Thelonious Monk
Posted By BillHeise on May 20, 2011
I found this article on Thelonious Monk in the IBD today, and I thought I’d share it with you. Monk is one of my favorite jazz musicians. I wrote my semester paper on him in my ‘perfect class’ (the class where I got an A on every quiz, test, and paper after begging to get in).
The article tells this story about him:
Still, every now and then he would show flashes of the pride, combativeness and wit that were his trademarks in his younger days.
One of those flashes came on a March day in 1976. Monk was listening to Columbia University’s radio station, WKCR, and a special broadcast that happened to be dedicated to his music.
A show guest mentioned that Monk created “extraordinary” music despite the fact he “played the wrong notes on the piano.”
When Monk heard this, he immediately called the radio station and relayed the following message: “Tell the guy on the air, the piano ain’t got no wrong notes.”
That, as much as anything, encapsulated Monk’s life as a person and a musician. He went against the grain musically as well as in the way he lived his life.
Here are three of my favorite Monk masterpieces:
Blue Monk:
Epistrophy. This is the sort of music that my friends were complaining about when they told me that jazz had too many notes, to which I should have replied as Monk replied to the DJ at WKCR: ‘Shut up!’ (or something like that). But I was young and twenty….
And finally, the first Monk song I ever listened to, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes:
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