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Musical Quarterly
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conversations engaged in by the jazz community. It asks how ethnographic research with jazz musicians might serve as a wedge that opens a
door to understanding the music of Thelonious Monk-a figure widely
seen as influential in the history of jazz since the 1940s. Ultimately this
article points in the direction of a jazz historiography that addresses this
The Musical Quarterly 86(1), Spring 2002, pp. 82-116; DOI: 10.1093/musqtl/gdg01
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the concept that his music in toto represents a complete and self-created
world. It is significant to an understanding of the relationship between
memory and history in jazz that the musicians with whom I worked on
ing issues of metatheoretical and even metaphysical concern. Ontological and epistemological questions about the music as well as questions
about historiography have started to coalesce in the literature, however,
and it is my hope that a case study such as this one may provide a useful
perspective and further some of these ongoing discussions. Of particular
interest here are attempts to understand the place of various materials,
most notably recordings and ethnographic interviews, in constructing
histories of the music, and attempts to theorize what it means to think
of music as racially coded-to think of jazz (for instance) as African
American.1
and has been an ongoing source of conversation and at times consternation for virtually everyone involved with it. In the worst cases this has
led to a kind of trait listing, in which jazz's characteristics are marked
off as either African or European in origin, giving the impression of the
social class in postwar America and the mapping of this composite raceclass discourse onto the aesthetic dichotomy in jazz between modernism
and the vernacular.
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power that race has in American society, while recognizing the historical
contingency and fluidity of its expression. My experience working with
jazz history, in parallel with a number of ethnomusicologists currently
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Such an understanding provides a basis for exploring the interaction between the vernacular and modernism in jazz. I would like to
build on it by noting the ways in which the terms "veracular" and
eral, a vernacular may be seen as any set of musical practices that allows
a musician to construct a relationship of familiarity and to perpetuate
some sense of the past in the present through music. Modernism is most
so on. As such, moderism and vernaculars are not diametrical opposites, but rather two aspects of most musicians' involvement with con-
in mind the purposive, constructive aspects of memorialization, it is possible to avoid the impression of essentialism that might attach to Floyd's
project led me to focus on the ways in which Monk was able to create a
music that found the intersections of Western and African diasporic aesthetic canons and practices, melding relationships to vernacular expressivity and modernism, a process Houston Baker has described as an "Afro-
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collective Sphere and T. S. Monk as the leader of his own sextet), remarked that Monk's unusually solid sense of time set him apart from
the average and even from many of the best jazz musicians.10 In contrast,
Don Sickler, who as an arranger and producer relies heavily on his ear
for musical detail, noted that Monk's peculiar rhythmic phrasing can be
disorienting and at times makes it difficult to hear or infer time from his
In order to investigate how musicians' descriptions of Monk's approach to time can function as the starting point for some musical analysis, it will be helpful to consider the shades of meaning "time" may have
in a discussion of jazz. Musicians use the word "time" in various contexts
to refer to a number of interrelated facets of the temporal aspect of play-
ing jazz. "Time" may refer, among other things, to a general sense of the
underlying pulse of a piece, as in, "He has a good sense of time." In addition to this metric sense, "time" references the subtle ways a musician
may play with the basic tempo, phrasing ahead of, in the center of, or
behind the beat in order to create shadings of feeling. It may also refer to
one of a few specific rhythmic accompaniment patterns, particularly for
drummers, as when a musician is said to be "playing time."1l The term
then the idea comes across.... But if you miss the time ... if you blow
the time you're more likely to do irreparable damage to that particular
section of the music."12
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esteem those who could be relied on to play with a solid feeling for time.
More than an objective measurement, though, the evaluation of a musician's feeling for time is dialogic. The pianist Laurent De Wilde describes
a good rhythm section making time as "[a] truly mystical and communal
Tempo
In an interview for this project, Ben Riley used Monk's approach to
tempo in the performance of his own pieces as a marker of a deep under-
you become more in tune to the music, the music that you're playing.
