Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital might as well have been Rikers Island, as far as Monk was concerned. Surrounding the red brick building on the corner of 30th Street and East River Drive was a ten-foot-high “spear-topped, wrought-iron fence.”1 Attendants often acted like prison guards, and with 650 patients jammed into a 630-bed facility, the overcrowded conditions were reminiscent of the Tombs.2 As soon as he was allowed access to a phone, Monk called Nellie in a panic. Nellie in turn called Colomby, Nica, and her friend Maely Dufty, who promptly contacted a lawyer in East Harlem in an unsuccessful effort to secure his release. Nica got in touch with her doctor, Robert Freymann, who immediately contacted the psychiatric ward’s lead staff. In the meantime, Colomby picked up Nellie and headed straight to Bellevue.3
They found him, weary and anxious, yet surprisingly stoic under the circumstances.4 No one knew what was wrong with Monk, not even the highly trained staff at Bellevue. Yet they considered him a sufficient danger to himself and others to hold him for observation. They kept him nearly three weeks. He passed the time painting pictures and taking visitors. Nellie was always there, and Nica came quite often. After almost three weeks of negotiation, Dr. Freymann secured Monk’s release without a diagnosis.5
The absence of a diagnosis is a little surprising. One might have expected the staff psychiatrist to declare Monk a “paranoid schizophrenic,” a catch-all phrase frequently applied to black patients and nonconformist artists. The list of alleged paranoid schizophrenics who passed through Bellevue in the 1950s is long and distinguished, including Bud Powell, Charles Mingus, not to mention Gregory Corso, Norman Mailer, and Allen Ginsberg.6 Given the state of psychiatry and the overburdened staff at Bellevue, accurate diagnoses weren’t always possible. Although it took nearly two more decades before doctors would correctly diagnose Monk as bipolar, he had begun to exhibit classic symptoms of the disorder—symptoms that would occur more frequently in the years to come.
Manic depression encompasses a wide range of mood disorders, and the shifts in mood tend to be episodic. Falling asleep at the piano, staring into space lost in thought, seemingly unable to recognize people around him were all indications of cyclothymia, or a depressed state. When Monk experienced hypomania, or a manic state, his moods ranged from euphoria and impatience to frenetic and volatile. Common traits of manic behavior include aimless and violent actions, a marked tendency to seek out other people, and an inability to sleep.7 We have already seen the signs in Monk—enduring days without sleep followed by exhaustion, late-night forays in search of someone’s piano to play, frenetic pacing, skipping meals. Nat Hentoff’s sympathetic description of Thelonious’s character reveals all the classic symptoms: “He may often stay up two or three days, and he does not eat by the clock since his periods of hunger do not always fall into regular rhythms. On a visit, if he feels like napping, he does. There are times, in his home or outside, when he doesn’t feel like talking, and he may not for several hours. The latter condition usually occurs when he’s worried.”8 Sahib Shihab noticed similar behavior as soon as they began working together in the late 1940s. “He wouldn’t come out of his house for two weeks at a time. He wouldn’t come out of his room for two weeks at a time.”9
As we have already seen, friends, colleagues, critics, and the press were quick to interpret most of these behaviors as examples of his trademark eccentricities. When the possibility of mental illness was finally acknowledged, some of the same friends, colleagues, critics, and the press began kicking around the idea that madness may be the source of his genius.10 Whether or not Monk produced his best work during a “manic phase” is less important than the overall impact his illness had on his ability to work and on his social relationships. The fact is, his bipolar disorder often made it difficult to work, lost him jobs, and put undue stress on his family—especially Nellie. For someone so family-oriented who did not begin to make a decent living until he was over forty, there is nothing romantic or desirable about playing the tortured artist.
