Thelonious Monk

“As for writing for full orchestra,” Monk confessed in 1956, “I’ve done that years back for all kinds of pieces. I haven’t been doing it because I’m not the kind of person who likes to arrange, and they don’t pay enough for arrangements anyway.”¹ So he needed to find an arranger. He wanted someone who not only possessed a deep knowledge of his music, but who knew how to make a big band sound like a small ensemble. Jules and Thelonious both agreed that Hall Overton, now a Juilliard faculty member, was the best man for the job. During their nearly five-year acquaintance, Monk had grown especially fond of Overton, in part because he considered Hall one of the few people who genuinely understood his music. In 1957, when Ira Gitler suggested that some musicians found Monk’s music too difficult to play, Monk replied, “It’s not hard. Ask Hall Overton, he’ll tell you.”² When Jules approached Overton about the project, he was delighted to accept.

They began meeting in late January, early February at Overton’s loft on Sixth Avenue, near the corner of 28th Street in the heart of New York City’s flower district.³ Monk knew the place well; the dilapidated fifth-floor walk-up had been a popular musicians’ hangout since the mid-1950s. Hall, painter David X. Young, and pianist-arranger Dick Cary had moved into the building in 1954.⁴ Young transformed the fifth floor into an artist’s studio, Cary leased the third floor and installed his own Steinway, and Overton occupied the fourth floor and added two upright pianos he placed side by side.⁵ Soon Overton and Cary began hosting impromptu jam sessions that attracted musicians from around the city, in spite of the building’s squalid conditions. Harry Colomby still remembers the startling transition from Sixth Avenue, where the fragrance of flowers overwhelmed the senses, to the smell of “cat piss and dead rats . . . the odor was just horrific.”⁶ As Young recalled when he first moved in, “There were mice, rats, and cockroaches all over. You had to keep cats around to help fend them off. Conditions were beyond miserable.”⁷ Like Ken Karpe’s loft space on the East Side, Young’s place had become legendary for its early morning jam sessions.⁸ Virtually everyone passed through there: Charles Mingus, Zoot Sims, Teddy Charles, Jimmy Giuffre, Roy Haynes, Gerry Mulligan, Bill Evans, Bob Brookmeyer, Stan Getz, Art Blakey, Miles Davis, Art Farmer, Gigi Gryce, Oscar Pettiford, Sonny Rollins, Lee Konitz—among others.

Early in 1957, Overton sublet part of his sublet to photographer W. Eugene Smith.9 He was a celebrated photographer who had recently left Life magazine in order to create a massive photo essay of his hometown of Pittsburgh. With the support of grants, he took some 13,000 images and selected the very best for the essay, but failed to come to an agreement with either Life or Look magazines. Broke, dejected, and suffering from manic depression exacerbated by heavy drinking and benzedrine, Smith took refuge in the loft and its musical culture.¹⁰ Like David X. Young, Smith loved jazz. He was also an audiophile as obsessed with capturing life and history on tape as he was with celluloid. He wired the place with microphones and constantly ran his reel-to-reel recorder. As a result, he not only documented these incredible jam sessions at the loft but the entire scoring and rehearsal process leading up to Monk’s Town Hall concert.¹¹ Thanks to Smith, we can eavesdrop on Monk and Hall’s process of collaboration, and destroy the myth that Hall single-handedly arranged the music while Monk spun around in his own world.

The earliest meetings proved both productive and painstaking. Monk insisted that Overton transcribe his songs directly from the piano. They would sit together at the two instruments and Monk would patiently teach Overton each song, bar by bar, note by note. Monk had lead sheets, but would not share them. Sometimes, he would play just the chords with the specific voicings and bass lines, all the while indicating what instrument should play which phrases or notes. On “Thelonious,” Monk provided Hall with a precise delineation of his harmonies, movement, and rhythm. They spent at least fifteen minutes on the first two bars alone, all the while explaining how the song should sound, what notes ought to be there and how the overtones are meant to suggest the key of B^b throughout the song.¹² On “Monk’s Mood,” for example, it took Overton—an excellent pianist in his own right—forty minutes to get through one chorus. Monk was exacting. He even showed Overton how to create a “ringing” note, in this case D natural, by holding down the key until it fades out while playing other notes. When he finally got through the song, he indirectly paid Overton a compliment: “I don’t think I ever heard anybody play it, you know. You don’t hear a song, you know, like you like to hear somebody else play it. Hear how it sound, you know.”¹³ Once Overton got the basics, Monk often got up from the piano bench and either paced or danced around, barking out instructions and answering questions, often into the wee hours of the morning.¹⁴

What becomes clear from all these tapes is that Monk is in charge. He knows what he wants and feels quite comfortable directing, if not actually teaching, Professor Hall Overton. And Monk could wax philosophical. He expounded upon the use of the introduction: “[Y]ou gotta have an introduction? Sometime it sound better when you just start right out. Just start swinging right away. Then you don’t bring no lull. Introduction could put you in one kinda mood, you dig? Then you get in another kinda mood when you come on the melody.”¹⁵ He talked about how he projects harmony in the melodic line: “When I’m playing the piano, I’m not playing no chords there. I play the melody within them.” And he gave little lessons in fingering, composition, structure, sound, how to reach an audience, and how to tell a story with music. Overton, for his part, listened patiently and respectfully.16

The work was hard and some sessions were especially difficult. One night, Overton proposed writing background lines in order to get more instruments involved and this seemed to annoy Thelonious, who wanted less harmonic density and more emphasis on rhythm.

Monk: I do things according to what the drummer, what they’re doing at the time.

Hall: I know you do . . .

Monk: The horn is blowing according to what the drummer’s playing, you know?

Hall: Are you opposed to that? In other words, to . . .

Monk: No, I’m not opposed to that. I’ve done it many times myself.

Hall: If you like the idea, I’d like to get some things down.

Hall continued to talk, asking Monk for ideas about the order of solos, which ultimately pushed Monk to the point of silence. Finally, Monk responded, “My mind ain’t working tonight. I can’t think of shit. . . . Next time we get together, it might be working. I just woke up.”¹⁷

Most of the sessions were relaxed and full of humor. Thelonious, in particular, cracked everyone up with one-liners and colorful remarks. Listen:

Monk: On “Crepuscule with Nellie,” all we need is about two choruses on that, and we’ll end up everything on that or something. End the set with that. There ain’t too much you can do with that.

Hall: How do you want to do that Monk?

Monk: I’ll play the first chorus, let the band come in for the second chorus. Then we get up and get our bread and quit. [LAUGHTER]¹⁸

On another occasion, while working on the bridge to “Thelonious,” Monk sang along as Overton voiced the chords. Suddenly Monk stopped and said, “You threw a funny note in there, you didn’t mean it.”

Hall: I didn’t mean it, it was a goof.

Monk: It sound all right, though.