So once you [are] in tune, whatever tempo you play it, you hear where
it's going."'5 In Riley's opinion, this sense of rhythm, which is often
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his playing can also be explained in relation to their reasons for putting
them forward. Both musicians embed their discussions of Monk's use of
tempo in larger statements about how they approach playing the compositions themselves. Riley used his understanding of the many tempos in
which Monk played his own compositions as a way of describing the
variety of interpretive possibilities open to Sphere when the group ap-
proaches the music. He suggested that the ability and freedom to play
Monk's music in a variety of tempos has kept their engagement with it
that's where he wants to go," and we go there. And that's from under-
standing and trying to understand one another, 'cause we're always listening to each other. See, this is why when you hear us play, we might play
the same thing all week long, but every night it's not going to be the
same, because each night we come in with a different feeling for it, a
different tempo.23
Time
What Riley speaks of in terms of "tempo," T. S. Monk expanded on with
a broader consideration of Monk's time feeling:
Thelonious had the best time keeping ability of any jazz musician [Ben Riley, Max Roach, Roy Haynes, or I] ever played with. Nobody, nobody kept
better time than Thelonious. And it was magical. And it forced you, from
a rhythmic standpoint, to swing the hardest you will have ever swung in
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your life. You can ask Roy Haynes, you can ask Max Roach, you can ask
me, you can ask any of the drummers, from Leon Chancellor, who played
with Thelonious, to any of the cats who played a night here, a night there
with him, and they'll all tell you, "Man, Thelonious was like a magic carpet, man." All of a sudden it was another rhythmic center that was coming from him and was carrying you, and you the drummer! You're sup-
posed to be the rhythmic center. This is one of the things that I didn't
realize till I played with another piano player. 'Cause you have to remember, for me, in a serious jazz context, the first piano player I ever played
with was Thelonious, so that was normal. But nowadays, having really
played with a lot of badasses over the last decade or so, nobody even
comes close, you know, in terms of carrying me. I, I lay down a serious
groove, you know. I can swing. I never feel like anybody's carrying me,
like I felt with Thelonious, 'cause he just had a special time thing. And
you'll find that all of us that have played, whether you go back to Shadow
Wilson, you know, Denzil Best, all the drummers that played with Thelonious from the very beginning, anybody who's spent time with Thelo-
nious, including Kenny Clarke, became melodic. All of a sudden they got
this wide, melodic sense. Got this conversational approach to their instrument, in relation to the other instruments, as opposed to simply laying
down a rhythmic foundation for everybody.25
This aspect of Monk's feeling for time, like the question of his approach to tempos and the ludic side of his playing, is very difficult to ap-
part of the interactive ritual space of a live jazz performance.26 Such dif-
ficulty is cast into relief by Don Sickler's impression that Monk's playing
relies on the rhythm section to establish solid time so that he can phrase
outside of it:
[Monk] requires the rhythm section. The whole secret to Monk was [that]
the rhythm section always has to be real swingin'.... That gives him ...
the basis to let him do his thing. In other words, he's not going to play the
swing, he's not going to make it [swing]. He's not like ... Wynton Kelley,
for example, [who] really portrays the swing, [an] immaculate, exciting
player in that respect. But that's not Monk; that's not his contribution.
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It's gotta be swingin', and he plays, he puts his stuff on top of it and that's
magic. If the rhythm section's rushin' and draggin' and slippin' around ...
then it would simply destroy what he's trying to do. Then it would all
there, and all of a sudden I can push a button and, and eliminate the bass,
and push another button and eliminate the drums, you know, if I want
to be able to hear what the piano player is doing, for example. Well, you
can always still kinda tell where the time is and whatever else, by the way
they're playing, you know. With Monk there's some things, I think, where
if you took out the bass and drums ... it could confuse a lot of people, as
to where the time is some of the time. A lot of the time it would be very
relative, 'cause he actually knows where it is, it's just, he places his stuff
in a unique, very personal way, and only he's able to really do it.27
Sickler's impression that the quartet sound Monk aimed for required solid, groove-oriented playing from the bassist and drummer is
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solo introduction. This sense of a rhythmic feel pervades the rest of the
performance as well, with all the musicians participating in the maintenance of a steady sense of time.