Bipolar disorder and a variety of mental disorders are hereditary and scientists were just beginning to figure this out in the mid-1950s. Thelonious did not know that his own father had been living in a mental asylum for the past fifteen years. In the summer of 1941, while his son starred at Minton’s Playhouse, Thelonious Monk, Sr., was committed to the State Hospital for the Colored Insane in Goldsboro, North Carolina.11 He was fifty-two years old at the time, but the first severe signs of his illness occurred about ten years earlier, not long after he returned to North Carolina. He was known to have angry outbursts, fueled by excessive drinking, followed by bouts of deep depression and withdrawal. The episodes made it impossible for him to hold a job. Hettie and Eulah, his two sisters with whom he lived on Dunn Street, watched over him for a while, but when it became too difficult their brother, Theodore “Babe” Monk, took him in.12
Theodore owned land in Newton Grove, the same pocket of Bentonville where their father, Hinton Monk, had settled. He raised prize hogs, maintained three hundred acres of fruit trees, grapes, and a variety of crops, and provided for and educated six children. He was admired in the Newton Grove community. A God-fearing, devout Baptist, he was known for his generosity and honesty.13 His wife, Mamie Lofton Monk, protested his decision to care for his difficult brother. Olivia Monk, Babe’s daughter-in-law, recounted stories of Thelonious’s worst episodes. “His yelling and carrying on got to be so bad, they used to put him in the mule stable. Nothing but just hay and old junk. He’d get to kicking and beating on things and you can hear him for about a mile around the place. . . . He wanted to be with his family [in New York].” After a while, Mamie could take it no longer. She called the authorities and had him committed.14
The State Hospital for the Colored Insane was a far cry from Bellevue. African-Americans did not check into Southern Jim Crow asylums on their own volition, and they were certainly not institutions one turned to for proper mental health care. The nearly 3,000 residents of the hospital were called “inmates” for a reason; most were there in lieu of prison—although, as one reporter put it, “this writer would prefer the jails to the hospital.”15 The hospital had a reputation for using inmates as cheap labor for construction and maintenance, child care, and agriculture, and the staff offered no therapeutic activities besides work. The institution was notorious for murders, suicides, and frequent escape attempts, and the staff did not separate children from adults.16 In 1949, conditions improved slightly with the appointment of Drs. Mintaute and Edite Vitols, two distinguished psychiatrists from Latvia who turned the hospital into their own laboratory for the study of race and mental disorders.17
For eight years, Babe visited his brother in Goldsboro regularly. He kept Thelonious abreast of family news and became his brother’s advocate at the hospital, making sure he was not abused or mistreated. Then in 1949, just two weeks before Thanksgiving, Babe Monk was found shot to death in the very mule stable he had used to restrain his brother. The police and coroner’s offices ruled his death a suicide, with the unlikely story that he rigged a complicated scaffolding to hold a shotgun in place, tied a piece of rope to the trigger, and pulled.18 The police never conducted an investigation, in part because Babe’s widow, Mamie Lofton Monk, believed the story, though she was virtually the only family member who did, along with her daughter and son-in-law, Isabelle and Leroy Cole.19
With Babe’s sudden death, Thelonious, Sr.’s links to family and the outside world quickly dissolved. Babe’s youngest son, Conley Monk, and his wife, Olivia, continued visiting Thelonious, but once they moved to Connecticut they lost contact. Olivia vividly remembers one of their last visits. “I used to take my baby Pam to see Thelonious in the hospital. He used to play with her. He was a very pleasant old man. Good-looking. Short and heavyset, dark-brown-skinned. Oh, he just laughed and talked and had a lot of jolly. Very fun. I don’t know how they could have kept him down there. But if I had some place to put him I would have brought him home with me. He didn’t seem like nobody out of their mind. He never acted like he wanted to fight or drive somebody away from him or nothing like that.”20 It is likely that he suffered from bipolar disorder like his son, thus his condition was episodic. With proper medication and therapy, he might have been able to live independently, but the lack of scientific knowledge compounded by racism made it unlikely that Thelonious Monk, Sr. would ever see the world beyond the asylum grounds.
