Bassist Ray Brown complained that Monk never really “comped” properly behind the band, choosing to do his own thing. Sometimes he sat at the piano motionless and did nothing until he felt the time was right: “[M]ost piano players in most big bands sit down and they play with the band, you know. But Monk would just sit there like this. And all of a sudden there’d be a pause from all the trumpets and everything, and Monk would go ‘plink!’ like that. And everybody would go ‘Yeah!’ ”59
The extant recordings from Gillespie’s big band reveal just how adventurous Monk had become since his last recordings. His chords sound even more dissonant than anything documented from Minton’s or in the studio with Coleman Hawkins. Of the tunes on which Monk is audible, recorded at the Spotlite in June of 1946, Monk plays fewer notes, and his comping is extremely jarring. He plays in the pauses, and what he plays sounds so harmonically disorienting that there are moments—especially on “Our Delight”—when the piano seems to overtake the entire band. Although Gillespie has never publicly criticized Monk’s playing, either as a soloist or accompanist, he gave him very little solo space during these performances. But having no solo space has never stopped Monk from playing melodic lines or countermelodies beneath other soloists. There is a brilliant moment in “Groovin’ High” where Monk plays flashes of his composition “Evidence” behind Dizzy Gillespie’s trumpet solo. It is an interesting juxtaposition since “Groovin’ High” is based on the chords from the song “Whispering” and Monk’s “Evidence” (originally titled “Just Us” and then “Justice”) is based on “Just You, Just Me.”60
For all of Fuller’s efforts to “get” Monk’s tunes, only one made it into the band book: “ ’Round Midnight.” Dizzy had been playing it for a while and already had an arrangement of it from his time playing with the Hepsations. The one recording of the big band performing “ ’Round Midnight” with Monk at the piano renders him virtually invisible. In nearly six and a half minutes of music, Thelonious is granted only a four-bar solo, not enough even for the master of economy to make a coherent musical statement. On June 10, the orchestra made a studio recording for Musicraft, but there is no evidence that Monk was part of it. The little piano that comes through does not sound like Monk.
Monk stayed with the band for a month, but was not having fun. He had more fun up at Club 845 on Prospect Avenue in the Bronx, just a few blocks from Sonny and Nellie’s place. Club 845 hosted Sunday afternoon jam sessions with some of the big-name artists, from Ben Webster to Freddie Webster, Dexter Gordon to Gene Ammons.61 On Monday nights, he still made his way up to Minton’s Playhouse. Between Minton’s and Club 845, he began playing with an outstanding bassist named Gene Ramey. Monk liked Ramey’s big, plucky sound, and his grounding in the hard-swinging Kansas City style was not insignificant. Monk always wanted a rhythm section that could swing.62
Monk’s stint with Dizzy came to an inauspicious end on the last day of June. The band opened at the Apollo on June 28 for a week-long engagement.63 Dizzy was nervous; it was the band’s Apollo debut and its first gig outside the Spotlite. Monk showed up late one time too many, but on this occasion he had company. Kenny Clarke tells the story best:
One day Monk and I were hanging out in the Braddock Bar near the Apollo with some friends, talking about old times. It was the kind of musicians’ conversation where one anecdote leads to another and everyone tries to top everyone else’s story. After quite a few tastes had gone down, I looked casually at my watch and realized with a shock that the show had started and the band must already have hit. “My God,” I shouted to Monk. “Come on, we’re late!”
We raced back to the theatre and ran right into the manager, who was furious. Dizzy wasn’t too thrilled, either. He was striding about on stage and peering into the wings, looking for us. Milt Jackson had taken over on drums, but there was a conspicuous absence of a piano player.
Having been house drummer at the Apollo some years before, I knew the theatre layout very well, so I sneaked around backstage, slipped through the curtains, nudged Bags, took the sticks from him and slid on to the drum stool as he slid off. Dizzy looked over, did a double take, and said, “How in hell did you get up there?” I said, “Don’t worry about it—I’m here, I’m playing and that’s what counts.” We had only missed the opening theme music, but Dizzy was still mad, and poor Monk got the brunt of it. There was no way he could get to the piano without being seen by Dizzy—and when he tiptoed out from the wings, Diz was waiting for him. He pointed his finger accusingly at Monk and told him right there, in front of the audience: “You’re fired!” And that was the end of Monk’s career with Dizzy. John Lewis was in the wings listening to the band. Dizzy beckoned him on stage and he stayed on as both pianist and arranger after that.64
John Lewis’s presence in the wings wasn’t coincidental. Clarke had been lobbying Dizzy to hire Lewis in place of Monk for some time.65 Lewis and Clarke had been in the army, like their explorer namesakes; had served together in France; and had become fast friends. They even performed together during their three-year tour of duty. Lewis, who grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, had loved Dizzy’s music ever since he heard a broadcast from Los Angeles of the sextet with Charlie Parker. Once he got to New York in the fall of 1945, he worked on 52nd Street for a while and began hanging out with Dizzy’s big band, offering arrangements while waiting to receive his union card.66 He had his eye on the piano chair ever since the band formed. When the opportunity finally came, Lewis was there to seize it.
