26

“Sometimes I Don’t Feel Like Talking”

(August 1964–January 1967)

Bud Powell had barely walked through the door before Birdland exploded with applause. As he made his way to the bandstand, holding fast to Francis Paudras’s arm and greeting well-wishers and old friends, the whole room was on its feet clapping and shouting. Birdland’s diminutive emcee, Pee Wee Marquette, held the microphone and attempted to introduce “the Amazing Bud Powell” but the ovation lasted seventeen minutes. Clearly, Powell needed no introduction. When the applause finally subsided, Bud threw his head back, counted out the tempo, and took off on Irving Berlin’s “The Best Thing for You Would Be Me.”1 Supporting him was drummer Horace Arnold and John Ore, who had not set foot in Birdland since his row with Oscar Goodstein forced him to leave Monk’s band. But tonight, August 25, all was forgiven. New Yorkers packed Birdland to see this living legend after nearly six years in absentia. Powell restored Birdland’s jazz legitimacy, and it was Goodstein’s way of recovering all the money “that Bud owed me.”2

Bud’s return was the biggest jazz event of the season. Given the stories of how he barely escaped death by TB, his mental illness and emotional breakdowns, his drinking binges and bouts with poverty, those who knew Bud were just happy to see him alive. Not surprisingly, critics found Powell to be below peak and at times “moody and detached,” but he had lost nothing in terms of style, imagination, or fans. As one writer put it, “his audience vociferously agreed that he was still a master, his performance a giant step up from limbo.”3 Musicians came out in force, including Monk—who slipped away from the Village Gate between sets just to catch a glimpse of him. They couldn’t talk that night, but Powell sent him greetings in the form of sparkling renditions of “Bemsha Swing” and “Epistrophy.”4

Bud was anxious to visit Thelonious, but making contact was easier said than done. Both men were working every night, and during the first weekend in September Monk had to jet up to Montreal for a short engagement at Le Jazz Hot.5 And given Bud’s delicate condition, he and Paudras did not venture out too often when they first arrived in New York. After a couple of weeks, however, Bud could wait no longer. Since Paudras had no phone number for Monk (he never thought to look in the phone book; in 1964 it was still listed), they dropped by his house one afternoon. Thelonious answered the door. Both men stood there, staring at each other and not saying a word. Paudras was about to break the silence when Monk suddenly declared, “Come on in, I’ll do the airplane!” It was all incomprehensible to Paudras, but he knew enough not to try to analyze everything. Thelonious led them to the piano and, using a combination of keys, pedals, and his entire body, reproduced the sound of airplanes flying overhead. The quivering stack of dishes on the piano added to the effect. The trick sent Powell into hysterics.6

Now that they were reunited, Monk and Powell started hanging out together in the afternoons, often gathering at Ornette Coleman’s flat in the Village where they would listen to tapes Paudras made of Powell’s nightly sets.7 Spending time with Powell brought back a rush of memories, causing Monk to wax nostalgic. When Nica invited Bud and Francis to the Village Vanguard to catch Monk’s quartet (they opened September 10 for a three-week stay8), Thelonious launched into “In Walked Bud” as soon as he spotted his friend across the room. “I had never seen Monk look so happy at the piano,” recalled Paudras. Other times, when Monk reminisced about his former “student,” he betrayed a sense of sadness, loss, and nostalgia for Bud’s healthier days. He told Paudras, “Yeah, I’d play him my tunes and he could retain them right off. Bud was brilliant from very early on. I showed him a lot of chords, new combinations, reversed harmonies. . . . Bud was a genius, but you know, he was so sick, and now he’s fragile.”9

The road interrupted the men’s reunion. Monk left for the Monterey Jazz Festival on September 19, but without a bass player: Larry Gales was nursing a deep gash to his hand.10 Steve Swallow proved an able substitute.11 Thelonious was billed as one of the stars of the Festival, and promoter/emcee Jimmy Lyons planned to follow through on the previous year’s failed project—to have Monk play a few numbers with a larger band.12 The Los Angeles–based, multireed player Buddy Collette was charged with putting a larger band together for Charles Mingus, so Lyons asked Collette to augment Monk’s group using the same personnel and to arrange four of his tunes for octet. Collette agreed and brought a group of fine musicians from Los Angeles: trombonist Lou Blackburn, baritone saxophonist Jack Nimitz, trumpeters Bobby Bryant and Melvin Moore, and Collette played alto and flute. Thelonious reluctantly showed up to the afternoon rehearsal but remained aloof at first. “We kept running over his music and Monk wouldn’t sit at the piano,” Collette remembered, “he just kept standing around, looking a little confused and unhappy.” Charlie Rouse tactfully explained the problem to Collette: “Monk likes everything short.” Collette understood and called for “a more staccato approach.” Suddenly Monk perked up. “As we got into it, Monk smiled and went over to the piano and played with a lot of feeling . . . Charlie saved us, and we went on stage and broke it up.”13

Indeed. The quartet went on first after Mingus’s rousing performance, delivering exciting versions of “Blue Monk,” “Evidence,” “Bright Mississippi,” and “Rhythm-a-ning.”14 Then the Festival Workshop Ensemble joined Monk’s crew on Buddy Collette’s “Sketches of Monk”—what was supposed to be an ambitious arrangement of four Monk tunes now limited to two. On “Think of One,” set at a tempo slower than usual, the ensemble work was dynamic and solos fairly short—as rehearsed. Bobby Bryant stole the show with a brilliant solo full of huge octave leaps and rhythmic drive. “Straight, No Chaser” is even stronger. Collette’s arrangement is worthy of Hall Overton’s work, and as a soloist he swings hard on alto saxophone. Monk demonstrated his mastery of the blues, opening with simple, earthy lines that become more complex as he tells his story.15

The octet was a big hit, and Monk an even bigger hit. He was deemed one of the festival’s real stars “making the masses happy.”16 His “subdued” manner and “soft, harmonious rhythms and orderly transitions” surprised the critic for Ebony magazine: “Wearing a Dallas-style hat, Monk put together surprising, light-hearted combinations, making him appear more the gentle humorist than the remote eccentric.”17 Writing for the black-owned Los Angeles Sentinel, Les Carter found “humor, beauty and gentleness” in his music, as opposed to the new wave of artists who have been busy “subjecting the jazz audience to experimentation and pretentious intellectualism.”18 Monk also caught the ear and eye of another Sentinel writer, Eunice Pye, and not only for his “splendid performance,” but by virtue of the fact that he came with Nellie. In what might be better characterized as social commentary than music criticism, she wryly noted: “The Negro entertainers outnumbered the whites appearing at the festival. However, the white female companions evened the score.”19

Monk was home little more than a week before he headed out again to play at Penn State University.20 Because the campus is inconveniently located in the very center of Pennsylvania, far from a major airport, Colomby decided to charter a bus for the band (including Larry Gales, who had recovered from his injuries) and their families. Doug Quackenbush hitched a ride, and Nellie kindly loaned him Toot’s Nikon camera (a gift from Dizzy Gillespie). She noticed how Quackenbush constantly switched from color to black-and-white film and thought two cameras would make things easier. He was appreciative, both for the use of the camera and for the entire trip, which felt like an extended picnic. Everyone was in good spirits, and “at the concert, Monk played with the intensity of a madman.”21

Thelonious carried that intensity to 30th Street Studios a couple of days later. In three sessions over three days (October 6 to 8), the quartet revisited “Pannonica,” as well as several old standards he had recorded before. On “April in Paris,” he adopted what had become a standard arrangement—an unaccompanied rubato chorus followed by the whole ensemble swinging. Except for the addition of the tenor saxophone, Monk’s high-spirited take on “Liza” doesn’t stray too far from his Riverside trio recordings, and “Just You, Just Me” had never completely left Monk’s repertoire. He did add two new pieces, though “new” is really a misnomer.22 He recorded two unaccompanied takes of “I Love You, I Love You, I Love You (Sweetheart of All My Dreams),” and adapted the ancient nursery rhyme “This Old Man,” inverting some of the melodic phrases and adding some of his own to come up with the ultra-hip “That Old Man.”23

Macero was pleased. Six tunes plus “Teo,” which he had recorded back in March, completed the album. But Columbia’s brass worried about Monk’s poor productivity; according to his contract, he owed the studio three LPs a year. Macero decided that if he couldn’t get Monk into the studio, he’d bring the studio to Monk: he made arrangements to record him during his upcoming tour of California.24 Thelonious was relieved to finally finish the album, which Columbia simply called Monk, because it meant he’d get paid. Although it took a couple of weeks for Columbia to cut his advance check for $8,176.35, it was close enough to his birthday to merit a celebration.25 He spent October 10 at the Village Vanguard, surrounded by friends, family, and patrons. But the night turned bad when Monk found out that Bud Powell never made it to his gig at Birdland that night. Two days later, he turned up at a friend’s house in Brooklyn in terrible shape. The following week, he attended a party at Nica’s house and then left, unaccompanied and undetected. This time he was gone for five days. A sympathetic black police officer found him laid out on a stoop in Greenwich Village begging for a drink. Nica took him in for a while, and Francis Paudras expected to take him back to Paris, but Powell refused.26 Bud was unraveling and Thelonious feared for his life, but he couldn’t stick around to watch over him. On October 16, he was back on the West Coast for nearly a month.