His son fared much better; he was out in less than three weeks’ time. Nellie brought Thelonious home in a cab and Harry and Jules Colomby were there to greet him. Harry recalled, “When he walked in he was so queer in the face. He was happy to be home. I’ll never forget, he hugged us both and said, ‘Nothing should break us up.’ ”21 They began working right away. He had only been out a few days when Harry took him to Ira Gitler’s parents’ house to be interviewed for Metronome magazine.22 Monk looked quite sharp, sporting a glen-plaid suit, a grey felt hat, and draped in a salt and pepper overcoat. He confided that he was relieved to be out of the hospital and anxious to be outside, despite the freezing weather. “You see, being in the hospital, indoors so much, it gets on my nerves. I have to go and ride around a little while and then I’ll go home and practice.” More than anything, he wanted to “make some money.” He told Gitler that he was anxious to start working again and that he hoped to put together a sextet with three horns, “the right amount of horns.”23
Colomby got Monk six nights at the Blue Note with the house rhythm section, bassist Jimmy Bond and a phenomenal seventeen-year-old drummer Albert “Tootie” Heath—Percy Heath’s baby brother. “He’d come in with his coat and hat still on,” Heath remembered, “sit at the piano and just start playing. He never told us what he was playing, never gave us music or direction. He never said a single word to us for six nights. We’d have to figure out the music on our own. Fortunately, we’d been listening to Monk for a while and knew his music, but we had to find our own way.”24 Bond and Heath succeeded admirably, in spite of the fact that Thelonious dropped a brand new song into the mix he called “Light Blue”—a loping sixteen-bar theme played at a slow, plodding tempo. Monk was still struggling with his depression and feeling the aftershock of his hospitalization. Nellie, Nica, and Colomby agreed that he should not be left alone, so Nica drove him to Philly every night, stayed until the final set, and drove him home. “During the break, he would go out and sit in the Bentley with Nica,” Heath observed. “He didn’t interact with anyone. I thought that was strange.”25
Monk spent the rest of the winter and spring in the city hanging out with his kids and practicing. Although Monk was proud of his baby grand, it quickly became an extension of the kitchen countertop and a storage space for household clutter. When he sat down to play, his back stood just a few inches from the dishwasher. Monk wanted to hear himself, so like Nica he purchased a portable reel-to-reel tape recorder and taught Nellie how to work it.26 Some of those tapes survive, providing remarkable opportunities to eavesdrop on Monk’s creative process as well as his daily life. They reveal something of Nellie’s delight in listening to her husband, and the joy they both derived from each other’s company. Between and during songs, the recorder captured snippets of a life-long love affair. Following a tender rendition of “Tea for Two,” he asked Nellie in a surprised but gentle voice, “Were you recording that?”27 Other times Nellie sings along in perfect unison with the piano. “My mother knew the music,” Toot recalled. “She could sing all the solos, when I was little she could sing all the solos on all the records. All the tunes that I learned to sing I learned to sing them from my mother. . . . [M]y mother was singing the tunes and humming the melodies alllll the time.”28
Whether reconstructing an old standard or working through his own originals, the tapes demonstrate that Monk’s distinct sound was a product of unceasing discipline, practice, and hard work. Achieving the harmonic and rhythmic language recognized as Monk’s did not come easy to him—playing “straight” was easier than playing “Monk.”
Perhaps the finest surviving example of Monk playing at home is an eighty-four-minute recording of him working through one tune: Ned Washington and George Bassman’s “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You” (1932). Best known as the theme song for Tommy Dorsey’s Orchestra, “Sentimental” became one of Monk’s favorites—he recorded it more than any other standard. Nellie made the recording some time in late March or early April 1957, just before he took it into the studio. The first take is painstaking; in five minutes, he gets through just one chorus of the melody. As he wrestles with each measure, every note in his reinterpretation of the melody is carefully placed. By the second take, played rubato (out of tempo), there are more alterations to the melody and increasingly dissonant harmonies. Toward the end of this take, Thelonious begins to integrate stride piano and improvises for the first time. Here he has reached a comfort zone, singing solfeggio and audibly enjoying himself. The fourth, fifth, and sixth takes, which together add up to a little over an hour of continuous playing, are an exercise in discovery. Monk works through a wide range of improvised figures in a fairly systematic way. He repeats certain phrases, making small rhythmic and tonal alterations each time to see how they sound. Each take is successively more adventurous; while still playing stride piano in tempo, his right hand is more off beat, his lines increasingly angular. What is most surprising to serious listeners is that this master of space and economy leaves very little silence between notes and plays nonstop for long stretches. He’s listening for different possibilities to construct a tight, “edited” performance.29