Dizzy’s decision to fire Monk and hire Lewis angered and disappointed Gil Fuller. “I never forgave Dizzy for that. I didn’t think Monk was a piano player like Oscar Peterson, that type of thing, but he had material that we needed. And the idea was to collect as much music as possible.”67 For Fuller, that meant collect as much money as possible. As claimant on so many of Monk’s tunes, he was also looking to receive a share of the royalties. Monk was only one of many writers in Fuller’s stable. At one point, Fuller had so many people writing for the band and for his publishing company that he became more of a manager than an arranger, distributing writing and arranging jobs to ghost-writers, and adding his name to the scores. It was a questionable practice, but this was the nature of the business.68 Despite Fuller’s reputation, and even after Dizzy dropped Monk from the band, Thelonious continued to work with Consolidated Music.
Call it ironic, call it bittersweet, but within a couple of weeks of the Apollo fiasco, the first magazine profile ever written about Monk appeared on newsstands all over Harlem and in major black urban communities across the country. The piece appeared in Rhythm: Music and Theatrical Magazine in July 1946. A short-lived, black-owned periodical devoted to African-American arts and entertainment, Rhythm claimed a national readership in excess of 80,000.69 The author was none other than Herbie Nichols, the pianist and writer who had championed Monk two years earlier for Music Dial. Titled “The Jazz Pianist–Purist,” the article was accompanied by photos of Monk at Minton’s Playhouse posing at the piano (by then the management had replaced the upright with a baby grand) and jamming with Max Roach and bassist Gene Ramey. He looks dapper: jacket and tie, clean-cut and clean-shaven, and still baby-faced. He visually fits the magazine’s profile—a respectable, intelligent Negro artist committed to creating uplifting and thoughtful music. Elsewhere in the same issue, Monk is pictured shooting the breeze with Art Tatum and Eddie Heywood over the caption, “Three purveyors of modern swing piano.” The photo is linked to John R. Gibson’s article on the history of black dance bands, where Thelonious is surrounded by celebrated musical figures such as Duke Ellington, Mary Lou Williams, Coleman Hawkins, Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, Hazel Scott, and W. C. Handy.70 All in all, it was a sign of deep respect for Monk’s talents and potential, and, even at this early stage, nomination for uptown’s cultural royalty.
In the profile, Nichols is admiring. He does not hide or obscure their friendship. He describes Monk as an extraordinary musician who walks his own path, “a very rebellious person,” and one of the great musical minds he’s encountered. He compares Monk to Bird and Dizzy in terms of their contribution to modern music, but argues that Monk’s proclivity for slower tempos makes him unique. “It almost borders on the lethargic and may well be a key to his total personality. Monk has to be in a great mood before he will swing out in a fast tempo, and he can swing as effectively as any I know.” In this respect, Monk has more in common with Ellington—a younger, underdeveloped Ellington: “His expressive and soulful figures are a reminder of Duke. This is where the similarity ends as you will find. Monk’s rebellious spirit through the years has not permitted him to gain the all-around experience of an Ellington and so his enterprise has suffered.”71
Nichols was less interested in reviewing Monk’s work than in presenting a more intimate portrait of the artist, his life, his work, his process, his philosophy, his frustrations. During a visit to Monk’s tiny apartment on West 63rd Street, Nichols listened to Monk pour his heart out about his struggle to find work and the meager pay he earned when he did get a gig. The system is unfair, he proclaimed, and the powers that be ought to “ ‘let everybody live. Pay a fellow a good price especially when someone can really blow.’ ” By “really blow,” Monk means to create something original. “His eyes light up when he speaks of instrumentalists getting the right ‘sounds’ out of their instruments. He is forever searching for better ‘sounds,’ as he loves to say. He doesn’t seek these effects elsewhere. He creates them at his Klein piano. This way of thinking throughout the years has resulted in the creation of a system of playing which is the strangest I have heard and may someday revolutionize the art of swing piano playing.”72
The two continued the conversation at the piano, sharing ideas as well as original compositions. Nichols played for Monk, who in turn gave his guest a mini concert, introducing him to “You Need ’Na,” “What Now” (which he later retitled “Off Minor”), and what would become “Monk’s Mood” but at the time was “Y Don’t U Try Now.” The song that really caught Nichols’s attention, however, was “Ruby, My Dear.” Nichols described hearing Monk’s rendition of “Ruby” as “one of the greatest pleasures I’ve had listening to jazz. This song could be another ‘Body and Soul,’ if he would only put it down on paper and let a few other people learn it.” We know now that the song had already been committed to paper when Gil Fuller copyrighted it a few months back as “Manhattan Moods.” But Monk wasn’t ready to share—not yet, at least. Before Nichols left, they agreed to swap music. Nichols offered to write out three of his own compositions in exchange for “ ’Round Midnight,” “Ruby, My Dear,” and a tune Monk had yet to title. “On the day of the proposed swap,” Nichols lamented, “my tunes were the only ones completed. However, I haven’t given up all hope of eventually learning his tunes which I will play morning, noon, and night.”73
Nor had Monk given up on playing his own tunes . . . morning, noon, and night. He had plenty of time to compose, now that he was out of a job and no one seemed interested in hiring him. He practiced and wrote wherever he could—at his mother’s house on his precious Klein piano, at Mary Lou’s place when the crowds thinned out, at Minton’s in the afternoons or after hours, or at Sonny’s house in the Bronx. Sonny didn’t have a piano then, but Nellie was there.