As soon as they had three solid arrangements and sketches of other pieces together, Monk decided it was time to rehearse. Overton made suggestions for band members, but the final decision was Monk’s. The rhythm section was comprised of his new quartet—drummer Art Taylor, whom Monk mentored when he was still a kid in Harlem, and bassist Sam Jones. Of course, Charlie Rouse himself was part of the band, and his fellow saxophonists included alto player Phil Woods and Pepper Adams on baritone. In fact, Monk favored low-toned instruments for the ensemble, a decision for which he would be criticized.²¹ The brass section consisted of trombonist Eddie Bert, Donald Byrd on trumpet, and Jay McAllister on tuba. David Amram was originally tapped to play French horn, but he had an out-of-town commitment. “It broke my heart,” Amram reported. “I believe I was doing a film score, one of my few, and I couldn’t get back.”²² Instead he suggested twenty-four-year-old Bob Northern. When Monk and Overton hired him, he had just completed his studies at the Vienna Academy of Music and was beating the pavement for a symphony orchestra gig. “It was hard for black musicians just to find out about auditions,” he recalled. He welcomed the call from Overton.²³ “I didn’t hesitate. . . . This was an occasion that nobody wanted to miss.”²⁴

Except for McAllister, Northern, and Woods, Monk had performed or recorded with every other member of the band. Although Thelonious respected the band, he also knew the music was difficult and he planned for two weeks of rehearsal to prepare for the Town Hall concert, scheduled for February 28. He believed they needed to learn only one song a day. “Don’t make no sense working on a gang of songs if you don’t play nothing right,” he told Overton. “I’ve seen cats bring a whole group down and they run the book down like they playing on a job, and they still don’t know shit. Nobody still can’t play nothing. Now if they take one arrangement and run that down and learn that. One a day. . . . Let everyone take their time to learn it. Everybody don’t have to be showing how fast they can read. Sight read. Take one bar.”²⁵

Before rehearsals began in earnest, Monk was scheduled to perform at the Chicago Civic Opera House on Valentine’s Day. His new quartet—Rouse, Sam Jones, and Art Taylor—shared the stage with Sarah Vaughan, Gerry Mulligan’s quartet, and Miles Davis’s sextet as part of “New Jazz at the Opera House.” Ken Joffe and Don Friedman, co-producers of the New York Jazz Festival, put the package together and planned for a national tour. Whatever the prospects, it was much-needed work for Monk, a much-needed break from his work with Overton, and an opportunity to hear his new band on a concert stage.26 Nellie came along, allowing them at least a few moments to celebrate Valentine’s Day. The concert was a success, drawing about 3,000 people between the two scheduled shows.²⁷

Monk wasn’t anxious to return. When Frank London Brown, who was working on another story about Monk for Ebony magazine, invited Thelonious and Nellie to extend their stay in Chicago as his house guests, they readily agreed. “We were living in the projects, in the Lowden Homes, on West 95th Street,” recalled Brown’s widow, Evelyn Colbert. “But they didn’t mind. We gave up our bedroom and Monk stayed in bed just about the whole time. He didn’t come out. I would make dinner and breakfast and Nellie would bring him his food. So for two days or so, we didn’t see him.” Frank would go in and sit with Monk and shoot the breeze or gather more material for his article. Nellie rarely left him alone in the room. When she did come out to get his food, Nellie would make polite conversation with Evelyn. “She was very, very nice, very friendly.”²⁸

Monk started rehearsing the big band as soon as he returned. As he had promised, they worked on one tune a day, sometimes taking an hour or so to master the first few bars of a song. “It was tremendous, tedious rehearsing,” Art Taylor recalled. “By the time I finished rehearsing, I forgot everything I did. . . . Nothing came easy.” He was not alone. He remembered that just about everyone in the band struggled with the music.²⁹ Eddie Bert thought the arrangements “really captured Monk’s sound” but were “hard to play at that time . . . unorthodox. I mean, you were playing piano music on your instrument. . . . But it came out.”³⁰ The rehearsal schedule was pretty grueling, sometimes beginning around 3:00 a.m. and continuing until 7:00 a.m. Robert Northern often went straight from rehearsal to his job as a school teacher in the Bronx.³¹ The musicians were willing to put in time on the promise that a three-week tour would follow the concert. Pepper Adams was told that a concert tour “in fact was part of the package that I was approached with initially, when I was asked to play in this band for Town Hall.”³² Jules Colomby and Marc Smilow were supposed to organize it and Riverside Records, rumor had it, committed to underwrite the tour.

Monk proved to be a relentless taskmaster with a very clear sense of what he wanted. On “Crepuscule with Nellie,” for example, he insisted that the band pay attention to dynamics. In the fifth measure of the B-section, Monk tells them, “the last two notes are louder still, until the last one is loud as you can blow.” But on the next take, he chided trumpeter Donald Byrd for going a little overboard. He said, “Eh, uh, Donald Byrd, don’t play too loud, you dig? Don’t play it so loud so it sounds like you’re playing by yourself.”³³ He was especially hard on Byrd, who was only twenty-six at the time. On the last day of rehearsal, after playing through “Friday the Thirteenth,” Monk criticized Byrd for soloing just on the chord changes. Slightly annoyed, Byrd wanted to know what he should be playing. Monk gently berated him: “You forgot all about the melody. Forgot how the melody went.” He essentially repeated his oft-cited mantra: If you know the melody, you make a better solo.³⁴

Most of the tapes capture Monk at the piano playing with the band. Although they were still trying to tighten up sections of “Off Minor” and “Little Rootie Tootie” the day before the concert, Monk sounded as if he really enjoyed playing with and against the band.35 He did not simply go through the motions; rather, he crafted innovative solos and found ways to comp behind the band that propelled the rhythm. Often he got up from the bench and danced while Overton played piano and gave directions. Band members might have thought he was disengaged from the process, but those who knew him well knew that dancing was his way to feel and even display the rhythm. Northern remembered struggling with “Little Rootie Tootie” until Monk called a five-minute break, “walked into the corner of the loft and danced my whole part, note by note. . . . I watched his feet. . . . He called us back together and I played it perfectly after I watched him. That’s the kind of teacher he was.”³⁶ Eddie Bert recalled how Monk would “be dancing half the time. Hall would say, ‘Well, when do you want to play the piano?’ Hall would be playing the piano and Monk would be dancing in the other room saying, ‘Make sure them tempos are right.’”³⁷ By the time the last rehearsal ended on the 27th, the band wasn’t perfect but they got the tempos right.