These eighty-four minutes represents a fraction of what it took to transform “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You” into a Monk original. He rehearsed mostly at Nica’s, who had recently moved from the Bolivar to the Algonquin Hotel on West 44th Street. (She also picked up some new wheels to go with her new digs, trading in her ’53 Rolls Royce for a silver 1957 Bentley S1 Continental drophead coupe.30) Besides Monk, a parade of pianists dropped by constantly, notably Elmo Hope, Bud Powell, Kenny Drew, Horace Silver, Hampton Hawes, Dick Katz, and Sonny Clark. Art Blakey was always there, and “Philly” Joe Jones came by on occasion, as did Charles Mingus and Wilbur Ware. Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane also spent a great deal of time at the Algonquin. Coltrane and Monk had grown quite close, the latter assuming the role of mentor. Coltrane had been playing Monk’s tunes as part of Miles Davis’s band but wanted to learn more—in particular, “Monk’s Mood.” So, one night at the Algonquin, Thelonious sat down with ’Trane and taught him “Monk’s Mood.”31 Hungry to know more, Coltrane made what became an almost daily pilgrimage to West 63rd Street. He recounted these visits to critic August Blume a year later: “I’d go by [Monk’s] house, you know. By his apartment, and get him out of bed maybe. And he’d wake up and go over to the piano and start playing, you know. He’d play anything, like one of his tunes or whatever. He starts playing it, and he’d look at me. I’d get my horn and start trying to find what he’s playing, and he tended to play over and over and over and over, and I’d get this far. Next time we’d go over it I’d get another part. He would stop when we came to parts that were pretty difficult. And if I had a lot of trouble, he’d get his portfolio out and I’d see the music, that music, he’s got all of them written. And I’d read it and learn. He [believed] a guy learned without music. That way you feel it better. You feel it quicker when you memorize it and you learn it by heart, by ear. . . . When I almost had the tune down, then he would leave, leave me with it to fight with it alone. And he’d go out somewhere, maybe go to the store, or go to bed or something. And I’d just stay there and run over it until I had it pretty well and I’d call him and we’d put it down together. Sometimes we’d just get one tune a day.”32
All of Monk’s work at this point, from his solo explorations at home to his sessions with Coltrane, turned out to be rehearsals for his next Riverside recording sessions. Inspired by Monk’s impromptu version of “I Surrender Dear” from the Brilliant Corners session, Keepnews proposed a solo piano LP titled Thelonious Himself. The entire album was recorded at Reeves Sound Studios in two sessions—April 5 and April 16, 1957. During the first session Monk recorded a few takes of “I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance with You,” a popular standard from the 1930s made famous by Bing Crosby, and a few takes of “I Should Care,” a tune he had recorded for Blue Note almost a decade earlier. Monk closes the session with “ ’Round Midnight.” Despite having played it countless times, even recording an unaccompanied version three years earlier, he approached the song as if it were a new composition. The result is a probing twenty-two-minute rubato rumination on the theme, full of false starts, unresolved cadences, and unfinished creative journeys. At one point, after failing to execute a difficult passage in the bridge, he stops and says, “Mmmm, I can’t do that right, I have to practice that.”33 The master take of “ ’Round Midnight” is a distillation of Monk’s wanderings and one of his finest examples of solo piano on record.
Two days before returning to Reeves Studios to complete the solo album, Monk drove out to Hackensack to record with Sonny Rollins for Blue Note. It ended up being a wonderful little reunion—Alfred Lion was there and Monk had not seen Van Gelder since Riverside moved its operations to Manhattan. J. J. Johnson was on the date, along with Paul Chambers, Blakey, and pianist Horace Silver. Of the six tracks they recorded that Sunday afternoon, Monk played on two—“Reflections” and “Misterioso.” He had previously recorded “Reflections” at a kind of fox trot tempo, but with Rollins Monk transformed it into a sweet ballad. The dynamic interplay between the two artists is striking; they listened to each other with such intensity that they pick up each other’s riffs and play back variations. “Misterioso” was a playful experiment. Monk and Silver share piano duties, with Monk backing Rollins and Silver comping behind J. J. Johnson. As they slip on and off the piano bench, neither artist skips a beat.34