Now that she and Geraldine had taken jobs at the Pioneer Ice Cream Division on Fifth Avenue and 141st Street, Monk could always count on a few sweet enticements. The company packed ice cream and wrapped ice cream sandwiches for Borden’s and several other companies, and every once in a while Nellie and her sister-in-law brought home a few morsels to share with the kids.74 Monk also took time away from the piano, shooting hoops on West 63rd Street with his brother Thomas and his two sons, Thomas, Jr. and Theolonious, now ages eight and seven, respectively. As long as he refrained from using profanity, he visited his brother’s apartment, debating with his sister-in-law Trotyrine, listening to “Sissy,” Thomas, Jr.’s, twin sister, and doting on the baby, Charlotte, who made sure her uncle “Bubba” knew she was all of six and a half.
Weeks, sometimes months, passed between gigs, and when he did work the jobs tended to be one-nighters or a weekend here and there. Things got to be so bad that toward the end of 1946 he stopped paying union dues and let his membership lapse.75 He got tired of waiting for gigs to come his way and decided to organize a rehearsal band made up of some younger, adventurous musicians. He created something akin to a collective, not unlike what pianist Sun Ra would establish in Chicago a few years later, or the kinds of collectives jazz musicians would develop across the country in the 1960s. There was no “leader,” per se, and everyone in the group was expected to contribute ideas, compositions, new directions. About twelve musicians began meeting in the basement of Minton’s Playhouse. Among them were Bud Powell, vibist Milt Jackson from Dizzy’s band, and an excellent trombonist from Indianapolis named J. J. Johnson.76 Johnson had played with Benny Carter and Count Basie, but only became a permanent New York resident in August of 1946.77 Mary Lou Williams was there, too, though mainly as an observer. Every band member had to contribute fifty cents to help pay for arrangements.78 Monk, Powell, and Jackson wrote the lion’s share of the arrangements, “and some of them were real tough,” Williams recalled. “Even those guys couldn’t always get them right.”79
As the group’s organizer, composer, and one of the principal arrangers, presumably Monk received a share of the money in the kitty. At one point this paltry bit of change might have been Monk’s only source of income. But money wasn’t his primary motivation, according to Mary Lou Williams. She claimed he formed the band to challenge the practice of downtown musicians coming uptown and “stealing” the music. Reportedly Monk said to Mary Lou, “We are going to get a big band started. We’re going to create something that they can’t steal, because they can’t play it.”80 Though “they” might be read as “whites,” Monk rarely saw the terrain of music in such stark racial terms. He was more concerned about being ripped off by his peers—Teddy McRae, Gil Fuller, and to a lesser degree, his friend Dizzy. It seemed as though everyone but Monk benefited from the new direction in jazz. Thelonious felt it acutely when band members began to abandon the project in order to accept paying gigs. No such opportunities were forthcoming for him. Within weeks the group collapsed.