From the moment Monk disembarked from the plane at San Francisco International Airport, something wasn’t right. That night the band was scheduled to play at the Masonic Auditorium at 8:00 sharp, but they did not take the stage until 9:15.27 The emcee, saxophonist Kermit Scott, an old friend from the Minton’s era now living in the Bay area, tried to calm the restless crowd with a warm, effusive introduction, but after forty minutes of music, “Monk walked off stage leaving his associates in apparent bewilderment.” The audience applauded and shouted for Monk to return. He obliged, played one tune, and then took a forty-minute intermission. During the second half of the concert, Monk hardly touched the piano. Well over half an hour was given to bass and drum solos. “While all this was taking place,” Russ Wilson reported, “Monk was pacing the stage, looking at the audience, smoking cigarettes, and occasionally doing a stomping dance.”28 The concert ended around midnight, after the crowd had thinned out considerably. At least one angry audience member shouted, “Good riddance, Monk,” while the hardcore fans stomped and whistled for more. Monk ignored the commotion and slipped into the audience to speak with a couple whose child had fallen asleep. Meanwhile, Kermit Scott returned to the stage and announced that Monk’s band would return for an encore. Thelonious played “ ’Round Midnight” beautifully, but by then the damage was done.29

The next night, Saturday, October 17, the band played UCLA’s Royce Hall. They were late again, but Monk redeemed himself with a “delightful and completely absorbing” performance.30 Two days later, the band played without incident at the newly opened Valley Music Theater in Woodland Hills, California, where Monk shared the bill with John Coltrane and Jon Hendricks, and then began a two-week engagement at the It Club on Friday, October 23.31 Between gigs, Thelonious and Nellie stayed at Gene Autry’s Continental Hotel, a new, modern facility on the Sunset Strip.32 Soon after checking in, Monk drifted into the hotel bar and began twirling around. The hotel staff repeatedly asked him to leave and the bartender refused to serve him, but this only incensed Thelonious, who stood his ground. Finally, a staff person called Ben Riley to deal with Monk. “So I went downstairs and he’s in his LBJ hat and his robe and he’s got his tie and stuff on.” Thelonious escorted him to the bar and told the bartender to give Riley a double Old Grand-Dad since he would not serve him. Riley tried to coax Monk back upstairs, but he stubbornly insisted on confronting the bartender. Riley downed one drink, but when Monk ordered another Riley resisted. “I said, ‘Just because they won’t serve you doesn’t mean I’m gonna stay down here and act like a fool . . . If you want something to drink, come on up to my room.’”33 He chose to stay. Over the course of two weeks, Monk broke a sliding glass door, damaged the ceiling in his room, and roamed the lobby staring at guests. Consequently, he was banned indefinitely from Gene Autry’s Continental Hotel.34

Monk’s odd behavior was not limited to the hotel. Hampton Hawes, who had not seen Monk since he and Nellie helped him out in New York, came by the It Club one night to check him out. When Hawes approached Thelonious at the bar during a break, “he didn’t seem to recognize me. Looked over my shoulder, his elbow on the bar, staring into space the way he sometimes does . . . I said, ‘Monk, it’s me, Hampton.’ He kept staring past my shoulder as if he hadn’t heard, then turned his back and went into a little shuffling dance; danced a couple of quick circles around me, danced right up to me and said, ‘Your sunglasses is at my New York pad.’ And danced away.”35 Rose Robertson, a young pianist whom Larry Gales had recently met in the Bay Area, showed up at the It Club with high expectations. “The band was ready to go on, but Monk was nowhere to be found. Turned out, he was next door at the pool hall shooting pool. He finally came back, but when he noticed that someone had put a glass on the piano, he threw it down on the floor. That was so strange. So they start playing, but after a while Monk gets up and walks away, leaving the rhythm section to continue. He never came back. I remember being so disappointed because I paid to see him.”36

It Club patrons, a mix of black elites, Hollywood celebrities, and middle- and working-class folks from the surrounding neighborhood, were not accustomed to this kind of behavior. Club owner John T. McClain transformed this spacious room on West Washington Boulevard into the hippest spot in the city for modern jazz, momentarily shifting the center of gravity from the Sunset Strip to the “Westside” black community. On the heels of the demise of Central Avenue—the heart of black Los Angeles’s jazz scene in the 40s and 50s—Washington between Crenshaw and LaBrea thrived; the Parisian Room, the Black Orchid (formerly the Hillcrest Club), and Tommy Tucker’s Playroom were just a few of the night spots along the boulevard.37 Thelonious loved the It Club in part because he dug the neighborhood. Anna Lou Smith lived just a few blocks away, and a neighboring beer and billiards joint, L.C.’s Hideaway, became his favorite refuge in between sets. Monk could hardly resist a good game of pool and he was usually welcomed there, although one night the owner had to ask him to leave after Monk broke several cue sticks in a fit of uncontrolled rage.38

Monk also dug John McClain, who was always patient with him. The slightly built, dapper McClain was a renowned promoter and local celebrity (reputed to have “introduced Ava Gardner to Negroes”) who loved the music and musicians. He married pianist Dorothy Donegan and managed her career for a while, and when the talented Phineas Newborn, Jr., moved to Los Angeles in 1960, the It Club not only became a frequent home for his piano trio but McClain moved Newborn into a house he owned behind the club when he began suffering from emotional problems.39 McClain could afford to be generous and forgiving, since he had other sources of income; deemed “the Black Godfather,” he happened to be one of the city’s biggest drug dealers.40

Judging from the recordings Macero made at the It Club (October 31 and November 1), one would not have known Monk was on a downward emotional spiral. The band was on fire. Monk and Rouse are completely in sync, and Riley is unusually assertive in setting down a groove and driving both soloists—especially on “Misterioso.” Their exploration of “Rhythm-a-ning,” a song they must have played hundreds of times, is a veritable masterpiece. Monk tags on to the first phrase in the melody a kind of drunken flurry of descending notes, which Rouse then picks up and uses to build his solo.41 Besides exhibiting a high level of originality and imagination, the band sounds as though it was having fun. Monk even strayed from his regular repertoire, calling the familiar standard “All the Things You Are,” and the astonishingly difficult “Gallop’s Gallop”—a tune that had been lying dormant for nearly a decade.42

During his stay in Los Angeles, Macero arranged for a couple of studio dates in order to complete a solo piano LP. These sessions were productive; in two days, Monk recorded sixteen good takes of ten songs, mostly old standards. Besides his usual chestnuts—“Sweet and Lovely,” “I Should Care,” “Everything Happens to Me,” Monk delivered stunning renditions of “I’m Confessin,’” “Dinah,” and “I Hadn’t Anyone Till You.” He also included two original 12-bar blues—both probably made up in the studio. The medium-tempo “North of the Sunset” refers more to Sunset Boulevard than to the movement of celestial spheres, and “Monk’s Point” is the pianist’s homage to the bent note. These recordings reveal that, despite growing criticism that his quartet had become tedious and predictable, Thelonious Monk had not lost his chops. On the contrary, he had reinvented stride piano for the modern era.43

On November 3, the day after Monk’s last studio session, the group flew back to San Francisco for a week-long engagement at the Jazz Workshop, and Macero followed in pursuit of more live recordings. What he and his engineer heard during the first two nights of their gig was not the same band. The group dragged, the musicians were out of sync, and Monk could not seem to make up his mind about what he wanted to do. During his solo on “Evidence,” Monk suddenly started to play “Rhythm-a-ning,” forcing Larry Gales and the rest of the band to shift gears midway into the song. Later in another set, he returns to “Evidence,” but one chorus into Rouse’s solo, Monk pushes him off the stand by playing over him. The confused Rouse stops abruptly a few bars into his second chorus, clearly confused over what had just happened. Similarly, the band launched into “Bright Mississippi”—a tune that generally lasts about ten minutes—but Monk abruptly ended it in less than three minutes.44 What happened to the group those two nights remains a mystery, although the greater mystery is why Columbia released these recordings in the first place.