On Tuesday the 16th, Monk returned to Reeves Studios to finish his album, but this time he invited a couple of guests—John Coltrane and Wilbur Ware, who brought along their instruments. Though it was supposed to be a solo album, Monk invited them for one reason: to record “Monk’s Mood.” Thelonious liked Coltrane’s interpretation enough to put it on record, and Ware’s backing was icing on the cake. Monk rounded out the album with four more solo pieces, including a carefully crafted rendition of “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You.” He explores Irving Berlin’s “All Alone” and revisits “April in Paris.” Finally, he includes another new original—a nearly ten-minute, slow, stride blues he called “Functional,” about which he famously remarked, “I sound like James P. Johnson.”35 And to a certain degree, he did. He threw in many of the old tickler techniques, reminding listeners that Monk’s bent notes, right-hand flourishes, and even clashing harmonies were characteristics of Harlem stride piano—and especially of James P. Johnson’s playing.36
A few days later, Monk was back at the Café Bohemia with Nica to check out Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and the Miles Davis quintet. It should have been a joyous evening with friends—his old protégé Jackie McLean was with Blakey, and of course ’Trane, Philly Joe Jones, and Paul Chambers were there, too. But much to Miles’s consternation, Philly Joe was nodding off on the bandstand and Coltrane was wrestling with terrible withdrawal symptoms. Coltrane’s struggle to break his addiction to junk left him sick, disoriented, sleep-deprived, and thirsty for liquor to ease the pain. By this time Miles was fed up. He not only fired his drummer and saxophonist after the last set but he reportedly punched and slapped Coltrane in a fit of anger. Monk witnessed the assault and tried to intervene. He turned to Coltrane and said, “As much saxophone as you play, you don’t have to take that. Why don’t you come work for me?”37
A generous gesture to be sure, but Monk didn’t have a job to offer besides another recording session tentatively scheduled for late June. He still lacked a cabaret card. So Coltrane headed back to Philly to get himself together and play local gigs while Monk continued to scuffle. Bob Reisner, who used to run the Sunday afternoon jam sessions at the Open Door, established another funky spot on Seventh Avenue in the Village called “The Pad.” He invited Monk to play solo piano for a night and offered him the “door”—whatever they collected in entrance fees.38 The place was tiny and the upright piano was in shambles. David Amram, who accompanied Thelonious that night, remembers “the whole middle register [of the piano] was completely shot. . . . It wasn’t that it didn’t sound good. You pushed the keys down and nothing would happen except a ‘clunk,’ ‘clunk’ and no tone. So he played the entire evening with his left hand down at the very bottom of the piano and his right hand up at the very top of the piano, and played a whole incredible night.”39 Because the event was alcohol-free, the room was filled with young people, including a group of high school students from Newark. They approached Monk during the break in total awe, going on about how much they enjoyed his playing and how their parents were fans. Monk dug their energy. In the middle of the conversation, he suddenly said, “C’mon with me,” and proceeded to lead the entire group to a little diner up the street and treated them to ice cream.40 He might have blown a quarter of his take that night.
On the 14th and 15th of May, Monk did a recording date as a sideman with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers for Atlantic Records. Thelonious was clearly returning a favor because he did it for scale, which sent Colomby through the roof. Besides the low pay, Colomby was concerned about Monk’s contract with Riverside and that no one had made the proper arrangements with the union or with Bill Grauer.41 Besides helping out an old friend, Monk had good reasons to do the session. It was a chance to reunite with Johnny Griffin and Wilbur Ware, and all but one tune was a Monk composition. Here was another opportunity for the world to hear Thelonious’s music, presumably played well.
If the first day of recording was any indication, the session seemed doomed from the start. They attempted to record two songs—“Blue Monk” and “Evidence”—and nearly every take was unsalvageable. Johnny Griffin and trumpeter Bill Hardman struggled with the music. Initially, Thelonious gave them the music, but became so frustrated with their performance that he took it away. According to Blakey, as Monk snatched the lead sheets back he told the band “They would play far better without them because they could hardly play worse.”42 At the same time, Wilbur Ware showed up to the studio stone cold drunk. He never had a chance to play: “We got down to the studio, I go in the bathroom and pass out.”43 Fortunately, James “Spanky” DeBrest, a twenty-year-old bassist out of Philadelphia, was available to fill in.