While Monk’s proposal failed to produce a working band, it set a precedent that would come to define Thelonious’s role in the jazz world for the rest of his life. He became a teacher. His operations moved from the basement of Minton’s to his apartment on San Juan Hill, and soon all the young cats made their way over there. Although he had the run of the house, because the piano was in Thelonious’s bedroom as many as five or six musicians squeezed into his tiny room to work on songs, chord progressions, arrangements, or just the everyday challenges of making music. A frequent visitor in those days was a tall, brown-skinned kid from Harlem of West Indian descent named Theodore Rollins, though his friends called him “Sonny.” He was only seventeen years old, a senior at Benjamin Franklin High School, but already a brilliant tenor player. Monk helped him a great deal, encouraging Sonny to develop his own sound and, most importantly, allowing him to play what he wanted. “Every day after school I would go to Thelonious Monk’s place and practice with his band. He never really told me what to play, because I guess he respected my playing.”81 Rollins appreciated these afterschool sessions because the music was challenging and he came out of each rehearsal a better musician. “Monk would have what seemed to be way-out stuff at the time and all the guys would look at it and say ‘Monk, we can’t play this stuff . . . ’ and then it would end up that everybody would be playing it by the end of the rehearsal, you know. . . . It was hard music.”82
After he graduated in the spring of 1947, Rollins continued his “studies” with Monk, practicing with whomever showed up.83 He also began to bring some of his uptown pals along with him. Surrounding Rollins was an entire crew of talented teenaged musicians who lived in the Sugar Hill section of Harlem. Saxophonists Jackie McLean and Andy Kirk, Jr. (a brilliant musician who tragically stopped playing before turning twenty years old), drummer Art Taylor, pianist Kenny Drew and bassists Arthur Phipps and Connie Henry all might be regarded as the original “Sugar Hill Gang.” Sonny introduced McLean and Taylor to Monk, and at different points in their careers they would become Monk’s sidemen. For McLean, hanging out with Monk wasn’t just about the music; it represented an intellectual engagement of a very high order. “Monk is a deep person. . . . His interests vary far beyond what most people would imagine. He’s very easy to know as long as you deal with him in a plain and friendly way. But if you try to be dishonest with him or play mental chess with him, then you might have trouble. His mind is something that should be respected at all times. People are too quick to think that a jazz musician knows jazz and that’s it, you know.”84 Art Taylor was thoroughly impressed with Monk’s encyclopedic knowledge of tunes and chord progressions, yet he saw in Thelonious a model of a thinking person engaged with the world. “He had that kind of intelligence, that kind of wit, that kind of manner, musically and socially, that was important to me.”85
Monk’s model of sage musical leadership also extended to a group of young musicians in Brooklyn. The bridge between the Brooklyn cats and Thelonious turned out to be Randy Weston, the curious young pianist whom Monk used to see at the Down Beat Club when he was with Hawkins. Soon after he was discharged from the service, Weston began visiting Monk at his apartment on West 63rd Street. “I’ll never forget that first visit. He never spoke beyond basic greetings. He didn’t have the Steinway in the kitchen yet, but he had a small piano in his room and a picture of Billie Holiday on the ceiling and this red light! It was incredible. He’d sit at the piano and play and I’d listen.”86 Weston grasped Monk’s “simplicity and unique sense of rhythm. He can say so much with so little.” What he “said,” however, was hardly simple; it was unabashedly modern, grounded in the blues and yet deeply personal. Listening to Monk, Weston learned the value of having an “ethnic connection with self-expression. You’re taught to play a piano in a certain way, and if you don’t play it that way, it’s not the correct way. Without saying a word, Monk taught me, ‘Play what you feel although it may not be the way it’s supposed to be.’ ”87
Weston’s first visit lasted several hours, and though they hardly exchanged words, the encounter proved to be life-changing. It compelled Weston to approach his instrument differently, to find his own unique voice, and to be wary of false distinctions between “modern” and “traditional.” “Later, as I read about Sufism, I came to realize what a spiritual experience I had had. Monk communicated like a Sufi priest, sending powerful vibrations musically and spiritually.”88
As Weston’s visits became more frequent and their friendship deepened, he discovered that Monk hardly lived in monastic isolation; the man’s home had become a kind of village or community center for jazz musicians. He remembers going “by Monk’s house and all the guys would be there. We would all sit and listen to him play. We had that tribal thing going. It wasn’t planned like that, but it was something that happened. It was our culture.”89 Weston also began picking up Monk and taking him across the bridge to Brooklyn, where they might drop in at Mr. Frank Weston’s restaurant for a bite to eat or head over to Randy’s place on 13th Street and play piano. Through Randy, Monk met all the up-and-coming Brooklyn musicians whom he would later employ: bassists Gary Mapp, Michael Mattos, and Ahmed Abdul-Malik; drummer Willie Jones, trumpeter Ray Copeland, saxophonist Ernie Henry, to name a few. Just as Sonny Rollins became Monk’s conduit to the young Harlem musicians, Weston became Monk’s entrée into Brooklyn’s rich jazz world.