It is reasonable for a listener to think of Ore and Dunlop as the
rhythmic center of the performance. Indeed, perceptually this is un-
participated in this study also noted aspects of Monk's playing that are
part of more common music-analytical tropes, most importantly the in-
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cific musical gestures, but on the metacommunicative level.33 Application of his argument to the case in question would suggest an analysis in
which the specific formal structures of motivic unity and development
tive and semantic levels of meaning in this music (if not all music) are
intimately intertwined, if not entirely inseparable. It is only through the
mastery and masterful deployment of a repertory of concrete practices,
Developmental Logic
Three musicians who participated in this study specifically pointed out
thematic development as important or influential in their engagement
with Monk's playing: the pianists Kenney Drew Jr., Fred Hersch, and
"Bags' Groove"
Thelonious Monk's playing on the first take of "Bags' Groove," recorded
with Miles Davis and Milt Jackson in 1954, is exemplary in his use of
a developmental process to structure a long solo over blues chord
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changes.38 It shows Monk's engagement with the African American tradition of riff-based composition, his striking integration of that aesthetic
area of overlap between the blues tradition and classical modernism, and
his masterful deployment of jazz's dialogic qualities while using a distinc-
tive, personal voice. This recording, as an "All Star" date (the album
also includes Sonny Rollins, Horace Silver, Percy Heath, and Kenny
Clarke), posed significant difficulties for the musicians in terms of inter-
moves through the chorus with that musical idea, generally foreshadowing in the final measures of each the following chorus's riff. This can be
sixth becomes the basis for the third chorus's characteristic motive, now
taken up a notch from the previous chorus by the transformation of the
riff into sixteenth notes. Throughout the third chorus Monk gradually
expands the end of the sixteenth-note riff from a single pitch to a dyad
and finally a complete chord. Monk then takes up the chordal texture he
built in the third chorus as the characteristic texture for the fourth cho-
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nized the developmental process Monk was creating and tried to bring
something to it. In the first two choruses they play softly, reacting to the
very sparse texture Monk creates. They swell slightly with the internal
climax of the blues form but keep their playing generally understated. In
the third chorus Clarke adds snare hits for the first time, reinforcing the
ing out the individual musicians' sounds while enabling them to communicate coherently. This kind of unity in performance, though central to
jazz, is often overlooked in analyses that focus entirely on the soloist.41
In choruses five through eight Monk works in two-chorus groupings to build a different sort of development. He goes back to the triplet
riff from chorus two and plays with a layering of dissonance. In choruses
five and six Monk uses the triplet riff, ending it with sharply dissonant
clusters. He then extracts the clusters from their original context and
uses them as the basis for a riff in chorus seven, juxtaposing them with a
resolution tone. In the eighth chorus Monk abandons the dissonance for
the resolution, building the entire chorus on the single resolution note
and quickly shortening pitch durations throughout. This brings the entire solo to an emotional high point, which is defused with the downbeat
of the following chorus. It sounds as though Monk expected the next
soloist to enter on that downbeat, and when he did not, Monk appended
a final chorus to the balanced structure he had created in the preceding
eight choruses. This chorus, though perhaps unplanned, nicely brings
the emotional level of the performance down to a point at which Davis
can enter and build something on his own terms.
Unified Performance
In addition to the importance of coherent linear development in Monk's
soloing, the musicians who participated in this study described a unity in
his performances that set them apart from those of his contemporaries.
While Monk's versions of his own songs and standards share the basic
head-solo-solo-solo . .. -head form with the work of the dominant bebop
players of his time, the musicians with whom I spoke mentioned particularly the difference in the materials Monk used to fill out that form from
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and soloing was the most striking, singular thing that people had heard
and learned from. Fred Hersch added to this the idea that the experiential unity of the performances stemmed from the fact that Monk worked
as a composer in a very tightly unified way:
I think every Monk tune ... has to be about something. It can be about a
rhythm or a motive or two, or it can be about a person or a situation or a
mood, but it has to ... be about something. It's not just, it's not just notes,
you know. There's always a point to all the tunes, to Monk's tunes. There's
always some kind of point, musical or programmatic or something. And
he doesn't use that many elements in a tune. When you really get down to
it, he really makes a lot out of a little. And that's important; too many
people think that jazz composing is, you know, you throw in the kitchen
sink, and you have these long, epic sorts of things. And often those kinds
of things, you just improvise on two chords. Because you'd never be able
to improvise on all that stuff.42
piece, and that each piece seems to be "about" something. Monk's blues
compositions provide the most compelling evidence of this compositional
approach: "Misterioso" uses a repeated broken ascending sixth as the
basis of the entire head; "Straight, No Chaser" breaks up into a number
of short snippets, all of which present versions of a single motive; and
others, such as "Bolivar Ba-Lues Are" or "Blues Five Spot," are even
more traditionally riff-based tunes in which Monk uses a single motive
as the basis of the A and B sections of a standard AAB blues form. Even
in cases in which Monk does not compose with the kinds of motivic materials that sound immediately rifflike, his approach to musical process
shows an affinity for the riff-based music of his youth.