Thelonious and Nellie spent Thanksgiving week in Cincinnati, where he had a short engagement at the Penthouse, and returned home in December to begin a seven-week stay at the Village Gate.45 Thelonious was glad to be home for the holidays, but the physical wear and tear of the road ultimately caught up with him; his gig at the Gate was cut short due to illness and he also had to cancel a two-week engagement at the Plugged Nickel in Chicago in early February.46 Macero was not pleased about this, in part because he had planned to record Monk at the Gate and he needed him back in the studio to complete his solo LP. Despite four nights of live recordings from the It Club and the Jazz Workshop, Macero thought he needed “four additional selections to make a truly fantastic album.”47 And he needed a fantastic album because Columbia’s executives found Monk’s output and overall record sales disappointing.48 Macero gently warned Monk that while “sales figures are quite good . . . we want to do better this year.”49

In an effort to improve sales, they tried different marketing strategies. On the latest LP, Monk, Macero recruited pianist Bill Evans to write the liner notes. The bespectacled Evans was the industry’s latest star and deemed something of an intellectual force in the jazz world. Indeed, his first draft of the notes was five times longer than what was printed, and it read like a master’s thesis. The writing is pedantic in spots and the first half of the essay says little about Monk’s music, but it served its purpose—to have a popular, respected, and articulate pianist legitimize Monk as a composer and musician.50 Evans demonstrates a sophisticated knowledge of music, but betrays a surprising ignorance of Monk. He falls prey to the long-standing myth that Monk lacks exposure to the Western classical tradition or any music besides jazz and American popular music, but as a consequence “his ability to wipe away superficiality to get at and work with fundamental structure has resulted in a unique and astoundingly pure music.”51

Columbia was willing to try almost anything to expand Monk’s audience. They even considered producing a vocal album and sought out writers to put lyrics to Monk’s music. Martin Williams proposed the idea, offered his own set of lyrics, and enlisted critic Joe Goldberg and composer/pianist/singer Margo Guryan to help with the task. Williams and Goldberg were not songwriters, and it shows, from their awkward, sophomoric efforts. Williams even borrowed an old blues lyric for “We See” (“I’m goin’ in the subway/ Put my head on the track/ When that train comes in close/ I’ll just pull my head right on back”). The only experienced lyricist in the trio was Margo Guryan, who at the time was employed by MJQ Music, the publishing company founded by John Lewis and Gunther Schuller. One of her many tasks, in fact, was to write lyrics for copyrights the company owned. She came up with lyrics for “Let’s Cool One,” “Worry Later,” “Let’s Call This,” and “Nutty.”52 Although the project never saw the light of day, Guryan produced some clever and rhythmically incisive phrases that would have worked quite well with Monk’s angular lines. For example, “Let’s Cool One”:

This has been a hot romance

Too hot to talk about

So let’s not talk

Have another drink

It’s a bit too warm to dance

So let’s sit this one out

Go take a walk

Let me think.

Or “Worry Later,” with its flurry of eighth notes:

If you wake up in the morning with a troubled mind

Don’t worry now, worry later friend

If you stop to read the writing on the wall, you’ll find

Your troubles gone–later on.

Macero’s bosses liked the idea but chose a different direction, enlisting Jon Hendricks to write lyrics to “all of Monk’s tunes” with the promise of a Monk–Hendricks LP.53 This, too, floundered.

Thelonious wasn’t so concerned about record sales. He made more money in 1964 than he had ever made, although given how hard he worked it is surprising how little income he took home. Whereas Monk’s gross receipts reached $111,010, after salaries, expenses, and commissions he was left with $42,700, and tax bills amounting to $13,440.54 Monk shelled out $13,000 in commissions alone, divided between his booking agent Jack Whittemore and Harry Colomby, whose relationship with the Monks cooled after Colomby had taken on a new client, a comedian named John Byner: “I got Byner on Ed Sullivan and Thelonious felt a little put out.”55

Monk’s decline was both physical and mental. Besides suffering from colds and occasional bouts of the flu that come with frequent travel and nightly performances, Monk continued to mix medications, such as Thorazine and “vitamin shots” with Benzedrine and a variety of other substances.56 The combinations of drugs exacerbated what doctors would later determine to be a chemical imbalance. Consequently, his bipolar episodes became more frequent. According to his son, the beginning of 1965 marked a turning point: “I remember the first time I saw my father sort of get disconnected. I was home from school. I don’t really remember what precipitated it. I just remember my mother waking me up in the middle of the night telling me that I had to run and get my uncle [Thomas]. All I knew was that he seemed to be acting very strange. He wasn’t really talking. He was looking out the picture window and there was really nothing to see but the walls and the backyard. . . . So my uncle came over and stepped into the apartment and he looked at my father and he said, ‘You OK Bubba?’ And my father didn’t say a word, just like he hadn’t been saying a word. And then my uncle went home. He was useless.” The episode shocked Toot, who really did not have a clue how bad things had gotten since he and Boo Boo went away to boarding school. And while Monk’s bipolar condition manifested itself infrequently, the long-term effects on his physical well-being were becoming evident. “It wasn’t until he started having these bipolar episodes that I saw any problems physically. Because he would walk himself to exhaustion, he might walk a sore into his foot. So when he was ‘recovering,’ this is the sort of thing he was recovering from.”57

Recovering from whatever ailed Monk in late January forced him to cancel a studio session booked for February 17, but he was well enough to come in on the 23rd to work on the solo piano LP. The three-hour session yielded two numbers, “Ask Me Now” and another take of “Everything Happens to Me.”58 It was all he had time for, since the quartet had a short college tour at the end of February that took them to Brandeis and Howard Universities, a piano workshop at Hunter College (a repeat of the Newport Festival workshop), and a world tour lined up for most of March and April. Columbia’s engineers taped Monk’s Brandeis concert for the “On Tour” LP.59 And two days before Monk left the country, Macero corralled him into 30th Street Studio one more time, in an effort to complete the solo LP. Monk brought his rhythm section along, however, to record a funky trio version of “Honeysuckle Rose,” the Fats Waller classic that seeped into Monk’s repertoire in California. Incredibly, Macero added an applause track and passed it off as “live at the Village Gate”!60

Meanwhile, Monk and Nellie prepared for what was to be their longest international tour to date. Leaving on March 4 and returning on April 26, the tour took them to France, Germany, the Netherlands, England, Switzerland, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, and Hong Kong.61 In Europe, Monk played to packed houses and was warmly received everywhere he went. The critics were not always so warm. The quartet’s repertoire had not changed much since Monk’s last tour a year earlier; the only significant difference was the addition of Larry Gales. Critics acknowledged Monk’s importance and his genius, but they began to tire of the old routine. In Paris, the quartet performed four concerts at the Olympia Theatre (two on March 6 and two on Sunday, March 7), which meant some duplication was inevitable.62 Critic Claude Lenissois was at two of the concerts and came away underwhelmed. Hoping Monk would “renew his style,” he worried that the pianist had become complacent and the quartet, though quite good, had fallen into a kind of mechanical repetition.63