• • •
During the first half of 1947, Monk virtually disappeared from the public record, though he never left the public view. You could find Monk up at Minton’s or Club 845 in the Bronx, or on the jam session circuit. He was often with Nellie at Sonny’s place. While working at Borden’s, she began to experience severe bouts of nausea and abdominal pain. It became a chronic problem; she could barely hold any food down and, as skinny as she was (five feet seven and barely one hundred pounds), she began losing weight. The doctor she saw had no explanation; at one point he even suggested that it might be psychosomatic.90 She persevered and continued to work. She really had no choice. Geraldine was pregnant again with her fifth child, who arrived too early on May 29. Her birth certificate read Benetta Smith, but because she was premature they called her “Teeny.”
When Monk wasn’t checking in on Nellie, he worked intermittently. One possible “sighting” was on April 14, a Monday night, at Small’s Paradise. Billed as a “Battle of the Baritone Sax” featuring Leo Parker and Serge Chaloff, the flyer promoting the event listed the pianist as Earnie Washington, “Mad Genius On Piano,” which has led hardcore Monk fans to believe it was a pseudonym—“earn-ing Washington(s)” or dollar bills.91 The drummer on the date was “Art Blakely” [sic], and Miles Davis is also listed. Yet Monk had no reason to use a pseudonym; his union dues were paid up and the gig was legal. And in fact, there was a fine pianist in New York named Ernie Washington who worked with many of the same guys either at Small’s or on 52nd Street.92
Monk maintained visibility by continuing to publish his music. Gil Fuller was still willing and eager to publish Monk with a new outfit called Monogram Music Company, and on February 21, 1947, Fuller copyrighted two more Monk tunes—“What Now,” one of the songs he played for Herbie Nichols, and a swinging number titled “I Mean You.”93 The latter is especially significant because Coleman Hawkins was frequently listed as co-composer with Monk, and Hawk was the first to record the song in December of 1946. The band Hawk put together was top-heavy with young modernists, including refugees from Monk’s short-lived big band—J. J. Johnson, Milt Jackson, as well as Max Roach, Curley Russell on bass, and the phenomenal trumpet player from Florida, Fats Navarro. Hank Jones was hired to play piano; evidently Monk was not even considered. When Sonora Records released the 78 several weeks later, Monk’s name was not listed anywhere on the disc.94 Yet the application to register a claim to copyright, not to mention the attached lead sheet, lists only Thelonious Monk as composer, not Hawkins.95
We can only imagine how Monk felt every time he heard “Bean and the Boys” on the radio swinging “I Mean You.” Yet if hearing his own compositions on the radio wasn’t surreal enough, in the spring of 1947 he also began hearing himself on the radio and in record shops. Jerry Newman, the Columbia University student who used to drag that slick recording device up to Minton’s Playhouse, decided to cash in. In March, the Vox label released two lengthy jam sessions from May 12, 1941, spread over three 78s—“Stompin’ at the Savoy” took up three sides, and the band’s rendition of “Topsy,” which was retitled “Charlie’s Choice,” occupied the remaining three sides. The personnel consists of the house band—Monk, Joe Guy, Nick Fenton, and Kenny Clarke—and guitarist Charlie Christian, who happened to be sitting in that night. The records were issued as Vox Presents Charlie Christian. In one fell swoop Monk was demoted from co-leader to sideman. Worse, neither Newman nor a Vox representative ever asked Monk for permission to release these recordings, and, no great surprise, he never received a dime.96
The guys who knew Monk from the early days at Minton’s felt for him. “When I came out of the Army,” pianist Allen Tinney recalled, “I was very hurt because Charlie Parker had become famous, Dizzy had become famous, Max [Roach] had become famous, and I said to myself, ‘What happened to Monk?’ ”97 Every time saxophonist Budd Johnson visited Monk during this period, he could see the pain, but he also witnessed an astonishing determination:
Monk’s feelings got hurt because Dizzy and Charlie were getting all the credit for this music, this style—I used to go over Monk’s house with him, drink some wine with him. “Come on, I want you to hear what I’m doing,” he said. “I’m gonna let them take that style and go ahead, and I’m gonna get a new style.” . . . His mother would fix some food for us, and he would just play for me. All this funny-type music that he was playing. And he had gone altogether different from what he had been doing. I said, “Hey, man . . . that’s outtasight! What’re you doing; whaddayou call that?”
“I don’t know, man, it’s just—you know.” He couldn’t explain it to me.98
Budd Johnson encouraged him. Monk concluded, “Well, I’m going on now with my new music.”99 By late summer of 1947, he had written an entire book of it. He just needed a company willing to put his ideas on wax.