The night of the concert was electric. Signs adorned the area around Town Hall, Broadway and 43rd Street, bright orange, black, and blue posters projecting Monk’s silhouette—slick driving cap, bamboo glasses, goatee. Eight-thirty arrived and about 1,100 of Town Hall’s 1,500 seats had been filled. Billed as “An Evening with Thelonious Monk,” all of the major jazz critics, writers, and musicians were there, along with “a goodly crowd of young adults of both sexes, all of serious mien.”³⁸ Photographers were everywhere. The folks who mattered most to Monk were there, too—Nellie, Sonny and Geraldine, Thomas, Marion, and some of his nieces and nephews—many of them now young adults. Monk was ready to hit, right at 8:30, but before the band could come out, critic Martin Williams, co-editor of Jazz Review, gave a few pre-concert remarks. He spoke longer than Monk would have liked, but the audience remained patient, attentive, and quite serious.³⁹

When it was time, Monk and his quartet appeared on stage impeccably dressed in dark suits, crisp white shirts, and ties. The folks who had not seen him since the Five Spot may have noticed that he had gained a little weight and his hair was beginning to thin. The quartet opened the concert with a swinging, loping version of “Blue Monk,” followed by “Straight, No Chaser,” “In Walked Bud,” “ ’Round Midnight,” and closing the set with “Rhythm-a-ning.” It was standard Monk fare, tried-and-true songs that had been in circulation several years. While the band jelled pretty well, the piano was the dominant force, the glue that held everything together.⁴⁰ The audience greeted each number with enthusiastic applause. Following a short intermission, Monk appeared with the entire ten-piece band. Here was the pièce-de-résistance. Opening with “Thelonious,” featuring Monk as the only soloist, they then slid into a nine-and-a-half-minute version of “Friday the Thirteenth.” Given how the critics bashed it five years earlier for being long and monotonous, it was a challenge to resurrect it for the band. They added a counter-melody underneath that enlivened the song, and Phil Woods took off on what would turn out to be his best solo of the night. “Monk’s Mood” is beautifully orchestrated; the harmonies are neither dense nor cluttered.

Thelonious left Town Hall that night feeling triumphant. Few jazz musicians are granted full concerts devoted entirely to their compositions. A few months earlier, he had been beaten in Delaware by police; now he took his place among a very tiny pantheon of artists that included Duke Ellington and Fats Waller.⁴³ Keepnews and Bill Grauer were also happy with the results, and could not help noticing the warm reception Monk’s big band received. They knew they had a strong disc on their hands and they looked forward to the upcoming tour.

Monk went home that night exhausted. He had been going nonstop for a month. He did wake up in time to catch his band’s brief appearance on Prudential’s The Twentieth Century on Sunday night. Of course, Monk knew nothing of the show’s content when they filmed him. What he saw that evening as he lay in bed with Nellie and the kids must have surprised him. As Thelonious and his band wailed away in the opening clip, Walter Cronkite described the current generation of youth as “silent, tranquil, beat.” For the next fifteen minutes, they listened to academic experts and students describe the new generation as materialistic and selfish, before returning to the Five Spot to meet the “Beats” and hear Monk.⁴⁴ (Unless one noticed the sign over the bar, the un-hip would not have known who was playing since Monk’s name is never mentioned.) The scene was surreal; the camera pans from the bandstand to the bar where we “eavesdrop” on a conversation between a young woman defending modern jazz and a young man criticizing it: “I think it’s going too far. I enjoy something like Turk Murphy, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Johnny Smith Quartet—something I can relax and enjoy.” They asked the poet who had just performed what he thought jazz meant for his generation. “To me it means something interesting, a different kind of sound.” And then the camera cuts to Monk jamming away, arms crossed, lips pursed, intensely focused. The next shot pans the Five Spot, capturing a sea of white faces and their expressions as they contemplate the music. Walter Cronkite concludes: “Nowhere have we found any indication of this generation having a new movement or cause of its own.” Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas has the last word, criticizing youth for “conformity, self-centeredness, and complacency.”

Monk’s triumphant night at Town Hall was followed by a reality check when the reviews started to appear. John S. Wilson, one of Monk’s champions, acknowledged the man’s genius, pointed out how rare it was for jazz musicians to have such a concert, praised the quartet, and then proceeded to criticize the big band’s “bland, workaday performances.” He blamed the arrangements, which “smoothed out the characteristically Monkian humps and bumps, diluted his tartness and robbed the works of their zest. It was a pipe-and-slippers version of music that is naturally querulous.”⁴⁶ Billboard critic Bob Rolontz felt Monk “let the audience down” because he played so little, and what he played lacked “the inventiveness or the compelling quality of which he is capable.” He faulted the venue, concluding that the high priest needed the “clink of glasses and hum of conversation that goes on when jazz is played in clubs like the Five Spot, where jazz sounds better—and Monk plays better.”⁴⁷ Metronome’s Robert Perlongo appreciated Monk’s individual performance, which he delivered “with an energy and dedication that was almost tiring to watch.” That energy was evident in the quartet performances but missing in the orchestra, which “tended occasionally to bog down with a little too much intellectual serenity.” For Perlongo, the problem wasn’t the venue or the arrangements but the band’s format—Monk’s music worked better in a small band. It was only on “Little Rootie Tootie” that the orchestra achieved “a standard of Monkishness” equal to that of the quartet.⁴⁸

No one wanted to blame Monk, certainly not New Yorker jazz critic Whitney Balliett. Balliett’s essay started out as a kind of love letter to Thelonious, whose work “represents possibly the most intense and single-minded exploration of the possibilities of jazz yet made by one man.” He praised how Monk takes singular phrases and reworks them until they become something else, something profound. “When he is finished, one has the impression of having viewed the restless, exciting, surprising aerie that only a handful of jazz musicians have inhabited.” This didn’t happen at Town Hall, Balliett complained. For one thing, Martin Williams’s introductory remarks gave the event an air of pomposity that didn’t sit well with Balliett (though one might detect a bit of professional jealousy since he wasn’t invited on stage). The “evening,” he wrote, “never seemed to fully disentangle itself from Significance; one kept waiting for the speeches to blow away, as it were, and the fun to begin.”49 And when the fun finally began, the big band fell short. While Monk was “remarkably consistent,” Rouse was “dull,” Art Taylor “monotonous,” and the arrangements (sans “Little Rootie Tootie”) were “pale, conventional small-band scorings—unison passages sprinkled with mild counterpoint—in which almost no effort was made to strengthen the various competent but second-rate soloists, who needed it.”⁵⁰ Even the later, more extensive reviews by Monk’s champions drew similar conclusions. Gunther Schuller, for example, thought the large ensemble performances were “bland and thoroughly conventional,” failing dismally to “achieve the earthy richness and propulsive swing of Monk at his best.”⁵¹

Thelonious rarely paid attention to reviews, but the Riverside executives did. Whatever plans they might have had to sponsor a three-week tour of the big band were squelched once the reviews rolled in. The decision devastated Monk. Without a cabaret card, a concert tour would have been an ideal way to earn some money. “The Town Hall concert was really the kick-off for what was going to be a tour,” Toot explained. “I think it was an eight-city tour, that never occurred because the reviews were so bad Riverside got scared. And so it’s funny how that record turns out to be a classic and probably the most important record that he did during his tenure at Riverside. But at the time the company—I don’t think it was Orrin or anything like that—just got cold feet because that concert did not get good reviews.”⁵²