The English, on the other hand, praised Monk—a complete reversal from the Brits’ response to his first tour. Gerald Lascelles found Monk’s “simplicity” refreshing in an age when “most of his rivals . . . are wrapped in a mantle of complex exhibitionism almost totally unrelated to the forces which guide jazz separately from the well trodden path of classical music. His understanding of harmonics is unmatched in its concept, his technique is anything but deficient, and he constantly demonstrates his ability to transmit the true jazz pulse by the simple expedient of subtly timed runs.”64 Commenting on Monk’s two concerts at Free Trade Hall in Manchester, Ian Breach noted that while the music remained essentially unchanged since his last concert four years earlier, the man on stage was quite different: “there was no burlesque, Monk got up from his piano and listened—solicitously, it seemed—to each solo, but these were taken in strict, almost staid order, with nothing to distract from their tight, methodic execution.”65 Sinclair Traill caught his two Festival Hall concerts in London, and while he complained about the routine and the all-too-frequent bass and drum solos, he appreciated Monk’s sheer musicality—especially when he played unaccompanied. As a solo pianist he is “in his best angular vein, full of fascinating oblique chords . . . queer changing rhythms,” and humor. It was his humor that the audience found most appealing and the critics seemed to miss, according to Traill. He concluded, “if Monk is the lonely man most critics make him out to be, I would wager his own private world is full of laughter.”66

Traill might have lost the bet. Frustration and exhaustion better characterized Monk’s mood during the European leg of the tour. Besides a few mishaps (Ben Riley’s drums did not arrive in time for the Paris concert), Thelonious was simply not feeling well. And now that he was a bona-fide celebrity, well-meaning journalists invaded his “private world” in their quest to discover the real Thelonious. Monk and Nellie knew good press was essential so they gave generously of their time. In Paris, British writer Mike Hennessey spent nine hours hanging out with the Monks, much of it holed up in their room at the Prince de Galles hotel. And a day before Hennessey’s visit, they entertained Jazz Magazine’s critic Jean-Louis Noames.67 The interviews became tiresome after a while, in part because the writers frequently asked the same questions: What do you like to do? Where is modern music going? Are you writing new music? Why do you like to wear hats? Some questions Monk found annoying. When Hennessey asked about his alleged unreliability, he responded defensively, “This is the biggest bunch of lies. I suppose people just like to run their mouth off. You know, some people were billing me for their concerts without asking me to play. My name would bring the people in, then when I didn’t turn up the promoters would say, ‘That’s Monk.’” Likewise, when the issue of his technique—or lack thereof—came up, he had this to say: “What they mean—the people who say that—is that their technique is limited—because they can’t do what I do. I’ll tell you one thing—my playing seems to work. I get good audiences, people seem to enjoy it.”68

Sometimes he played into their expectations and assumptions. When Jean-Louis Noames asked if he read the newspaper and kept up with current affairs, Monk stated flatly that he never read anything. He watches television instead.69 While he was a television junkie, his daughter Boo Boo described Monk as an “avid reader” who talked quite a bit about politics, history, and current events—often with a wry sense of humor: “Well, when reporters would talk to him, he wouldn’t be bubbling over . . . but he could often be very talkative.”70 Similarly, Ben Riley found Monk to be “very worldly, knowledgeable. He kept up with all the world. It didn’t look like he knew what was going on in the world [but] he could sit down and he could tell you about everything that happened internationally and everywhere else. He was on it, but he just never would say anything. Unless he was in a certain setting.”71

One of his more revealing encounters occurred on March 14, when Valerie Wilmer and John “Hoppy” Hopkins showed up at their suite at London’s Park Lane Hilton, rain-soaked and toting cameras and a portable Grundig tape recorder.72 They were not your run-of-the-mill jazz photographers/journalists. Wilmer was only twenty-three, and yet had been writing for music magazines since she was a teenager. “Hoppy” was only twenty years old when he graduated from Cambridge University in 1960 with a master’s degree in physics and mathematics. He gave up a promising career as a nuclear physicist to become a photographer. He and Wilmer met working for Jazz News and agreed that Thelonious Monk would make a good subject for the glossy men’s magazine, King. Besides an interest in Monk, Wilmer and Hoppy had something else in common: They were budding activists passionately opposed to social injustice and war. Wilmer had a brief flirtation with the Young Communist League and increasingly became involved with antiracist, antiwar, and radical feminist organizations, and Hoppy emerged as a key figure in Britain’s radical underground and the peace movement.73 A month earlier, Hoppy had met and photographed Malcolm X during his short visit to England; on February 21, three weeks before Wilmer and Hoppy’s meeting with Monk, Malcolm had been gunned down in Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom.74

For Wilmer and Hoppy, politics clung to them like the rain. Although most of their queries focused on music and they shared many light-hearted exchanges, their concern for world events compelled them to ask questions of a more political nature, producing some moments of tension, misunderstanding, and revelation. At one point, Wilmer asks Thelonious if he’s interested in what’s going on in the world. He replied, “Well, I got a wife and two kids, you dig, to take care of. So I have to make some money and see that they eat and sleep. And me, too. Dig? It’s not my business what’s happening with his family. I have to take care of my family.”75 When Wilmer repeats the question with more precision, Monk becomes agitated and annoyed. “I don’t go around looking. No! I’m interested in what’s going on nowhere.” The room is silent for a few seconds until Monk turns the table on his guests, blurting out, “Are you worrying about what’s happening to everybody?”

Wilmer: Not everybody, but some people. . . .

Monk: Why you ask me that? Expect me to be worrying about what’s happening to everybody. You not. You worrying about what’s happening with everybody?

Hoppy: Sometimes.

Monk: You worrying about what’s happening with the person around the corner? The person next door?

Hoppy: Not everyone, but some.

Monk: What if I asked you a stupid question like that? Something you don’t do yourself?

Wilmer: You can’t care about every single person, but you can care about some people.

Monk: But you asked me, do I care about what’s happening to everybody around the corner. I don’t be around the corner! Going to everybody’s house, be looking to see what’s happening. I’m not a policeman or a social worker. That’s what your social workers should do.

Hoppy: You’re American. I’m English. I get bothered about things my government does.

Monk: Well, I’m not in power. I’m not worrying about politics. You worry about the politics. Let the statesmen do that. That’s their job. They get paid for it. So if you want to be a politician, you be one. Stop taking pictures. Be a politician.

The exchange was unsettling, difficult, and yet incredibly painful and transparent. Rather than shutting Monk down, their challenges opened him up. He spoke about his incarceration (“I know it’s a drag to be in jail”) and lamented the brutal behavior of police back home. “The police bothers you more in the United States than they do anywhere else. The police heckle the people more in the United States than they do anyplace else. You don’t have as much trouble with the police in no other country like you do in the United States. The police just mess with you in the United States for nothing. They just bully people. They don’t do that in no other country but the United States. They carry guns, too. And they shoot people for nothing.”76 Monk wasn’t just speaking about himself. He was well aware of the rising incidents of police brutality in his own city, let alone other cities in the U.S. The previous summer Harlem exploded when a white patrolman killed an unarmed fifteen-year-old boy named James Powell. The riots spread to Brooklyn, and his own neighborhood in San Juan Hill became pretty tense. It was impossible for any New Yorker not to be affected by Powell’s murder and its aftermath. And like most black Americans, Monk knew the problem wasn’t limited to his beloved city. That same summer, incidents of police misconduct ignited riots in Rochester, Philadelphia, and Jersey City.77

While his anger over police violence was palpable, he nevertheless insisted that racism was not his concern and he had no desire to make his music a commentary on black oppression: “I never was interested in those Muslims. If you want to know, you should ask Art Blakey. I didn’t have to change my name—it’s always been weird enough! I haven’t done one of these ‘freedom’ suites, and I don’t intend to. I mean, I don’t see the point. I’m not thinking that race thing now; it’s not on my mind. Everybody’s trying to get me to think it, though, but it doesn’t bother me. It only bugs the people who are trying to get me to think it.”78

In the end, the interview’s most important revelation may have been the extent of Monk’s exhaustion. “I don’t sleep much,” he wistfully admitted. “Wish I could. I haven’t slept eight hours in a long time. . . . I’ve been kind of exhausted.” His grueling schedule kept him from composing new music. “I don’t get a chance to write . . . be working so much.”79 Signs of fatigue were evident to anyone who saw him on tour.80 Indeed, immediately after Wilmer and Hoppy left the hotel, Monk had to get dressed and head over to the Marquee Club to tape the BBC television program “Jazz 625.” Throughout the hour-long performance, Thelonious projects a rather vacant expression. He doesn’t leave the piano and the energy he usually displays at the keyboard is absent. He and the quartet certainly play well, and Monk is not short of ideas, but he looks tired and terribly bored.81