Things went infinitely better the next day. Monk showed Griffin and Hardman how to play the music, though his criticisms were unremitting. When Hardman asked Monk how he sounded after a particular take, he replied, “You played a whole lot of trumpet to be playin’ nothin’.”44 Still, the band completed the album, revisiting “Blue Monk” and “Evidence,” and producing strong versions of “I Mean You,” “Rhythm-a-ning,” and “In Walked Bud.” Monk took “Blue Monk” and “I Mean You” at slower than usual tempos, partly as a test of wills between himself and Blakey, whom he sometimes accused of pushing the tempo. (Half-jokingly, Monk told Hardman at the end of the session, “We made a good record—but the drummer couldn’t keep time.”45)
In the meantime, Nellie faced a new set of health challenges. She contracted a low-grade fever that persisted for weeks; she lacked energy and could barely keep her weight up. She checked in to Roosevelt Hospital, where she was diagnosed with a thyroid condition that required the removal of her thyroid gland. Geraldine attended to Nellie during her hospital stay, and she remembers the time being particularly stressful. “They were going through a lot of changes then, financial and otherwise. Nellie was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.”46 And so was Monk. Harry Colomby recalled, “Thelonious acted very badly during that period. He wanted to literally take her out of the hospital, take her out of bed and all that stuff. He was just going crazy. He was walking around drunk and dangerous.”47
Monk had started composing a piece for Nellie just when she fell ill. He worked on it throughout the month of May between home and the Algonquin, and Nica captured a “draft” of it on tape during one of Coltrane’s visits.48 He wanted to call it “Twilight with Nellie,” but the Baroness promptly suggested he use the French word for twilight: crépuscule. It became his obsession. He conceived of it as a through-composed piece—there would be no improvisation, no variation, just a concise arrangement. “Crepuscule with Nellie” was to be his concerto and he wanted it to be perfect. Driven to mania, he stayed up many nights wrestling with the song’s middle or bridge.49 He was desperate to finish the song because he feared he might lose his precious wife.
A thyroidectomy was no small matter, though the procedure had become a fairly routine treatment for cancer and hyperthyroidism.50 Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of Nellie’s illness was the impact it had on her psychological state. Thyroid dysfunction can produce chronic depression, and the removal of the thyroid tends to worsen matters, causing labile mood swings, confusion, and bouts of melancholy.51 Nellie went into the hospital on the verge of a breakdown and she came out even more depressed. Instead of returning home, she checked herself into Burke Rehabilitation Hospital in White Plains, New York.52
Monk kept tinkering with “Crepuscule” right up to his Riverside record date on June 25. He had stayed up several nights prior stressing over the music and out of sorts in Nellie’s absence. He was especially anxious about the session not only because it was to be “Crepuscule” ’s debut but because he had recruited his old mentor and hero Coleman Hawkins for the date. Monk and Hawk had not played together in nearly ten years, though they had remained close.53 Thelonious also hired Coltrane (as promised), trumpeter Ray Copeland, and Gigi Gryce, who also doubled as arranger for the band. The rhythm section consisted of two of his favorite cats: Blakey and Wilbur Ware. With Blakey showing up over an hour late, Monk’s anxiety level was nearing its breaking point. They managed to lay down a complete version of “Crepuscule with Nellie,” but at a slightly faster clip than on subsequent recordings, with Blakey’s busy drumming overwhelming the sound. The next take begins much like the first, with just Monk and the rhythm section, but it breaks down after the first eight bars, followed by a rapid loss of momentum. Overcome with fatigue, Monk called it quits for the day.54 Not one to waste precious studio time, Orrin Keepnews asked the band to record an impromptu blues without the pianist. Gryce hastily composed a Basie-ish blues riff, and the result was a thirteen-and-a-half-minute jam session titled “Blues for Tomorrow” that Riverside later issued under Hawkins’s name.55
Monk returned the next evening rested and ready to play. He brought an arrangement of a song he’d learned as a kid: “Abide with Me.” Thelonious adored the melody, which was originally titled “Eventide” by William Henry Monk (no relation). But after Henry Francis Lyte wrote his poem “Abide with Me” from his deathbed in 1847, his words were adapted to William Monk’s melody. Thelonious did not know this history, but given his recent scare with Nellie’s health, the lyrics resonated with him:
The darkness deepens; Lord with me abide.
When other helpers fail and comforts flee,
Help of the helpless, O abide with me.56
He had arranged it for horns only, and the result was fifty-five seconds of pure majesty.
