The photography world thought Smith had ventured far off base when he quit Life, launched a quixotic project in Pittsburgh, left his family and moved into the loft building, and began making audio tape recordings. The impression stuck. In 2002, an elite museum curator chided me: You still trying to listen to all those tapes of cats meowing?
There are many hours of cats meowing on Smith’s tapes, and other bizarre oddities. And the sheer volume of the collection was an obstacle to preserving them properly so we could hear them for the first time. In no small part, my motivation came after spending two weeks in Arizona picking through the dusty reels with Smith’s chicken-scratched labels and numbering them 1 to 1,740. I noticed Thelonious Monk’s name—usually just “Monk”—jotted on thirty-one of the reels with dates from 1959, 1963, and 1964. In Smith’s 5 x 7 work prints, one can see Monk and Overton working together by themselves in the loft, wearing suits and ties, smoking cigarettes, and evidently talking while sitting and standing at Overton’s side-by-side pianos. The thought of having surreptitious, behind-the-scenes recordings of Monk—one of the most mysterious musicians in American history—talking about his music proved irresistible.
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In early 1959 Monk and Overton spent three weeks arranging Monk’s tunes for a tentet to perform at what became a historic concert at Town Hall, the first time Monk’s music was ever performed by a big band. From private conversations between Monk and Overton to full band rehearsals in the loft, Smith’s tapes provide rare access to the exacting creative process and humanity of a musician who had become more myth than man.
Monk: Those three arrangements are crazy. I like ’em.
Overton: Yeah, I do, too.
Monk: I like ’em. We got enough to start a rehearsal, three arrangements, you know?
Overton: Sure.
Monk: If [the band] did one arrangement a day, that would be a motherfucker. Boy, I tell you, they’re going to sweat their balls off on that, uh, “[Little] Rootie Tootie.” It’s gonna be a hard one for them, to get that clean, all that phrasing clean …
In 2008 I visited Monk’s French-horn player, Robert Northern, at his home in Washington, D.C. I think it was Hall who called me [to join Monk’s Town Hall band], said Northern. Monk spoke very little. He would’ve never picked up the phone and called me. Overton called me and said that we were preparing for a performance. I asked him a little bit about the music. I knew it was going to be really interesting and a challenge. I knew I was going to be playing with some of the musicians I had always admired. So I didn’t hesitate. The only thing that I did hesitate about was that rehearsals started at three a.m. That was the only time that everybody could make it. It was after the clubs had closed. Everybody [in the band] was playing some nightclub somewhere, you know, Birdland or the Royal Roost or something. So, between two and three, people began to congregate in Hall Overton’s loft. And by three thirty or four we were well under way. And we were there until seven or eight in the morning rehearsing. I don’t think it would have been the same had it been somebody less than Monk. This was an occasion nobody would want to miss.
Monk: [We] make them work on that all day, you know … one song, you know. [It] don’t make no sense working on a gang of songs if you don’t play nothin’ right.
Overton: You’re lucky if you get it in one day …
Monk: I’ve seen cats where they bring the whole book down—like they run the book down—like they playing on the job, and they still don’t know shit. Nobody still can play nothing, you know? We can take one arrangement and run that down, and learn that, you know?
Overton: Sure.
Monk: One a day.
Monk’s personality, judged by the workaday world—or even by the working jazz musicians of his day—was eccentric. Some believe Monk suffered from manic depression, with tendencies for severe introversion, and perhaps over-the-counter chemical dependencies—alcohol, sleeping pills—and amphetamines. One of Monk’s bassists, Al McKibbon, once said Monk showed up at his house unannounced, sat down at his kitchen table, and didn’t move or talk the whole day. He just sat and smoked cigarettes. That night McKibbon told him, “Monk, we’re going to bed now,” and he and his wife and daughter retired. The next morning, when they awoke, Monk still sat at the kitchen table in the same position. He sat there for another day and night without moving or talking or seeming to care about eating, just smoking. It was fine with me, said McKibbon, it was just Monk being Monk.
Monk: We should let everybody take that “Little Rootie Tootie,” let them take their time and get it. Ya know?
Overton: Sure.
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Monk can be heard pacing around Overton’s half of the fourth floor, his heavy boots thudding at one-second intervals on the creaking planks that date to the building’s construction in 1853, when Monk’s grandfather Hinton was an infant living in slavery in Newton Grove, North Carolina, about five hundred miles away.
In 1880, Hinton Monk and his wife, Sarah Ann Williams, named their first son after his father, John Jack, and in 1889 they named their seventh child Thelonious. The scholar Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (2009), suggests the unusual name could have come from a Benedictine monk named St. Tillo, who was also called Theau and Hillonius. It could also have come from a renowned black minister in Durham, North Carolina, at the time, Fredricum Hillonious Wilkins, whose wife, Eula’s, father was Reverend John Paschal, a notable black state senator. Hinton and Sarah named a daughter Eulah, so perhaps Thelonious was a derivation of Hillonious.