Monk seemed to perk up once they left the gray skies of England for the beautiful resort town of San Remo, Italy, on the Mediterranean Sea. He played a lively set at the San Remo Jazz Festival, urged on by the presence of the legendary pianist Earl “Fatha” Hines,82 and then enjoyed a three-day break before heading to the Pacific Rim. They spent six days touring southeastern Australia, which Monk and Nellie treated as a kind of adventure. Tour organizer and emcee Kym Bonython remembered it as a “financial disaster.”83 As soon as they arrived, Bonython had to fork over an excess weight fee for the Monks’ luggage, which was loaded down with empty Coke bottles (Nellie insisted on redeeming the bottle deposits), fourteen suits, an iron and ironing board, and seventeen pairs of shoes. The Monks’ luggage was the least of Bonython’s problems. Because Sydney’s Town Hall was unavailable, he booked a large dance hall, filled it with hundreds of rented folding chairs, and wrote row numbers on the floor with chalk. They numbered each seat with strips of paper, but fifteen minutes before the concert a gust of wind from an open door obliterated their efforts.84 To make matters worse, most of the seats remained empty that night and the few reviews the concert got were less than enthusiastic.85

Immediately after the concert, the band was scheduled to play in Melbourne. Bonython assumed the Monks would be packed and ready to catch their flight, but when he arrived at their hotel room in Sydney he saw a “mountain of garments . . . heaped in the middle of the floor, as though suitcases had simply been upended and emptied out. Crowning this tangled heap a contraceptive device reposed coyly.”86 They had just enough time to gather a few belongings for the rest of the tour, and that meant keeping their suite an additional four days. Again, Bonython and his backers footed the bill. After Melbourne, they were supposed to continue west to Adelaide87 for a concert at the Centennial Hall, but Dave Brubeck’s quartet was also scheduled to perform in Adelaide the same night, and had no venue. Brubeck’s drawing power won out, so Monk was re-routed to Newcastle, a coastal city about 100 miles north of Sydney, to play for a disappointing crowd of less than two hundred. To save money, they traveled by car. For most of the two-hour drive, Monk quietly gazed at the passing landscape. He finally broke his silence to ask, “Where the hell’s all the fucking kangaroos?” According to Bonython, “Someone in New York had told him he should buy a kangaroo-skin coat in Australia, and he was becoming perturbed by the apparent dearth of marsupials. Later, we took him to a Sydney dealer where he bought no less than three kangaroo-skin coats.”88

Nellie somehow found room for the new coats in their already overstuffed luggage, and they continued on to New Zealand, where the Chamber Music Federation arranged a two-week, ten-city tour.89 The remaining concerts were canceled, but not until they had already arrived in Hong Kong. Perhaps as a gesture of apology, one of his hosts gave him a silk Chinese skullcap.90 Before they left Hong Kong, Monk did a bit of shopping himself and picked up a beautiful black opal ring, which would become one of his prized possessions.91

While this was his hardest and longest tour to date, he had had a good experience overall. He told Russ Wilson, “The whole trip was a gas. We got a wonderful welcome everywhere we played.”92 However, he was less than pleased with the financial arrangements. Nellie complained that they had to shell out money to travel to Hong Kong but were never paid because of the concert’s cancellation. Nellie also thought George Wein failed to pay Monk for the New Zealand concerts, so for months she badgered him, prompting Wein to ask Harry Colomby to “please inform her that no more money is due as far as I know and that any money she would receive now would come out of my pocket. I would appreciate it if she would let the matter drop.”93 She finally let the matter drop, but the incident jolted their relationship. From that point on, it changed the way Wein did business with Monk—or specifically with Nellie, who now handled his financial affairs. As Wein explained to Colomby, “We have never had any problem working together in the past but there still should be some written record if not a contract so we at least know how much money changes hands.”94

The cancellations meant that Monk’s group arrived in San Francisco a few days early. Jazz Workshop owner Art Auerbach arranged a weekend “preview” for the quartet beginning Friday, April 23, four days before their scheduled opening date, opposite the Mose Allison Trio. Showing no apparent signs of jet lag, Monk impressed Wilson with his “fast-paced” rendition of “Well, You Needn’t” and his soulful reading of “Blue Monk,” which “recalled the youthful days when he was accompanist for a faith healer.” Especially noteworthy was the fact that Monk did not dance. The few times he got up from the piano he just “stood quietly waiting. There was no arm waving, no dancing.”95

It was mid-May before Nellie and Thelonious could finally collapse in their own bed, though their respite was temporary. On May 24, Nica drove them to Buffalo for a week-long engagement at the Royal Arms.96 They did make something of a vacation out of the trip by spending a day at Niagara Falls.97 Upon their return, however, Monk learned that Denzil Best had died from injuries sustained from a bad fall on the streets of Manhattan. He was forty-eight. The circumstances surrounding his accident are hazy, but his health had been failing for some time. In 1957, he was diagnosed with a rare bone disease that caused calcium deposits to form in his wrists, thus severely limiting his ability to play.98 Best’s premature death shocked Monk. It was the first of many such losses he, and the jazz world, would endure over the next few years.

Except for the Pittsburgh Jazz Festival, Thelonious was off the entire month of June. Columbia finally sent his advance check for completing his “on tour” LP, now titled Misterioso,99 and with the extra cash reserves Thelonious and Nellie did the unexpected: they moved. Harry Colomby had tried to get them to vacate their tiny apartment for some time, especially after the second fire. But Monk loved his neighborhood, and the Phipps Houses were still the best housing stock in the vicinity. That changed in late 1964 when the Lincoln Square Urban Renewal Project completed a massive, twenty-acre apartment complex called Lincoln Towers. Bounded by West End and Amsterdam Avenues, and running from 66th to 70th streets, the complex consisted of six twenty-eight-story rectangular buildings surrounded by abundant green space and, for some residents, spectacular views of the Hudson River.100 Geraldine Smith’s sister Millicent persuaded the Monks to move, which took some doing, given Thelonious’s reluctance to leave West 63rd Street. That summer, the Monks migrated four city blocks and settled into 170 West End Avenue, apartment 18D.101 The new space was nicer, larger, sunnier, and they had a terrace with a river view. The kitchen was semi-open with a passway, and both kids had their own rooms. The Baldwin grand—later replaced by a Steinway—found a grease-free location in the living room, and Nellie hired Bloomingdale’s to decorate the newly constructed, box-like apartment. She hung a sign on the front door that read “T. Monk,” and had someone stencil a couple of measures of Monk’s music on a blank wall.102 Thelonious liked his new digs, but he had no intention of leaving the neighborhood. They kept their apartment on West 63rd, and when Thelonious took his walks he headed south, down to Pat’s Bar, his brother’s place, and all of his old haunts.

But the kids were home for the summer, and their very presence was enough to make 170 West End feel like home. They accompanied their mother and father on several short trips, beginning with Newport on the Fourth of July, where Monk gave a commanding performance.103 Their travels took them to Riverside, New Jersey, for his sell-out concert at the Barn Arts Center; the Berkshires, where he played the Music Barn; Chicago for the Down Beat Jazz Festival, where the quartet performed before a crowd of over 10,000 and Thelonious joined the Festival big band under the direction of Gary McFarland on an arrangement of “Straight, No Chaser”; Canada for the Montreal Jazz Festival; and Columbus, Ohio, for the Ohio Valley Jazz Festival.104 Monk also had a couple of one-week stints at Lennie Sogoloff’s popular club, Lennie’s-on-the-Turnpike in West Peabody, Massachusetts.105 These short trips became real family affairs. Ben Riley would also bring his wife and kids along. “[Monk’s] children during the summer would be with my children. . . . We had like a family style, we would go on certain trips . . . with the band, we would all take our families with us.”106

Toot and Boo Boo exhibited a more sustained interest in music that summer. Boo Boo continued to develop as a dancer, but she was also drawn to the piano. “She was the one who sat down at the piano,” Toot confessed, “and learned to play ‘Ruby, My Dear,’ learned to play all of these things. . . . [S]he would ask him, ‘Daddy, show me this.’ And he would show it to her and she learned to do it—things that I never learned to do.”107 Monk also learned early on that his daughter was more interested in becoming a singer than following her father’s footsteps. Not long after discovering Boo Boo’s musical talents, he boasted to opera singer Dolores Wilson, “My daughter, she wants to be a star, a singer.” When Wilson asked if she was taking voice lessons, Monk replied, “No, but she sings every song . . . every rock ’n’ roll song that comes out. Plus, she digs other types of music too. She’s not just a rock ’n’ roll fan.”108