Monk’s relationship with Riverside cooled. But he still had to make money. Harry Colomby took more aggressive measures to protect Monk’s long-term financial interests. He started a publishing company, Bar-Thel Music (named for Monk’s children), and affiliated with Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI), which collects royalties and license fees on behalf of its songwriters, composers, and music publishers.⁵³ He had also retained the Shaw Booking agency to secure a few out-of-town gigs and New York City concert appearances. In mid-March, the quartet was booked at the Apollo Theater for a week. Billed as the “wizard of the eighty-eights,” Monk shared the marquee with Miles Davis and R&B singer Ruth Brown.⁵⁴ Monk had not set foot on the Apollo’s stage in thirteen years, not since the night Dizzy Gillespie fired him for being late. He didn’t miss it. In those days, working at the Apollo meant playing five shows a day, which for a non-headlining major band meant thirty-minute sets. The Apollo’s famous revolving stage kept the show moving without delay. Monk sometimes disrupted the show’s rhythms, sending Apollo owner Bobby Schiffman into paroxysms of rage. Just minutes before his Friday matinee appearance, Monk disappeared. “It was time for him to go onstage, and I’m running around frantically trying to find him. I see him standing up on the fire escape backstage, outside the building in the middle of winter with an overcoat on and his hat pulled down over his head.”⁵⁵ Despite the drawing power of Miles’s sextet featuring Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley, uptown audiences came mainly to see Ruth Brown, whose Atlantic recordings sold well among black consumers. During the matinees, the theater stayed pretty empty, and at night the house was a little over half full—a foreboding of things to come for jazz artists.⁵⁶

On March 28, Monk returned to Town Hall, this time opposite singers Chris Connor and Dakota Staton and Dizzy Gillespie’s band. John S. Wilson described the concert as a mediocre stage show complete with pop singers and a comedian (in the form of Gillespie). While Monk alone committed to an authentic “jazz program,” he “was in a drab and lumbering mood.”57 Wilson’s assessment may have been more of an unwitting diagnosis than a music review. April arrived and Monk began showing signs of manic behavior. The quartet was scheduled to open at Storyville in Boston on Tuesday, April 28. Having gone three nights without sleep, he arrived at the Copley Square Hotel (where Storyville was located) early that evening in terrible shape. Slightly drunk and holding a glass of liquor, he paced around in the lobby examining the walls. His band was staying about a mile away at the Hotel Bostonian on Boylston Street, but Monk preferred the luxury and convenience of the Copley. When he tried to get a room, he was refused.⁵⁸ Angry and frustrated, he wandered around the neighborhood, missing the first set and sending club owner George Wein into a panic. Wein recalls how “the audience stayed put for two solid hours without complaint.”⁵⁹ (Not everyone stayed. My own mother and father went to Storyville that night and stayed for about an hour and forty-five minutes before giving up.⁶⁰) Monk finally appeared at 10:00 and joined the rest of his group on the bandstand. But after two songs, he got up from the piano bench and “wandered aimlessly around the room, picking imaginary flies off the walls. The audience watched him in silent bewilderment.”⁶¹ Wein eventually persuaded Monk to come back to the stage for the next set at 11:30, but he did the same thing—after two songs he was through. Instead of walking around, however, he “sat motionless at the piano for what seemed like half an hour.”⁶² Wein tried talking to him but he remained unresponsive. After a while, Rouse, Sam Jones, and Art Taylor decided to leave; the gig was over.

Thelonious reluctantly withdrew to the Bostonian, but he so disliked the accommodations that he took a cab to the Hotel Statler-Hilton (which the night before had hosted Cuba’s new president Fidel Castro and his entourage⁶³) in an effort to get a room there. Again he was denied. Bitter, he decided to go home and fetch Nellie. He hopped a cab to Logan Airport, but arrived too late to catch a flight to New York. By this time Thelonious had become quite agitated. A state trooper at the airport noticed his behavior and began to question him, but when Monk would not respond, the trooper took him into custody and drove him directly to Grafton State Hospital, an insane asylum located near Worcester, in central Massachusetts.⁶⁴

It may have seemed like déjà vu, but Grafton State was a far cry from Bellevue. Situated on 1,200 sprawling acres of farm land, the facility was divided into four distinct “colonies” meant to isolate groups of patients by gender and by diagnosis—i.e., stable patients versus “excited” patients. Monk, in his manic state, was deemed “excited” and confined to “Elms” colony, with its masonry buildings and wood-frame dormitories. The landscape was stunning: rolling hills, woodlands, a dairy farm, two- and three-story Craftsman-style brick buildings, as well as small cottages housing some 1,500 patients. The grounds bore a closer resemblance to the Music Inn or Tanglewood than a mental institution.⁶⁵

While it is not clear if the medical staff came up with a diagnosis, they did administer chlorpromazine—better known by its trade name, Thorazine. Introduced in the early 1950s as an anti-psychotic drug, it had become the drug of choice for managing manic behavior and schizophrenia. State hospitals, in particular, gravitated toward the drug because it worked quickly—sometimes in a matter of hours—and was cost-effective. There are significant side effects, including blurred vision, dizziness, drowsiness, sensitivity to light, nasal congestion, rigid muscles, and dry lips and mouth. The side effects took their toll on Monk: While taking the drug he frequently complained of stiff fingers and those closest to him noticed his dry lips.⁶⁷ “His lips were always very dry,” recalled his nephew Clifton Smith. “And he put an excessive amount of Chapstick on his lips and the Chapstick would peel and he would lick his lips rapidly.”⁶⁸ Since Thorazine contains a sedative, it slows movement and can dull cerebral functions. Patients on Thorazine have often compared it to having a “blanket on the brain.” One of the more severe visible side effects is that it can cause abnormal and involuntary movements—traits similar to those of Parkinson’s disease.⁶⁹

The medical profession was still learning about the impact of anti-psychotic drugs in 1959, but Thorazine seemed to work fast and effectively. Dr. Robert Freymann, who had taken Thelonious on as a regular patient, agreed. He prescribed Thorazine but supplemented the drug with “vitamin shots” to counteract its sedative effects and boost energy. His infamous vitamin shots attracted a clientele of celebrities, elites, and drug-addicted jazz musicians referred by the Baroness. Harry Colomby, who occasionally took Monk to Dr. Freymann’s office on the Upper East Side, would sit “in his waiting room and see dowagers from Park Avenue and then musicians because he was ‘Dr. Feelgood,’ you know.”⁷⁰ Dr. Feelgood would go on to publish a best-selling book titled What’s So Bad About Feeling Good? on how he treated addiction, depression, obesity, and a range of minor ailments using vitamin shots.⁷¹ What neither Monk nor most of Dr. Freymann’s patients knew at the time was that the shots were laced with amphetamines. In 1968, the New York State board suspended his medical license for administering narcotics to known addicts.⁷²

