Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original by Robin D. G. Kelley (review)

Decades before the millennial Brooklyn Renaissance, this exciting but woefully overlooked New York City borough held its own as an innovative showplace for African American improvisational music, or “jazz.” This found expression in clubs like the Blue Coronet, La Marchal, et. al. Further performance possibilities appearing in the sixties, seventies, and eighties were a series of concerts organized by promoter and tireless impresario Jim Harrison, typically featuring aggregations of extraordinarily talented creative artists. At one, this writer joined a crowd convening at 8 pm on a Friday in a converted church to witness units led by Alice Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, and Thelonious Monk, inter alia. It ended the following morning, Saturday, at 7 am. On this occasion Monk played a short set, accompanied by Wilbur Ware on bass and Ben Riley on drums. Monk played with his back to the house on a piano that had seen better days; he made it into a Steinway.

It is trite but too often true that it may take years for audiences and critics to catch up to pioneer artists. In the case of musicians, it can be their peers who will know and say so first, but real innovation can be risky. Even if a “new thing” is detected, it is difficult to safeguard rights of acknowledgment and remuneration. So it was with Thelonious Monk (1917–1982), protagonist of a dozen studies, one of which stands head and shoulders above the rest. In the magisterial tome Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, spanning 29 chapters, a postlude, and two appendices, sociocultural historian, public intellectual (and deft ivory tickler) Robin Davis Gibran Kelley has executed a tour de force worthy of his subject.

Monk was a prime, indeed premier architect of a genre of improvisational music that came to be called “bebop.” However, this was a designation he personally despised as trivializing serious artistic endeavor. As Kelley tells it, Monk saw himself as the teacher of others who literally capitalized on his innovations, among them Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie “Yardbird” Parker, and Miles Davis. In 1957, cashiered by Miles and struggling to kick a crippling heroin habit, John Coltrane found refuge in the pedagogy and precision of the incomparable composer-performer Monk. After serving his grueling apprenticeship with “the High Priest,” involving daily tuition and nightly examination, Coltrane himself catapulted to the top rank of practitioners.

Kelley’s Monk is like none we have seen before; we are unlikely to see another like him again. Sadly, much “jazz” reportage, as readers readily realize, is marred by more than its share of miscreants, mythmakers, and malcontents. Since almost anyone can present himself as an “authority” in the field, carnival barkers and snake oil salesmen abound. As with athletics, this is further complicated by “race.” Critics, mostly White, regularly rant of “natural,” “unschooled,” and “instinctive” talent, as if practice and tutelage never occurred. The upshot of this is that nonsense gets produced and reproduced before being granted credence as “fact.” Monk, then, was at times a victim of this documented idiocy. Kelley systematically shows how this paper trail of preposterous and puerile pomposity has obscured the life and labors of the real Thelonious Monk.

Kelley’s method is straightforward. Over a decade and a half he assembled and interviewed as many people as knew Monk who were still breathing. He developed a close relationship with Nellie, Monk’s widow and muse, who gave him access to hours of private recordings and scores bearing Monk’s hand. He used his considerable skills to reconstruct not only the musician’s genealogy, but the stages of his growth as a piano pupil, a performer, then a composer, arranger, and inspiration of successive generations of imitators. Chapters are titled with a phrase or sentence Monk uttered, complemented by a parenthetical chronologue.

Kelley is insightful regarding relations between Black musicians of southern birth and Antillean ancestry...