Toot’s passion was the drums—one he had been harboring since he saw Max Roach play with his father on the Brilliant Corners session. During his first year at Cherry Lawn, a classmate named Frank Serena gave Toot a pair of drumsticks, which he used to practice on his pillow.109 “I didn’t say a word to anybody, but when I came home the summer of my fifteenth year [1965], I said, ‘You know, Dad, I think I want to play the drums.’”110 Monk wasted no time. He called Art Blakey to help find a good drum kit. Blakey asked his son, Art Blakey, Jr., a drummer himself, who sold used Gretsch drums on the side, to give Toot his first set. Monk then sent Toot to Max Roach for some lessons. “He did not sit me down and say, ‘This is how you play a paradiddle.’ No, because it’s all about hanging and digging the music, listening and learning. So basically I did everything with Max, from carrying drums to gigs to going to car shows. Of course, you know you got to study, you’ve got to practice, but what makes you a great jazz player is philosophy.” Monk heard his son practice and kept tabs on him, but he essentially left him alone. Over the next four years “there wasn’t one word on the subject of music between me and my father. Not one utterance.”111

Between summer travels, the quartet returned to the Village Gate for three weeks in July and a week in August. For the first two weeks, they played opposite John Coltrane’s quartet, and together they kept the house packed until closing time.112 It was the best show in the city, in part because occasionally Coltrane joined his friend and mentor on the bandstand. Monk and ’Trane together again, especially as Coltrane’s music moved further “out” in the realm of the avant-garde, thrilled audiences. But it challenged Monk’s rhythm section. Ben Riley recalled, “[T]hey played all of those old things that ’Trane played with him, Shadow Wilson and Wilbur Ware at the old Five Spot. They would play ‘Trinkle, Tinkle’ and all of those songs.”113

After the kids returned to school in September, Monk’s schedule slowed considerably. The quartet spent a short week at the Cellar Door in D.C., where the Washington Post critic audaciously declared Monk to be “the greatest piano soloist since Tatum,”114 and after Thanksgiving he returned to Lennie’s-on-the-Turnpike for another week.115 Health considerations and sheer exhaustion kept Monk home for much of the fall and early winter.116 On Nellie’s birthday (December 27), he appeared at the Village Gate for a benefit for WBAI, a Pacifica-owned radio station with radical leanings.117 The following day, the quartet traveled to the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence for the only paying gig of the month, outside of Lennie’s-on-the-Turnpike. For an afternoon concert they earned $1,650—about what Monk made working five nights at Lennie’s.118

Monk may have needed a break, but it is unlikely that he deliberately limited his engagements. He needed money; he made less in 1965 than in the previous year, taking home only $38,796. And whatever savings the Monks had were meager; they reported interest earnings of $201.119 But the worst financial setback came in mid-summer, when Columbia modified Monk’s contract, reducing his advances from $10,000 per LP to $6,000. Business affairs decided to tighten the reins when Monk’s unearned balance exceeded $40,000.120 Most careful observers knew that Monk was floundering at Columbia, and they placed much of the blame on Teo Macero for lacking imagination. Unsolicited advice as to what to do with Monk came from all over the world. Henri Renaud proposed recording Monk with Kenny Clarke during his next European tour. In a fit of nostalgia, he suggested they might “play the tunes they used to play at Minton’s.”121

Macero preferred new music, and he gently nudged Monk to write some. It’s not as if he hadn’t been trying, but as he explained to Val Wilmer and “Hoppy” Hopkins in London, “You have to stay home and relax to write some music.”122 In December and early January he did stay home and composed “Green Chimneys” for Boo Boo, who was home for the holidays.123 A swinging, twenty-four-bar vamp over descending chord progressions and a minor tonality, “Green Chimneys” was a labor of love. Its simplicity was deceptive; Monk took months to perfect it before he was willing to try it out in the studio. Composing had become more difficult, but so had everything else as he advanced in age. He confessed as much to Leonard Feather soon after he had written “Green Chimneys.” When Feather asked Monk if he thought he was “playing more piano now than when you were 20?” Monk replied with an emphatic “No, I’m not.” He looked back to Minton’s Playhouse as his heyday, not only because he believed he played better but “things were being instigated in those years. I don’t say I’m not playing anything now; it’s just that there were all new ideas then, things that hadn’t been thought of.”124 He had grown weary of the idea that he had to continually innovate, compose new music, lead jazz into the new horizon. “Why should I have to create something new? Let someone else create something new!” As he was about to leave, Monk got his revenge: he asked Feather, “How about you as a writer? Are you creating? Are you writing better than you did 20 years ago?”125

The issue clearly struck a nerve. For all the accolades and standing ovations that Monk received in Europe and at various concerts in the United States, he recognized a growing backlash against him. Although he rarely read his own press, he heard the complaints about his music becoming routine and knew his fans wanted something new. In the Down Beat Readers Poll, he held the number-two slot for best pianist behind his rival, Oscar Peterson, though Monk edged him out in the Critics Poll.126 Some readers thought Monk was undeserving and his influence inflated. One irate reader “was disgusted to find people like Thelonious Monk stealing the show from people like Oscar Peterson. How an artist so hard to pin down or describe, like Monk, could take it away from great originals like Teddy Wilson is obviously a product of someone who was in a hurry or didn’t stop to consider all that the old-timers have done for modern jazz.”127 What is ironic about this complaint is that Monk’s own musical tastes had become fairly conservative. When Leonard Feather played Monk a record by pianist Andrew Hill during a “Blindfold Test,” Monk responded by walking to the window, commenting on the view, and complimenting his host on his “crazy stereo system.” Yet, Monk had been one of Hill’s biggest influences, inspiring his tune “New Monastery.”128 Later, in a conversation with opera singer Dolores Wilson, he lamented the loss of melody and beauty in modern music, complaining that “what they call avant-garde” is ruining jazz. “[T]hey do anything, make any kind of noise. A lot of young musicians are doing that.”129 For Monk, melody was the song’s essential quality. When Teo Macero, half-jokingly, suggested he record some “free form things,” Monk took a moment to school his erstwhile producer: “I want it to be as easy as possible so people can dig it. And then, it should be good. A song is like that, it’s easy.”130

The second week of January he and Nellie escaped the New York winter for California, where the quartet played two weeks at Shelly’s Manne-Hole in Hollywood, two weeks at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco, and a concert at Stanford University in between, where Monk shared the bill with Coltrane.131 Thelonious never returned to the It Club, which had begun to flounder after the Watts riot of August 1965 and the subsequent imposition of martial law in neighboring communities. (The It Club temporarily closed a few months after the uprising, but its much anticipated reopening in October of 1967 was short-lived: the following month John T. McClain was arrested for receiving seventy kilos of marijuana with intent to sell.132) It must have been rather eerie to arrive in Los Angeles five months after one of the worst urban civil insurrections in American history, especially with the Harlem riot fresh in his mind. He and Nellie had heard the story of Leonard Deadwyler, a black man stopped by the LAPD for rushing his pregnant wife to the hospital and fatally shot in the head as he sat behind the wheel of the car. They knew the cops were cleared of all charges. And every newspaper in the country carried stories of subsequent arrests, rioting, looting, fires, and the governor’s decision to dispatch the National Guard.133 Shelly’s Manne-Hole was far from the events in Watts, but it was also far from Monk’s favorite pool hall, and far from the local black community who had patronized the It Club.