None of this surprised Toot, who often accompanied his father to Dr. Freymann’s office. From what he observed, the good doctor merely catered to the whims and desires of the wealthy. “A brilliant guy, very nice man, but an enabler. So, he would give Nica anything she wanted, including bennies [benzedrine pills]. So they were taking bennies, smoking, drinking Chivas Regal and Dr. Freymann was giving everybody vitamin shots of every kind. . . . Thelonious didn’t need any of that stuff. But I can’t completely blame Dr. Freymann because Thelonious was his own man. . . . I think it exacerbated the coming storm.”73 Irrespective of Dr. Freymann’s motives, we now know that combining Thorazine and amphetamines has a deleterious effect on the patient, and that chlorpromazine inhibits the central stimulating affects of amphetamines.⁷⁴ To make matters worse, Monk’s frequent drinking and occasional recreational drug use—marijuana, cocaine, uppers—meant that the impact and efficacy of the Thorazine was never consistent.

There is very little evidence that Thorazine reduced the frequency or intensity of his manic episodes. On the contrary, the combination of drugs and lifestyle choices may have exacerbated his condition. Once again, Nellie, Nica, Colomby, and even Monk decided that he should no longer travel alone. If Nellie or Nica could not accompany him, they called on Jules Colomby. (Harry was still teaching full-time.) Of course, Monk’s condition had a profound effect on the family. The kids had moved back from Marion’s in the late spring, early summer, but it soon became clear that Monk needed Nellie on the road. They decided to send Toot and Boo Boo to live with Nellie’s sister Skippy and her son Ronnie, who was now nineteen years old. Because Skippy lived on 1304 Bristow Street, just a few blocks from Geraldine and Sonny, the kids attended P. S. 61 in the neighborhood and Evelyn was able to baby-sit after school.⁷⁵ Thelonious and Nellie knew their children were well-protected; they had most of their cousins, not to mention the entire neighborhood, looking out for them.

Fortunately, the next few gigs were nearby—a short stint at Hank’s Club Evergreen near Morristown, New Jersey, about forty minutes’ drive from home, and then a return engagement at the Apollo opposite Dinah Washington and the Gil Evans Orchestra.⁷⁶ Between these two engagements, Monk returned to the studio on June 1 to cut another album for Riverside. It had been over a year since he set foot in a recording studio, and nearly two years since his last studio recording session as a leader.⁷⁷ Monk and Keepnews decided to change things up by adding Thad Jones on cornet. A scion of Detroit’s most famous jazz family (his brothers were drummer Elvin Jones and pianist Hank Jones), Thad was the star trumpeter in Count Basie’s band and, in Monk’s estimation, one of the most underrated musicians in the business.⁷⁸ He once said, “I think Thad Jones is a much better trumpet player [than Miles Davis].”⁷⁹

Keepnews anticipated an easy session. He was mistaken. Thelonious introduced a new composition titled “Played Twice,” the title referring to the song’s structure. It is a rhythmically complex, sixteen-bar theme based on a series of repeated phrases or “echoes” that fall in different places in the meter. After several false starts and three complete takes, they finally laid down a version satisfying to Monk, but then ran out of time. They returned the next day to presumably finish the disc, recording well-established pieces—“Straight, No Chaser,” “I Mean You,” and a gorgeous, nearly eleven-minute rendition of his ballad “Ask Me Now.” Everything went smoothly and Jones showed just how adventurous he could be, especially on “I Mean You.” But it wasn’t enough for an album; Keepnews wanted one more tune.

Between West 63rd Street and Nica’s house, Monk began sketching out a new song, a stately sixteen-bar theme anchored in B^b Lydian mode and delivered as a dynamic, processional march.80 Once past the melody, the processional turns into an all-out, head-nodding, swinging dance party. He called it “Jackie-ing” for his niece. Now nineteen and committed to studying music, Jackie Smith was thrilled with the idea that her uncle would name a song after her. “Then he showed me this little half piece of paper. I was a little disappointed; the song was so short and simple. But when I heard it, it reminded me of the beginning of a song. I said to Thelonious, ‘It’s like an entrance, an opening. It’s like a royal statement,’ and he said, as if it were some kind of epiphany, ‘That’s what it is.’”⁸¹ No surprise that he used it as the opening theme to his concerts.

Armed with a new composition, he and the band returned to Reeves Studios on June 4 to record it. There was one problem: Monk left the music on Nica’s piano. He thought he could teach them by ear. “After he struck a few notes and sang a few more,”Keepnews recalled, “there was a rebellion. The musicians insisted on having it in writing, and I quickly agreed to the delay.” Monk returned with the music an hour later, but what appeared on the page to be a simple sixteen-bar theme was difficult, especially for Thad Jones. They wrestled through a couple of takes and finally produced a master they were proud of. Rouse delivered one of the best recorded solos since he had joined Monk’s band. Indeed, all the solos on “Jackie-ing” were memorable, including Art Taylor’s swinging introduction.⁸²

With two albums in the can, Monk faced a fairly busy summer of concerts and out-of-town engagements, and he had a film score to write. He was supposed to record the soundtrack for Les liaisons dangereuses in Paris that spring. In fact, Colomby and Marcel Romano, the film’s music director, had arranged for a short run at Club Saint-Germain and a concert at the Olympia, but the trip was cancelled. Instead, Romano and director Roger Vadim decided to come to New York to supervise the recording.⁸³ They arrived in May but soon discovered that pinning Monk down to a date was nearly impossible.

Meanwhile, Monk had to attend to his other obligations. On June 17, he and Nellie were back in Chicago for a two-week stay at the Sutherland Hotel and Lounge. The club was packed opening night.⁸⁴ Accompanied by his regular crew—Rouse, Taylor, and Jones—Monk’s band was nevertheless billed as a quintet with “special guest stars.” Who the guest or guests were is not clear; perhaps Johnny Griffin, who led his own group at the Sutherland on Monk’s off night.⁸⁵ But Monk had a difficult row with the management toward the end of his engagement. Around the 27th and 28th of June, Chicago experienced a short heatwave. To the management’s chagrin, Monk showed up to work one night in short pants. The Sutherland, after all, was a classy place known for its crystal chandeliers, plush mauve carpet, and white Hyde Park clientele. Although “Monk’s crowd was probably the most ‘way out’ group,” according to ex-bartender Artie Frazier, the club maintained a fairly conservative atmosphere.⁸⁶ Monk lost the battle, but their verbal exchange got back to the Shaw Agency.⁸⁷