Thelonious Monk Sr. moved with several relatives to the tobacco and railroad hub of Rocky Mount, North Carolina, in the 1910s. There he met his wife, Barbara Batts Monk, who gave birth to Thelonious Jr. on October 10, 1917. The family lived in a Rocky Mount neighborhood called Around the Y, named for the Y-shape intersection of the Atlantic Coastline Railroad roughly a hundred yards from their home on Green Street (later renamed Red Row). In the tradition of renowned country blues musicians in North Carolina such as Sonny Terry, Blind Boy Fuller, and Reverend Gary Davis, Thelonious Sr. played harmonica and piano in almost certainly this syncopated, Piedmont rag style. Three and four decades later, Thelonious Monk would write compositions mimicking train sounds such as “Little Rootie Tootie”—the tune he’s arranging with Overton in the loft.
The Monk family struggled. Jim Crow was in full force and, by all accounts, Thelonious Sr. and Barbara had problems with their marriage. Barbara moved to West Sixty-third Street in New York City in 1922 and took Thelonious Jr., his older sister, Marion, and younger brother, Thomas, with her. Thelonious Sr. tried to join the family in New York later in the 1920s but returned to North Carolina for medical or personal reasons. After 1930, the family apparently lost contact with him. They may have assumed he was dead. Rumors in the family indicate that he was beaten beyond recovery in a mugging or, having a wicked temper, participated in a violent beating himself and was committed to an asylum, or both. In any case, according to various extended relatives, Thelonious Sr. spent the last two decades of his life in a mental hospital in Goldsboro, North Carolina, not far from Newton Grove, before dying, as his death certificate indicates, in 1963. Many relatives visited, but his wife didn’t and his kids were not known to do so either.
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Monk: Nobody [in the band] would have to be showing how fast they can read. No sight-reading or something, you know. Just take one bar, and work on it.
Overton: Like sight-reading Stravinsky.
Monk, sarcastically: A sight-reading contest, we’ll have a sight-reading contest.
Overton: It’s going to be hard, man.
Monk: It’s generally good to tell cats that, ya know. And they really figure it out. You know, clashing notes, sometimes reading something they can’t read perhaps, or understand how it sounds or goes or nothing. Let ’em listen to the record, you know? You do that by letting them listen to the record.
There is a pause of a minute or two as Monk continues pacing around the room, his footsteps maintaining a rhythmic pattern underneath the conversation. He doesn’t sound so eccentric on these tapes, at least not in the one-on-one sessions with Overton. When the full band showed up for rehearsals in the loft, Monk went quiet, a bandleading technique certainly, indicating his preferences to his musicians with body language rather than words. The drummer Ben Riley told me in 2007 that he heard Monk talking more with Overton on these tapes than he did in four years of being in his band.
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Monk’s wife, Nellie, joined the family in 1947, and she moved into the three-room apartment on West Sixty-third Street with him, his sister, Marion, and his mother. These three women protected him and allowed him to live a life focused almost exclusively on his music and family. He was lucky that he lived with [us], Marion said once. You’ve got to have somebody behind you when you are following one road, because otherwise you can’t make it. Monk and Nellie lived with his mother until she died in 1955, when he was thirty-eight years old. Around that time the noted jazz patron Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter entered Monk’s life and added herself to the team of female caregivers.
Monk’s music owes something to his devoutly churchgoing mother. Some say the syncopated Harlem Stride style is the foundation of Monk’s music. That’s not false; it’s just not the deepest root. Lou Donaldson, a member of Monk’s band for the 1952 recording of Carolina Moon, said to me once, My father was an AME Zion minister in Badin, North Carolina, and the Albemarle area, and one of the reasons I was so drawn to Monk’s music was because I recognized right away that all of his rhythms were church rhythms. It was very familiar to me. Monk’s brand of swing came straight out of the church. You didn’t just tap your foot, you moved your whole body.
In addition to gospel, Monk blended blues, country, and jazz, then tied it together with a profound, surprising sense of rhythm, often using spaces or pauses to build momentum. The idiosyncrasies of his music made it difficult for some fans and critics who considered his playing raw and error-prone. Those criticisms came from European perspectives in which piano players sat still and upright in “perfect” form. Monk played with flat fingers and his feet flopped around like fish on a pier while his entire body rolled and swayed. In the middle of performances, he stood up from the piano, danced, and walked around the stage. Then he rushed back to the piano to play, sticking a cigarette in his mouth just before he sat down.
* * *
Monk: That’s three arrangements. You know, all of them are crazy, all of them are cool, you know, so far. They sound all right to me, they sound all right to you? Huh?
Overton: Pardon me?
Monk: All three of them sound all right, like they are.
Overton: Crazy, yeah. It’s very clear to me, yeah. “Friday the Thirteenth.” “Monk’s Mood.” “Crepuscule with Nellie.” “Thelonious.”
Monk: “Crepuscule with Nellie,” all we need are about two choruses on that. We end up everything with that or something, end the set with that. You know, there ain’t too much you can do with that, you know, it’s just, you know, it’s just the melody and the sound, you know, a couple of choruses.
Overton: Yeah, well, how do you want to do that, Monk?
Monk: I’ll play the first chorus. Let the band come in and play the second chorus and finish that. And then we get up, you know, and get our bread and quit.
[Laughter.]
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In 1963, Monk made a remarkable appearance with Overton at the New School in New York, broadcast live on the public station WNET, Channel 13. Back in the loft Smith put a microphone next to his television speaker and recorded the audio. Monk demonstrated his technique of “bending” or “curving” single notes on the piano, the most rigidly tempered of instruments. He drawled single notes like a human voice and blended them to create his own dialect, like making “y’all” from “you all.” “That can’t be done on piano,” Overton told the audience, “but you just heard it.”