From sunny California they headed to the Windy City for a week at the Plugged Nickel, then on to the Boston Globe Jazz Festival before settling into a nine-day stay at the Village Vanguard, where Monk played opposite Coleman Hawkins.134 He closed on March 6, and eleven days later he and Nellie were bound for Europe for a world tour terminating in Japan. The two-month tour Wein arranged proved fairly lucrative for Monk. On average he earned $1,000 per concert, with slightly larger fees in Paris and smaller fees in Switzerland since their dates fell over the Easter holiday.135 They revisited some of the usual spots—Belgium, Italy, Denmark, England—but they also performed in several provincial towns in France, including Caen, Lyons, Nantes, and Amiens, made their first trip to Oslo, Norway, and crossed the so-called Iron Curtain into Warsaw, Poland.136

The tour got off to a bad start. The band arrived safely in Paris, but the big instruments did not. Gales and Riley had to perform at the historic Palais de Mutualité with rented bass and drums. Indeed, throughout the French leg of the tour, the quartet received lukewarm or bad reviews, in no small part due to the “poor quality of the instruments.”137 But Monk himself came under scrutiny, partly for sounding disconnected from his sidemen. One critic who attended the first concert at Palais de Mutualité even suggested that “Monk seems to be losing his touch.”138 The most common complaint against him was that nothing changed; he seemed stuck playing the same songs in the same format. After catching the quartet’s concert at London’s Royal Festival Hall, an exasperated British critic grumbled that it had become difficult “to find something new to say about the Thelonious Monk Quartet without nit picking and succumbing to a general feeling of crabby irritation.”139 Charles Fox was convinced that “the Quartet could play the whole lot in their sleep.” Nostalgia was the only explanation for the crowd’s warm response to Monk, because as far as Fox was concerned he had heard it all before. He left Festival Hall wondering “why Monk, one of the most original composers in jazz, doesn’t seem to be composing anymore.”140 While it is true that his repertoire hardly changed, he did add his solo rendition of “Sweetheart of All My Dreams” as a closing number, and he came up with a radically different approach to “Blue Monk” that involved a boogie-woogie-style left hand—though he did not always pull it off successfully. At Free Trade Hall in Manchester, for example, he fumbled the introduction so badly that he had to start over twice.141

At the same time, critics treated the virtual disappearance of Monk’s stage antics as a welcome change. In Amsterdam, Monk’s midnight performance in the Concertgebouw was surprisingly subdued. Although the audience was comprised largely of young people, college students who were visibly attentive and focused, the Monk they had come to see was not the same man on stage. Critic A. D. Hogarth asked, “Where was the frantic search for him beforehand . . . Where were the fiendish dances . . . Where were the walk-offs . . . the trances . . . the overplaying time . . . the non-playing time? . . . Nowhere.” Instead, what they got was “a polished professional.” Hogarth attributed the change to money. Now that he had a name and could finally earn a living, eccentric behavior was unbecoming and unproductive. Besides, a younger generation of Europeans cares about the music “more than the Americans themselves.”142 And yet, what Hogarth interpreted as a newfound seriousness were signs of fatigue and illness. Monk wasn’t through dancing.

Monk’s quartet had its share of adoring crowds, especially in cities where he had never played before. In Warsaw, where they were guests of Pagart (the Polish Arts Agency), Monk gave two concerts before capacity crowds and taped a show for the state television network. The Polish jazz musicians came out in force, over 100 journalists showed up for a press conference, and the audiences treated Monk and his quartet like kings. A writer for the Polish music magazine Ruch Muzyczny hailed Monk as “the most original jazz pianist in the world.” He praised him for his courage, for not being afraid to make mistakes, and for his vast knowledge of the keyboard. He also challenged the idea that jazz is supposed to always progress, suggesting instead that we pay attention to the “uniqueness” and “individuality” of each great artist. In the end, the writer left the concert hall with a “thirst for Monk’s sensational way of playing jazz.”143

Warsaw left a lasting impression on the Monks, as well. With nearly a week-long break before the next concert in Stockholm, Nellie, Monk, and the entire band decided to do a little sightseeing. They visited the historic Royal Castle (Zamek Królewski), the official home of Poland’s monarchs since the thirteenth century. Everything was kept in pristine condition, and visitors were required to wear slippers over their shoes. When the tour reached one of the queen’s bedrooms, with ceilings painted “like the Sistine Chapel” with cherubs and floating angels, Thelonious decided to slip under the velvet ropes and try the bed out. “I was downstairs,” Ben Riley remembered, “when I heard Nellie screaming. I ran upstairs and saw Thelonious laying up in the queen’s bed. And the guards and everybody is standing there like they don’t know what to do. So I said, ‘Thelonious, man, you got to get out of there, this is a national treasure. They’re going to lock you up. What are you doing in the bed, man?’ He’s laying there with his arms crossed and says, ‘I just wanted to see what the bitch saw.’”144

Fortunately, Monk wasn’t locked up for his indiscretions and the band continued on to Stockholm, Helsinki, and Oslo, where they taped a half-hour television show and performed for a sold-out crowd at the University of Oslo.145 That night, Jo Vogt—the wife of university president Hans Vogt and a prominent artist in her own right—jumped onstage and put a Peer Gynt–style hat on Monk’s head. He later gave the hat to Nellie.146 Monk also met Randi Hultin, a Norwegian critic who had befriended Bud Powell. She was anxious to learn of Bud’s condition in the States. She knew he had barely escaped death the previous summer, after being hospitalized for five weeks with pneumonia and a severe case of jaundice, complicated by a relapse of tuberculosis.147 Thelonious let her know how bad things had gotten. “Bud is beautiful,” he told her. “But he’s not doing so well in America, he’s sleeping in the gutter.” She asked why he didn’t help. “Monk gave no reply to this, but rather continued chattering away.”148 She probably never knew that Monk had been giving Bud money intermittently since he had first contracted tuberculosis. Or that he visited him at Cumberland Hospital in Brooklyn last July when the press wrote him off as virtually dead. In fact, he had been thinking about Powell quite a bit. In January, when he sat down with Leonard Feather for his “blindfold test,” they listened to Powell’s version of “Ruby, My Dear,” recorded in Paris a little more than four years earlier.149 When Feather asked if he thought Bud was “in his best form” when he made this recording, Monk replied wistfully, “No comment about him, or the piano . . . He’s just tired, stopped playing, doesn’t want to play no more. I don’t know what’s going through his mind. But you know how he’s influenced all of the piano players.”150

The quartet played its final European concert at Durham University in England on April 30, and then boarded a BOAC jet to Japan to begin a two-week tour that took them to Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe, and Fukuoka.151 Much like their last trip in 1963, the Monks took some time to explore the country and the culture, thanks again to their gracious host, Reiko Hoshino, the celebrated owner of Kyoto’s most popular jazz café.152 Either through Ms. Hoshino or some musician acquaintances, Monk discovered a Japanese song titled “Kojo no Tsuki,” which roughly translates as “The Moon Over the Desolate Castle.” It was composed in 1901 by Rentaro Taki, one of Japan’s legendary Meiji-era modernist composers. Then a graduate student and teacher at the Tokyo Music School, Taki had written “Kojo no Tsuki” in response to a school-wide contest. Consequently, the gifted young composer was selected to further his music studies in Leipzig, Germany, but within months of his arrival he fell ill and was forced to return home. He died tragically on June 29, 1903, while attending a cousin’s funeral in Oita, Japan. He was twenty-three years old.153 Taki’s premature death and the song’s haunting melody transformed “Kojo no Tsuki” into something of a national treasure, especially after poet Bansui Doi contributed lyrics.154 When Monk heard it, he was drawn to its minor tonality, the medium tempo, and the harmonic movement—which vaguely resembles “Softly, As In a Morning Sunrise.” He felt it swung naturally, and he loved the idea of playing music with which the Japanese could identify. “He was show business,” Colomby explained. “I’m not sure if someone showed him the song or what, but he played [“Kojo no Tsuki”] and the people went crazy.”155

By the time Monk returned to the states in mid-May, the tune that Columbia would rename “Japanese Folk Song” had become part of his repertoire. Finally, a new song, and one that sounded unlike anything they had heard from Monk. The first recorded evidence we have comes from the Newport Jazz Festival that summer. Anyone familiar with the melody must have marveled at how close Monk stayed to the original, how he maintained the song’s somber mood throughout the statement of the theme, and how Rouse, in particular, played like a man possessed. The crowd really did go crazy.156

Monk experienced quite a bit of craziness upon his return home, not all of it good. No sooner had he and Nellie unpacked their bags in New York than they had to hop a plane to the Twin Cities for a concert at Carleton College and a week-long engagement at Davey Jones’s Locker in Minneapolis.157 The trip might have been uneventful, had it not been for an adoring fan at Davey Jones’s who thought it would be cool to slip LSD in Monk’s drink. “He couldn’t calm down,” Harry Colomby remembered. “He stopped playing and went out and was walking on cars. He had delusions and hallucinations. Had to be bedridden for weeks.”158 The following month, the quartet opened at the Vanguard for a three-and-a-half-month stay with sporadic breaks,159 and a couple of weeks into the gig Thelonious had a relapse. Harry Colomby was there that night. “He didn’t stop playing. He kept going around and around. After forty-five, fifty minutes into the opening tune I was like, ‘wow, was that weird.’ I finally had to take him home.”160