Once the quartet launched into the music, the hat suddenly seemed unimportant. And though they performed well-worn Monk standards, the band was on fire and the audience—the largest to date⁹¹—was warm and receptive. Charlie Rouse displayed a mastery of the repertoire and proved that he really was an appropriate choice for the coveted spot as Monk’s horn. He quieted the naysayers—at least for the time being. And Monk had as much fun comping as he did soloing, especially on “In Walked Bud” and “Blue Monk.”⁹² Except for Art Taylor’s occasional tendency to push the tempo, the set was close to flawless. “That night, Monk was inspired,” wrote critic Dan Morgenstern. So was Morgenstern, who declared Monk’s forty-minute set “the greatest performance I have heard him give” and “perhaps the most moving experience of the festival.”⁹³

Monk’s triumphant showing at Newport was quickly overshadowed by the news that his friend and former drummer Shadow Wilson had died. A rumor circulated that he had been killed over gambling debts, but the truth was that he died of meningitis exacerbated by years of addiction and poor health. He was thirty-nine.⁹⁴ According to David Amram, “Shadow’s death had an effect on Monk, certainly. He loved Shadow and always worried about him.”⁹⁵ A week later, Billie Holiday died of cirrhosis of the liver. She was forty-four. Monk was never close to her personally, but he loved her artistry, her phrasing, her musical choices, and for so many years as a young man, he would wake up to Billie Holiday gazing down at him from his bedroom ceiling. She spent her final days at Metropolitan Hospital under house arrest for possession of heroin that had been planted on her. Both Shadow and Billie died too young, their lives shortened immeasurably by addiction.

Two deaths back to back put Monk in a somber mood, making it difficult to focus on the soundtrack for Les liaisons dangereuses. Roger Vadim and Marcel Romano stayed in New York for several weeks in an effort to coax some music from Monk, but they could not even get him to sign a contract. Vadim had to return, but Romano stayed behind to try to seal the deal. Meanwhile, as a precautionary measure, Romano commissioned pianist Duke Jordan to write some original music. If Thelonious fell through, at least they would have something.⁹⁶

After the screening, Nica invited the whole entourage to her house to talk about the film and to urge Thelonious to begin working. It was already 10:00 p.m., but Thelonious was in no mood to talk business. Instead, he challenged Romano to a game of Ping-Pong. Midway into the match, Romano recounted, Monk suddenly “darted to the second floor, and sat at the piano and began to improvise. Nica timidly handed him the contract. He escaped to the living room, where he sat for only a minute in front of the TV. The kids were hungry, and being the considerate father, Monk went to the kitchen to cook them dinner. After sitting down with them for dinner, Monk played Ping-Pong again, then some piano, more TV, Ping-Pong . . . Still, at dawn, the contract had yet to be signed.”¹⁰¹ The next day, Monk did go to the studio, ostensibly to work on the score, but he produced nothing and still refused to sign the contract. Again, he took refuge at Nica’s house, spent the night with his family partying, sleeping, playing, and eating, until finally he relented. He signed the nine-page contract on July 26 and called Rouse, Sam Jones, and Art Taylor over to Nica’s house to rehearse.¹⁰²

It took three nights in the studio—July 27 to 29—to record the soundtrack. Monk completed most of his part on the first night, Blakey’s group finished the following two nights. After all the hand-wringing and stalling, Monk did not write anything new, nor did he give the musical demands of the film much thought. He added French tenor saxophonist Barney Wilen, who had just made his American debut at Newport a few weeks earlier,¹⁰³ and simply recorded his usual repertoire—“Off Minor,” “Crepuscule with Nellie,” “Let’s Cool One,” “Rhythm-a-ning,” “Pannonica,” “Ba-lue Bolivar Ba-lues-Are,” and “Epistrophy.” The one exception was a solo piano rendition of Charles A. Tindley’s gospel hymn, “We’ll Understand it Better, By and By.”¹⁰⁴ It was an intelligent, if not ironic, choice to underscore the film’s theme of seduction and innocence. Romano and Vadim used it to great effect during a scene where the innocent Marianne and the scheming Valmont meet up in a church. In the end, Romano flew back to Paris immediately after the session with the music secure in his suitcase. He and Vadim were happy with the results. Between Monk’s contribution and the music provided by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, Vadim had more than enough for an adequate soundtrack.

On Friday, August 21, Monk and his quartet had to put in an appearance at the Boston Jazz Festival—another George Wein production—and returned to New York in time for the Randall’s Island Festival the next evening.¹⁰⁷ The format was the same as Town Hall—the small group would perform a few numbers followed by the ten-piece band. Thelonious was a little nervous; after all, this was his chance to prove the critics wrong. So it didn’t help matters when he and Nellie were held up in traffic and arrived a little late. The band was already beginning to warm up backstage when he realized that he’d forgotten all the charts! Without telling anyone, he jumped in the car and headed home to retrieve the music. Nellie noticed Monk rushing off and set out after him. With the two of them dashing to the parking area just before Monk’s group was scheduled to perform, Peter Long, the festival’s assistant producer, started chasing after the both of them. It looked like a scene from Keystone Cops: Two more festival employees chased down Long, which piqued the attention of the police. Eventually, the cops overtook Monk on the bridge with sirens blaring. Once he explained the situation, the pursuing patrolman provided a police escort, enabling him to make it home in time to gather the music and go on as scheduled.¹⁰⁸ When he hit the stage, however, he showed no signs of stress. Indeed, according to John S. Wilson, the band “appeared looser and more at home in the arrangements” than they did at Town Hall. But he still thought the band failed to capture Monk’s “distinctive quality” on all but one number—“an exuberant piece that smacked strongly of the more ribald rhythmic side of Duke Ellington.” He never identified the composition (though he’s probably referring to “Little Rootie Tootie”), but believed that “it was the only time when there seemed to be a satisfactory meeting of minds among composer, arranger and band.”¹⁰⁹

Monk was pleased with the performance, which only heightened his disappointment over the band’s prospects. He had to move on. A couple of days later, he and Nellie headed to Washington, D.C. for a week-long gig at the Caverns on Eleventh and U Street.¹¹⁰ They camped out at the elegant Hotel 2400, a renovated turn-of-the-century apartment building on 16th Street, spending part of the day walking the city and taking in the nation’s capital.¹¹¹ It turned out to be a short-lived working vacation. They returned home long enough to celebrate Boo Boo’s sixth birthday on September 5, then were off again on a grueling nine-city tour as part of George Wein’s “Newport Jazz Festival Presents.” The package included Anita O’Day, George Shearing’s big band, Cannonball Adderley, Lennie Tristano, British trumpeter Humphrey Lyttleton and his Octet, and, of course, Monk’s quartet. Starting in Indianapolis on September 7, the groups traveled by bus to Louisville, Chicago, Detroit, Boston, New York, Pittsburgh, Washington, D.C., ending in Philadelphia on the 20th of September.112 Monk made every venue except Pittsburgh’s Syria Mosque. The night before, the group performed at New York’s Town Hall, so Monk took advantage of being home in order to rest. He rested a little too much, missing the bus in the process.¹¹³ Monk ended up missing the Pittsburgh concert, but making the remaining gigs in Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia’s Academy of Music.¹¹⁴

