You know what’s the loudest noise in the world, man? The loudest noise in the world is silence.
Thelonious Monk
If the world had all but forgotten Thelonious Sphere Monk, no one told the over 1,000 people who tried to cram into St. Peter’s Church on Lexington and 54th Street to attend his memorial service. On Monday morning, February 22, the musicians arrived in full force, and many contributed to what turned into a musical celebration of Monk’s life and work. Monk’s own recording of “Abide With Me” was selected for the processional, as the pallbearers carried him in and opened the casket to allow the world one last glimpse of the High Priest. For the next three hours he lay there, nattily attired, awash in his own music. Old friends, new friends, and young musicians who knew Thelonious only from records, played their last respects: Paul Jeffrey, Sadik Hakim, Muhal Richard Abrams, Tommy Flanagan, Max Roach, Ray Copeland, Walter Bishop, Jr., Sheila Jordan, John Ore, Gerry Mulligan, Frankie Dunlop, Eddie Bert, Ben Riley, Larry Ridley, Ahmed Abdul-Malik, Barry Harris, Lonnie Hillyer, Marian McPartland, Adam Makowicz, Ronnie Matthews, Randy Weston, and, of course, the Rutgers Jazz Ensemble. The right Reverend John Garcia Gensel presided, Ira Gitler eulogized, and George Wein and Walter Bishop, Jr., shared personal tributes.1 Three generations of Monks and Smiths were on hand, as well as the Baroness and her daughters. Nellie and Nica sat and mourned together.
Following the benediction, the funeral caravan took the long route to Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York, traveling west on 52nd along what was once Swing Street, turning up West End Avenue, past the Phipps Houses on 63rd, and then on to Harlem to the old Cecil Hotel where Minton’s used to be.2 The trip proceeded without incident until they reached Hartsdale. Less than a mile from the cemetery gates, Nica’s car, which was leading the caravan just behind the hearse, unexpectedly broke down. She was carrying the immediate family, including Nellie and her kids. Considering the prospects of divine intervention, Nellie asked, “What does it mean?” Boo Boo replied, with her father’s legendary wit, “It means that everyone in the front get to the back, everyone in the back go to the front!”3 Her words elicited gales of laughter, and yet they were profound, if not prophetic: “So the last shall be first, and the first last: for many be called, but few chosen.”4 This was Monk’s life condensed to a parable—a life of constant struggle for work, for recognition, for respect as a pianist and composer. Not until the early 1960s had his fortunes shifted, and he moved from last to first, and not for long. The musical genius was again recast as the mad eccentric, who then became the boring old man, who subsequently metamorphosed into a relic of the past. Boo Boo vowed to change the order, to make her father first again and to remind the world of his enormous contribution to modern music. And she launched her crusade at the very moment when the T. S. Monk Band was riding on the crest of fame and potential fortune.5
First, Boo Boo formed an advisory board consisting of family members and close friends—most prominently choreographer/dancer Nina Garland, Monk’s former drummer-turned-historian, Willie Jones, and New York Supreme Court Justice Bruce Wright. She envisioned several different projects to memorialize her father—each one linked Monk’s musical legacy to the neighborhood in which he grew up. She wanted to save the Phipps Houses from being demolished. She was living in the very same apartment in which her father grew up, but the buildings were in shambles. Ever since the Phipps Foundation sold the buildings in 1961, the property had changed hands at least thirty times. By 1982, only 92 of the 346 apartments were legally occupied, as squatters and drug addicts took over. The then-current landlord planned to sell the land to developers, but Boo Boo and Toot, along with several residents, appealed to the Landmarks Preservation Commission to declare the Phipps Houses an historical landmark.6 She also launched a campaign to rename that section of West 63rd Street “Thelonious Sphere Monk Circle.”7
Boo Boo’s most ambitious plan was to establish a scholarship program and a theatrical workshop in Monk’s name, to be housed at Martin Luther King, Jr., High School on 65th and Amsterdam. To endow the workshop and scholarship, she conceived of an elaborate work of art and history that would take the forms of a documentary film, a staged musical production, and a photo exhibition that would tell the story of the San Juan Hill neighborhood through Monk’s life and work. Calling it “Always Know, Two Is One: The Philosophy of Thelonious Sphere Monk,” she hoped this ambitious work would draw links between black migration and settlement in the neighborhood, the struggle for civil and human rights and social justice, and the vision and music of Thelonious Monk. Most importantly, Boo Boo’s dream was to establish a permanent foundation in her father’s name that could support and oversee these specific projects while keeping Monk’s legacy alive.8
She succeeded in getting at least one of her goals accomplished. On June 25, 1983, the Monk and Smith clans joined hundreds of fans and San Juan Hill residents for the unveiling of “Thelonious Sphere Monk Circle.” Thelonious’s brother, Reverend Thomas Monk, spoke, as did George Wein, Judge Bruce Wright, and journalist Marc Crawford. And, of course, there was music. Barry Harris played solo piano, followed by performances by Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach, Clark Terry, Frank Foster, Walter Davis, Jr., and Larry Ridley.9