Thelonious was not in the best physical or emotional state when he got the news that Bud Powell had been taken to Brooklyn’s Kings County Hospital. He was suffering from a combination of tuberculosis, liver failure due to alcoholism, and malnutrition. Thelonious learned of Bud’s condition while playing a gig at the Music Barn in the Berkshires, but he rushed back as soon as he could to see his old friend.161 It would be the last time; Powell passed away the night of August 1.162 When the Amsterdam News asked Monk for a comment, all he could say was, “The world has lost a great musician.”163 An understatement, to be sure. Monk loved Bud like a brother, and losing him at forty-one years of age was an emotional ordeal. Indeed, the third member of their trio, Elmo Hope, was so distraught he could not attend the funeral.164 Monk and Nellie did attend. They followed the procession from the funeral home on Seventh Avenue to St. Charles Roman Catholic Church on West 143rd Street. As a few thousand mourners made their way through the streets of Harlem, the band played tunes dedicated to Powell, including “I’ll Never Forget You,” “I’ll Be Seeing You,” and “ ’Round Midnight.”165

Thelonious pushed on. Besides working the Vanguard,166 he did the annual summer concert circuit, performing at the Barn Arts Center in New Jersey,167 and then the much larger Rheingold Music Festival at Central Park’s Wollman Skating Rink. Over 4,000 adoring fans came out to hear Monk’s quartet and the Bill Evans trio in Central Park, but anyone who had seen Monk before could not help but notice his subdued, disengaged performance. Critic Robert Shelton thought Monk appeared “uninvolved” but it didn’t stop him from giving a good show: “even with his left hand, to be figurative, he had the audience in his palm.”168 He eventually snapped out of it; by the time the quartet performed at Syracuse University three days before his birthday, Thelonious was reportedly up and dancing again, to the crowd’s delight.169

For Monk, the return of dancing and spinning about on stage wasn’t just a sign that he was feeling better and digging the music. It was a matter of stagecraft, and as he got older he understood that spectacle sells and eccentricity makes good copy. During Monk’s two-week stay at the Colonial Tavern in Toronto (he opened on Halloween), the local press focused on his strange behavior, his hats, and his unremitting lateness. His stage antics went over well with the Canadians. Besides dancing, he would stare at the wall while Rouse and the rhythm section played, and then suddenly turn toward the audience as if he was seeing them for the first time.170 He told one journalist, “Yes, I’m eccentric musically. . . . If the music is eccentric, I have to be. Anybody talented in any way—they’re called eccentric.”171 Another writer deemed him “the grand wizard of all the cultist hippies of the world.” Monk did not like the word “cult” (“It sounds evil,” he said), but he did admit, “I like to stand out, man. I’m not one of the crowd. If the crowd goes that way, man . . . I go the other way.”172

During the day, curiosity-seekers and interviewers gathered at the Royal York Hotel to see Monk. Of the parade of characters who passed through their fourteenth floor suite, one guy showed up with a pretty blonde and her pet monkey; he wanted Monk to pose for a photo with a monkey. Monk could tolerate the eccentric label to a point, but when the press characterized him as aloof, difficult, or “arrogant,” he became indignant. “You can write what you want to,” he told one journalist, “I’m not arrogant. Do I seem to be? I never felt arrogant.” To the contrary, he took requests from fans if he could remember the tune, he did not demand total attention or silence, and the sound of clinking glasses and waiters taking orders did not bother him. He wanted customers to buy drinks: “That’s what pays us.” He didn’t mind being a spectacle, “as long as they come.” His interlocutor was a little taken aback by his cold, business-like approach, but as Thelonious put it, “I have a wife and two kids.”173

Two days after his return from Toronto, Monk returned to the studio to cut his ninth album for Columbia. The first day (November 14), they laid down three tracks of “new” music—a sluggish first attempt at Monk’s new composition “Green Chimneys”; a gorgeous reading of Duke Ellington’s “I Didn’t Know About You” that featured Rouse as a soulful balladeer with flashes of Lester Young; and a solo piano rendition of Fanny Crosby and Phoebe Knapp’s “This Is My Story, This Is My Song,” known in most hymnals as “Blessed Assurance.” In one slow, reverent chorus, Monk returned to his roots, perhaps invoking memories of his mother who first taught him the song. At the end of the day, only the Ellington piece was selected for the album. They returned to the studio the following evening, only to come away with one more usable track—a revisiting of “Locomotive,” which Monk last recorded for Prestige twelve years earlier.174 Macero hoped to complete the LP before the year ended, but Monk couldn’t stick around for another recording session. A couple of days later, he and Nellie were off to Chicago for a concert at the University of Illinois–Chicago Circle, and a two-week stint at the Plugged Nickel.175 The concert sold out and the quartet was well-received, but the pressure to produce new music was clearly wearing on Thelonious. The well of earlier compositions was beginning to run dry. When a Chicago Tribune writer asked if he was writing new music, he replied worriedly, “Not now in Chicago . . . but I’ve got to have some done when I get back to New York.”176

He got back to New York the first week of December and enjoyed a short break before returning to work at the Village Vanguard.177 It wasn’t enough time to compose new music, but when he returned to the studio on January 10, he had enough material to complete the album. The band recorded a lively eleven-and-a-half-minute version of “Straight, No Chaser,” a resurrected and slightly revised “We See” (from the same 1954 Prestige LP on which “Locomotive” appeared), and a nearly seventeen-minute version of “Kojo no Tsuki.” He then capped the session with a humorous unaccompanied version of “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea,” with full tempo shifts and old “tinkler” clichés from the 1920s. Thelonious had fun with the tune, showing off his chops as a stride pianist and proving again that it is possible to play chorus after chorus of fresh improvisations without straying too far from the melody.178

Calling it Straight, No Chaser, Columbia rushed the LP to production. Because it was Thelonious’s first studio album since the release of Solo Monk two years earlier, Macero and Bruce Lundvall, who ran Columbia merchandising, thought Straight, No Chaser “could use some extra publicity emphasis.”179 Monk was just happy to have another album out, although his somewhat paltry advance check—$6,000 minus union scale for his sidemen and related expenses—was yet another reminder how he had fallen a few notches in the corporate family.180

He still had to make money, and that meant hitting the road. In mid-January, the quartet played Washington University, St. Louis, the Boston Globe Jazz Festival, and then flew to Detroit for another George Wein production at Cobo Auditorium.181 Billed as “Jazz in January—a Mid-Winter Jazz Festival,” Wein gathered a star-studded show that included Sarah Vaughan, Dave Brubeck, the Modern Jazz Quartet, and Clark Terry, as well as Coltrane and Monk. The concert was scheduled for Sunday, January 22, but bad weather forced many airports to shut down, including Detroit Metro.182 Nellie had the foresight to check the weather conditions and rerouted the band to Toledo. From there they drove to Detroit, arriving around midnight. The only other artists who made it were Sarah Vaughan (who performed with a local Detroit group) and John Coltrane, who had come a couple of days earlier with his new wife, pianist Alice (McLeod) Coltrane. (A native of Detroit, Alice arrived early to visit family.)183 In an effort to salvage the evening, Wein asked Coltrane to sit in with Monk’s quartet—a request he was more than happy to oblige. In Wein’s view, what happened that night was magical. Coltrane played brilliantly, but in a more traditional vein. He “blew like he was glad to be back home. And I never saw Thelonious more enthusiastic; having Coltrane with the band seemed to make him feel years younger. The energy they exchanged was obvious; they were on the same wavelength. The people cheered the triumphant set, and the evening was saved.”184 After the concert, Wein tried to convince Coltrane to come back to his “roots,” perhaps collaborate more often with Thelonious. He pondered the question for a moment and then replied, “You know George . . . sometimes I don’t know exactly what to do—whether I should play in my older style or do what I’m doing now. But, for the moment, I have to continue in this direction.”185

It turned out to be the last time these two giants played together. In six months, John Coltrane would be dead.