The tour proved to be both a musical triumph and a financial disaster. Wein and Newport Productions lost money,¹¹⁵ but Monk’s quartet received accolades in every city. Humphrey Lyttelton, whose band was on its first U.S. tour, was so taken with Monk that he published his musings in the British jazz journal Melody Maker. He initially found Monk’s performance rather humorous, if not eccentric, notably the way he positioned “his elbows in an odd flapping movement like some huge, ungainly crow trying to take off from the piano stool.” And he took note of Monk’s newfound obsession with hats. During the first part of the tour, the hat he wore reminded Lyttelton of “some weird modernistic lampshade.” “He wore this hat day in, day out—visitors to his room found him wearing it in bed.”¹¹⁶ (The headgear was hardly “modernistic”; on the contrary, he was sporting the farmer’s hat from Northern Ghana given to him by Guy Warren!) Nevertheless, Lyttelton warned readers not to confuse his “façade” with musicianship. He confessed that he enjoyed listening to Monk “more than the rest of the package put together.” Critics who believe he is a “simpleton,” Lyttleton cautioned, are dead wrong. Indeed, Monk was a model of professionalism. Although he rarely talked to anyone besides Nellie, his behavior was impeccable, contradicting the “legendary tales of buffoonery” that circulated among club owners, promoters, and some musicians. His “sets were models of decorum,” and he possessed a better stage manner than Lennie Tristano’s group, whose performances were marred by lengthy pauses between songs and “a unanimously cool front to the audience.”¹¹⁷ In every city, audiences greeted Thelonious warmly and enthusiastically, and he “responded by treating them with respect, even to the extent of bowing solemnly when his solos were applauded.”¹¹⁸

It was a great tour, but it ended on a sour note. As soon as they returned to New York, both Sam Jones and Art Taylor gave notice. Although Jones found working with Monk “enjoyable,” and considered it a dream come true, he later said he had to leave because of “personality problems.”¹¹⁹ Jones joined Cannonball Adderely’s band. Taylor was simply tired of touring and ready to move on. He decided to stay put in New York for a while, freelancing with different artists.¹²⁰ The timing was terrible for Monk, who was scheduled to open at Club 12 in Detroit two days later. He and Rouse played with a local rhythm section—bassist Alvin Jackson (brother of Milt Jackson) and the club’s house drummer, Frank Gant. Both were fine musicians with a genuine local following, but they were not up to Monk’s standards. According to Prophet Jennings, then a Detroit-based journalist, artist, and photographer, Monk “was mad every night. He was especially mad ’cause Sam Jones had left him to join Cannonball.”¹²¹ He was also mad at the club’s management. Formerly Klein’s Show Bar, the club was situated on 12th Street, a historically Jewish neighborhood that had recently become predominantly black. In April of 1959, Al Mendelson had bought the property from George Klein, and in an effort to boost the bar’s national profile, began booking big names, such as Miles Davis, Sonny Stitt, and Monk.122 Unfortunately, when Monk opened on September 22, the house piano was deplorable. Poor, out-of-tune pianos had long been Monk’s number-one pet peeve, and at this stage in his career he saw no need to accept it.¹²³ Thelonious threw a fit, vowing not to return unless it was replaced. “The following evening,” reported one observer, “a new baby grand piano awaited the finger tips of the genius.”¹²⁴

The audience wasn’t too pleased with the genius. He played the same songs over and over again, sometimes twice in a row. For Five Spot patrons, this wasn’t unusual; he was rehearsing on the bandstand, teaching his new sidemen the music. But for Detroiters whose knowledge of Monk derived from records, radio, and reputation, they thought he was putting them on. When the people started complaining, Monk shot back. “So Monk got on the stage one night,” Jennings remembered, “and said of Alvin Jackson, ‘This man here can’t play no motherfuckin’ way. So fuck all y’all. And you, too, Prophet.’ ” He had been drinking a lot and smoking reefer, which only accelerated his emotional descent. Nellie did her best to calm him down but he could not sleep for a couple of days. At one point, Monk decided he wanted to buy a car, so he, Nellie, and Prophet went to a local Cadillac dealer. According to Prophet, “Thelonious was looking but he didn’t speak. The salesman got suspicious, you know, and wouldn’t deal with him.” Eventually, he crashed. “Just before he closed [at Club 12], I woke up one morning and somebody’s beating on my door, and there’s Monk coming up to where I was living at. I let him in. . . . He just came in and went to sleep on the floor with his clothes on.”¹²⁵

On September 28, he and Nellie headed west for the first annual Los Angeles Jazz Festival at the famed Hollywood Bowl. It was Thelonious’s first trip to L.A. since he worked for Coleman Hawkins. Now he shared the limelight with Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan, and pop singer Bobby Darin.¹²⁶ He had just won the Down Beat International Critics Poll for best pianist a second year in a row, and was second choice in the Down Beat Readers’ Poll. Leonard Bernstein had recently declared Monk “the most original and creative pianist in the world of jazz today.”¹²⁷ And yet, Monk still felt underappreciated. Despite having surpassed piano virtuosos like Oscar Peterson for the top spot in the critics’ poll, Monk complained, “Oscar Peterson never gives me any credit.” He also had choice words for his concert-mate. “George Shearing copies so much jive from me,” yet never mentions Monk. “I don’t care who I mention, ’cause I don’t envy anybody—it seems they go out of their way not to mention who they dig.”¹²⁸ The Los Angeles press did not help matters, either. The early press releases prepared the ground for Monk’s visit, describing him as “controversial” and “eccentric.”¹²⁹

Nellie, on the other hand, looked forward to Los Angeles. She was anxious to see her cousin and former college classmate Anna Lou Smith. Smith had recently completed her medical degree and residency and was now a practicing psychiatrist at L.A. Metropolitan Hospital.¹³² Nellie also needed a break. She and Monk were exhausted from the nonstop traveling. Thelonious continued to take Thorazine, though he still experienced cycles of manic behavior and depression—made worse by sleep deprivation and intermittent dosage. Unfamiliar with the drug, Nellie sometimes doubled his dosage if he skipped a day, exacerbating the side effects.¹³³ Moreover, Nellie still battled stomach and intestinal problems. By the time they checked into their hotel, Nellie was experiencing severe bouts of nausea while Monk was becoming more agitated. When he took the stage on opening night, he was already showing signs of manic behavior. He performed poorly. Critic John Tynan: “Monk fumbled confusedly through ‘Misterioso,’ in the course of which he abruptly slammed his entire forearm across the keys. . . . As the applause faded at the close of the number, Monk suddenly rose and faced the audience. Then he lurched, staggered to regain his equilibrium and sat down again without saying a word.”¹³⁴ By most accounts, when Monk had gotten up to dance he tore his pants!¹³⁵ Not everyone caught it, but Thelonious was embarrassed and out of sync. Thelonious wrestled with one more tune and then walked off the stage to tepid applause. He was not called back. “What should have been the night’s highlight,” wrote Los Angeles Times columnist Mimi Clar, “a rare appearance by Thelonious Monk—was the biggest disappointment of all.”¹³⁶ Another critic called Monk’s performance “the biggest blunder since the man who said that Mississippi was better than California for Negroes opened his big yap.”¹³⁷