Sadly, Boo Boo’s triumph was marred by the recent news that she and Yvonne Fletcher, Toot’s fiancée, had been diagnosed with breast cancer. The chances that these two young black women, friends, bandmates, not yet thirty years old, could be stricken with breast cancer simultaneously is astonishing. Boo Boo and Yvonne learned of their condition some time in the late winter or spring, but in lieu of chemotherapy or a mastectomy, they both opted to check into the Livingston-Wheeler Clinic in San Diego, California.10 The clinic’s founder, Dr. Virginia Livingston-Wheeler, held the unorthodox view that cancer was caused by a weakened immune system that enables the unchecked growth of particular bacteria. Thus she treated cancer by targeting the immune system with vaccines, antibiotics, megavitamins and nutritional supplements, digestive enzymes, enemas, and diet.11 Although the clinic had treated nearly 10,000 patients by the time Boo Boo and Yvonne checked in, and many of her patients survived cancer, the Livingston-Wheeler methods were later questioned by the California State Health Department and the American Cancer Society.12 A few months into their treatment, neither woman showed any improvement. On October 23, Yvonne Fletcher died in San Diego. She was one week away from her thirtieth birthday.13 Boo Boo stayed in California and stuck with the treatments. Less than three months later, she too died.14
Nellie and Toot were devastated. Just two years after losing Thelonious, Nellie had to bury her baby daughter. And in a span of three months, Toot lost his only sibling and the woman he had intended to marry. He stopped playing music and went into seclusion for several months. When he emerged, he knew what he had to do: He threw himself into the work Boo Boo had left unfinished. With help and guidance from Nellie, several relatives, and longtime friends,Toot steered the Thelonious Monk Foundation from a fledgling family-run outfit to an internationally respected institution. In 1986, he and his board teamed up with Maria Fisher of the Beethoven Society of America and launched the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz to promote music education and to train and encourage new generations of jazz musicians.15 The founding of the Monk Institute was a fitting tribute to an artist who was always willing to share his musical knowledge with others but expected originality in return. The work inspired Toot to not only return to music but to devote most of his energies to studying and performing his father’s compositions.16
In more ways than one, Boo Boo’s dream has been realized, and Nellie, who would pass in 2002, lived long enough to see it come to fruition. The music world accepts Thelonious Monk as an American master. He has been the subject of award-winning documentaries, scholarly studies, prime-time television tributes, and in 2006 was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for his contribution to jazz. His compositions constitute the core of jazz repertory and are performed by artists from many different genres. “ ’Round Midnight,” “Straight, No Chaser,” “Well, You Needn’t,” “Ruby, My Dear,” among others, have become bona-fide jazz standards; no self-respecting jazz musician today can get a job or participate in a jam session without knowing these tunes.
Indeed, even as Monk prepared to meet his maker, his music was just beginning to experience a renaissance. On November 1, 1981, producer Verna Gillis gathered an array of musicians—from Steve Lacy and Barry Harris to trombonist Roswell Rudd and pianist Anthony Davis—at Columbia University’s Wollman Auditorium for over four hours of “Interpretations of Monk.”17 And the day Monk died, Charlie Rouse was in the studio with former bandmate Ben Riley, pianist Kenny Barron, and bassist Buster Williams, launching a new band called Sphere. They recorded only Monk tunes that day, resulting in the landmark LP Four in One.18 Soon CBS Records was digging through its vaults to issue Monk’s unreleased Columbia recordings, and every label—legitimate and bootleg—scrambled to put out whatever Monk they had on hand. A new generation of musicians explored his compositions with fresh ears and built on Monk’s idioms, his use of space, dissonance, rhythmic displacement, his angular lines and devotion to melody, to create new works of their own. Jason Moran, Geri Allen, Matthew Shipp, Vijay Iyer, Anthony Davis, Jessica Williams, Marcus Roberts, Danilo Perez, Gonzalo Rublcaba, and Fred Hersch are just a fraction of the post-Monk generation of pianists/composers whose ideas have been profoundly shaped by a serious engagement with Monk’s music.19
Yet, for all the accolades and formal recognition, for all the efforts to canonize Monk and place his bust on the mantel alongside Bach and Beethoven, we must remember that Monk was essentially a rebel. To know the man and his music requires digging Monk—out of the golden dustbins of posterity, out of the protected cells of museums—and restoring him to a tradition of sonic disturbance that forced the entire world to take notice. He broke rules and created a body of work and a sound no one has been able to duplicate.
If I’ve learned anything from this fourteen-year adventure, it is that duplicating Monk’s sound has never been the point. “Play yourself!” he’d say.20 “Play yourself” lay at the core of Monk’s philosophy; he understood it as art’s universal injunction. He demanded originality in others and he embodied it in everything he did—in his piano technique, in his dress, in his language, his humor, in the way he danced, in the way he loved his family and raised his children, and above all in his compositions. Original did not mean being different for the hell of it. For Monk, to be original meant reaching higher than one’s limits, striving for something startling and memorable, and never being afraid to make mistakes. Originality is not always mastery, nor does it always yield success. But it is very hard work.
You know, anybody can play a composition like [“Body and Soul”] and use far-out chords and make it sound wrong. It’s making it sound right that’s not easy.21