It was a long night of recording for some of Monk’s sidemen. The music challenged the musicians, and Thelonious vacillated between being an unforgiving taskmaster and a patient teacher. He warned Ray Copeland that his elaborate runs in the upper register were “impractical” since they did not give him a chance to breathe. He explained to Copeland that a musician “should be flexible on all ranges of his horn.”57 He chastised Gryce for not writing out the horn parts exactly as he had requested. “I felt the musicians would look at the score and figure it was impossible to play. [Monk] was very angry, and he finally got exactly what he wanted.”58 But before he got it, both Hawkins and Coltrane were having trouble reconciling what Monk demanded with what Gryce had written out. When Hawkins asked for some explanation, he got an earful. Art Blakey remembers, “Monk said to Hawk, ‘You’re the great Coleman Hawkins, right? You’re the guy who invented the tenor saxophone, right?’ Hawk agreed. Then Monk said to Trane, ‘You’re the great John Coltrane, right?’ Trane blushed, and mumbled, ‘Aw . . . I’m not so great.’ Then Monk said to both of them, ‘You both play saxophone, right?’ They nodded. ‘Well, the music is on the horn. Between the two of you, you should be able to find it.’ ”59
While the disc has its share of ragged moments, it is nevertheless a display of virtuosity, musicianship, and collaboration. Monk had the band revisit some old gems, including an extended exploration of “Epistrophy,” as well as “Off Minor” and “Well, You Needn’t,” compositions he had not recorded with an ensemble in ten years.60 Blakey, who was on the original Blue Note recordings, brings even greater fire than he had in 1947. Both songs swing hard, but the eleven-and-a-half-minute “Well, You Needn’t” stands out for the way each soloist asserts his individual voice. The master take is infamous for another reason: Monk shouts “Coltrane! Coltrane!” just before his sax solo. Ray Copeland convinced himself years later that ’Trane was nodding off, high on junk, and Monk had to wake him up.61 The truth is a little more mundane. Monk had not planned out the sequence of soloists, so he was merely letting ’Trane know that he was next. And the recording is evidence that he was poised to play.62
Finally, all of Monk’s fretting over “Crepuscule with Nellie” paid off. Every part of the song is carefully orchestrated, from the bass counterpoint figures to the voicings to the little fills thrown in at various points. He plays a chorus and a half with just the rhythm section and then adds the horns for the next chorus and a half. The horns are not always together and sound somewhat tentative, but it does not detract from the composition’s haunting melody, descending harmonies, rhythmic displacements, and its odd thirty-three-bar structure and five-bar coda. When Nellie finally heard it on record, she smiled.
Keepnews and Grauer knew they had something special. Just a couple of weeks earlier, both Down Beat and Metronome ran glowing reviews of Brilliant Corners, which was released in May. Down Beat’s Nat Hentoff not only gave it five stars but called it “Riverside’s most important modern LP to date.”63 With Monk’s Music now in the can, Keepnews and Grauer wanted to strike while the iron was hot, so they turned to their newly established art/marketing department to come up with the right album cover. The staff consisted of designers Harris Lewine and Ken Braren, photographer Paul Weller, and Monk’s old friend from his Blue Note days, Paul Bacon. Their first idea was meant to be a wacky play on his name: “They wanted me to pose in a monk’s habit, on a pulpit, holding a glass of whiskey,” Monk explained. “I told them no. . . . Monks don’t even stand in pulpits. Then they wanted to dress me in evening clothes, white tie and all.”64 Monk’s refusal took Bacon and his crew by surprise. “It never occurred to us that he would have any objection to it,” recalled Bacon. “He was seriously pissed off. It was the only time he was ever mad at me. And he walked away. So Paul Weller and Harris and I looked at each other and said ‘What are we going to do?’ Not only does he not want to do it, but now he’s mad.”65 Monk walked away to another part of the studio where Weller’s props lay. He saw a little red wagon and decided to park there for a moment. The image was striking. There was Monk, sporting a clean dark three-button suit, dark tie, crisp white shirt, handkerchief, bamboo-framed sunglasses, and plaid driving cap. Bacon reluctantly asked Monk if it was OK to shoot him sitting in the wagon. Thelonious agreed.66 “I told them I would pose in a wagon, because I have actually composed while sitting in my kid’s wagon on the front sidewalk.”67 To further underscore the point, Thelonious added his own props—his brief case, a sheet of staff paper, and a long pencil.
Even if the designers sought to deliberately play on representations of Monk as “child-like” (reinforced by the lettering chosen to evoke a child’s handwriting), Thelonious was too cool, too masculine, and too angry to convey anything but black manhood. The wagon simply became a performance piece, an avant-garde twist. Monk didn’t know it, but he was about to become an icon for a new generation of artists, intellectuals, activists, bohemians, and free spirits. Armed with a couple of new albums of original music and a flurry of press, Thelonious was as ready as ever to find his audience. And he found them, gathered together in a tiny bar in the East Village called the Five Spot. Now all he needed was a cabaret card.