Monk headed back to the hotel as soon as the set ended. While Nellie was holed up in the room vomiting, Thelonious roamed the hallways and lobby, eventually getting into a physical confrontation with someone. The hotel staff called the police, who arrested Monk for assault to do bodily harm.¹³⁸ Fortunately, hotel management elected to drop the charges and asked the Monks to leave. Nellie packed up their things and they caught a cab to Anna Lou Smith’s home on Victoria Avenue. Dr. Smith still has vivid memories of that night: “The thing that struck me, was when I opened the door, she was throwing up, but she had the suitcases! We got the suitcases away from her and got her in to see what was going on. She was so sick. She was having not only the vomiting but pain. So I called a surgeon for an emergency visit and he saw her and said she was obstructed. She went into the hospital and had surgery, for which she never forgave me.”¹³⁹ Dr. Smith saved her life. Nellie remained in the hospital for nearly two weeks recovering from surgery while Thelonious traveled back and forth between the hospital and Anna Lou’s home. “Thelonious was kind of in his own world,” she recalled, “but he was anxious. He would get out and walk early in the morning.”140

Monk felt very much alone and out of sorts. He spent most of his birthday in the hospital, pacing and brooding over Nellie. He did reach out to Elmo Hope, whose friendship became a source of comfort. Hope himself was wrestling with his own drug problem and had been clean for over a year, encouraged by a beautiful young piano player named Bertha Rosemond. Daughter of actor Clinton Rosemond and dancer Corine Rosemond, legends such as Nat “King” Cole, Art Tatum, and Fats Waller used to drop by their home and play the family piano. Seeing and hearing these great ticklers inspired young Bertha to take up the instrument. She had studied briefly with Richie Powell, Bud’s brother, not long before he perished in the terrible car accident that claimed the life of Clifford Brown. She finally met Hope one night in October 1958 at the Hillcrest Club, where he was playing with Sonny Rollins. At the end of the set, she shyly approached Hope to tell him that she was learning his music. “He didn’t believe me. He introduced me to Sonny and said, ‘You know this young lady says she’s learning my music!’ I really wanted him to hear me play so I invited him over to my house for coffee and to play for him. Only then did he believe me.”¹⁴¹ Elmo was soon writing songs for her.¹⁴² Monk was pleased to see Elmo and to learn that he was well and happy. Hearing Elmo talk of Bertha reminded him of Nellie, reinforcing his abiding commitment to her while providing Monk with the reassurance and comfort he needed.

Nellie was still hospitalized when Thelonious left for San Francisco, where he was scheduled to open at the Blackhawk Club on October 20.¹⁴³ He could not bear leaving her like this, so on his first day off (Monday) he flew back to L.A. to check on her. Her doctors still insisted that she remain under observation a few more days, which worried Monk even more. But he never lost his sense of humor. He turned to his wife and said, “Nellie, I hope you’re not going to kick it. I can’t find my socks!”¹⁴⁴

Besides Nellie, Thelonious had other things to worry about. Rouse had returned to New York to find work and couldn’t get back in time. And Monk still didn’t have a rhythm section. He called Nica to help and she promptly contacted George Morrow, the former bassist for the Clifford Brown–Max Roach group. He agreed but at the last minute was arrested for failing to make alimony payments so he called Eddie Kahn to substitute.¹⁴⁵ Monk had already arranged to use Frank Butler, but he missed the opening set. And so on opening night, Monk was the only member of his band to show up on time. He ended up using local subs—Brew Moore on tenor, Dean Riley on bass, and drummer/percussionist Willie Bobo.¹⁴⁶ The next night Butler, Kahn, and Rouse were in place and things began to feel normal. The band came to life.

Monk arrived in San Francisco just three weeks after the Monterey Jazz Festival, where a twenty-nine-year-old alto player named Ornette Coleman made his first big concert debut. The Texas-born saxophonist had been on the scene for a while, playing in R&B and blues bands in the Southwest before settling in Los Angeles, where he met trumpeter Don Cherry and other like-minded young musicians interested in pushing the limits of harmony and rhythm. Coleman and Cherry had already released one album and recorded enough music for three more LPs.¹⁴⁹ Pianist John Lewis and critic and composer Gunther Schuller championed their music, inviting them to the Lenox School of Jazz in August of 1959, where Coleman’s free-form improvisation caused a stir among students, faculty, and assorted visitors.¹⁵⁰ Lewis was also musical director for the Monterey Jazz Festival, and chose to add him to the roster, though he only played a couple of numbers. While the full dimensions of Coleman’s style did not come through in this context, his performance set the jazz world abuzz, and Coleman and his funny-looking plastic saxophone quickly became the talk of the town.¹⁵¹

Monk had not yet confronted Coleman and his music, but he knew that a small group of younger musicians were moving in the direction of greater dissonance and experimentation. As far as he was concerned, the jury was still out on the new music. But that did not stop Canadian jazz critic Helen McNamara from associating Monk with the emerging avant-garde. She offered The Thelonious Monk Orchestra at Town Hall LP as an example of “the harsh protesting air that more and more is becoming the cry of the modern jazzman.”¹⁵² Increasingly, dissonance had come to mean “protest,” and protest eventually became synonymous with “anger.” And, as we shall see, the shifting meanings of dissonance had more to do with the political background noise—the “protesting air” of the black freedom movement—than the music itself. For the moment, Monk was well aware that change was in the air and a younger “avant-garde” was pushing jazz in new directions. Some of it he liked, much of it he disliked, and felt uncomfortable when his own music was lumped in the same category.

From the beginning of his musical life, Thelonious had always epitomized the Janus-faced musician, looking simultaneously at the future and the past. He had assiduously promoted the modern while taking pride in his ability to sound like James P. Johnson. But these recordings are deliberately and urgently nostalgic. They return us to an older day, to the generation that believed the old musicals, found comfort in radio, and sang the blues without electricity. True, when Monk plays unaccompanied, there is always a nostalgic turn. Stride is inevitable, as is his exploration of old standards. But this album felt a little more prescient, if not prophetic. A revolution in music had been declared, and Monk was staking out a position.

20

“Make Sure Them Tempos Are Right”