ing short pieces that work with a single musical idea. "I Mean You" provides an excellent glimpse of how Monk accomplishes this. The head is
forty measures long, divided into a four-measure intro, a thirty-two-
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melodic material for the rest of the piece through playful repetition and
revision. Through this use of a single motivic riff with numerous permu-
beat, creating a new rhythmic profile. The only notable relationship between this and the riff that opens the A section is the off-beat quarter
note pickup on which they both begin. Harmonically this introduction
almost defies any tonal interpretation. Together these four measures project a sense of an E-flat seventh chord, with no suggestion of a move to
E When F comes as the tonic at the beginning of the A section, it is not
F tonality. This second interpretation gains credence from the fact that
the juxtaposition of the E-flat seventh chord with the F chord also occurs at the beginning of the bridge, where an E-flat seventh immediately
follows the arrival on the tonic at the end of the second A, here used to
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and his improvisational voice. But I would like to focus here on a less
often commented upon aspect of the way he integrates those materials
from the head in his soloing as it surfaces in two recordings of "I Mean
You," one from 1948 with Milt Jackson and one from a live performance
second solo, following Jackson and Coltrane, respectively-each a musician whose voice is dramatically different from Monk's. Following his
sidemen's strong solos, Monk takes time to transition from their sound
worlds to his own. In both cases Monk starts his solo with new material
that sounds plausible coming after the previous one. After these transitions Monk then begins to work within his own sound world, introducing materials drawn from the head. In the recording with Coltrane,
Monk then uses an extended solo as an opportunity to intertwine materials from the head with new materials handled motivically. In the earlier recording, the movement from Jackson's improvisation to materials
drawn from the head takes the whole of Monk's sixteen-measure solo
and provides a neatly drawn shape of departure and return to the performance as a whole. It is noteworthy that in performances in which Monk
took the first solo he often started with a largely unadorned statement
of at least part of the head, often with little variation, before launching
into other material.
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value such as "creating music that is 'open enough' to allow other musicians to bring something [to the music] despite or because of what has
been provided structurally or contextually" is open to disagreement and
debate.44
Although I suggested previously that Monk worked within the sort
of synthetic "Afro-modernism" that Baker theorized, such a synthesis
would appear, at least in my analyses, to be interior to Monk and anterior to performance. In this case it need not be contradictory to speak of
a synthetic Afro-moderism and at the same time to note that this synthesis functions in the intersections between the vernacular and modernism: the aesthetics in the abstract can be seen as distinct, yet satisfied
explain the problems that have arisen in its discussion over the past half
century.
Ben Riley and Steve Lacy, each of whom played with Monk (Lacy
for a very short time in 1960, and Riley as Monk's regular drummer from
1964 to 1967),46 both remarked on humor as an important aspect of
Monk's musical style. Riley noted it when discussing what a musician
has to bring to the table in order to play Monk's compositions successfully. "We have to learn the humor," he told me.
because [Monk] had fantastic humor in his music. And this is one of them
things that most people don't collect in what they're doing: that humor.
See, they do everything else-notewise and whatnot-but they forget the
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humor. And he was a very humorous person. If you listen to some of that
phrasing you have to laugh [You have to] say, "How did he figure that
out!" You know? These are the things that you have to bring to the table:
do it your way, but don't neglect the humor.47
Riley, like many others, situates the presence of humor in Monk's playing itself, as well as ascribing it to him as a personality characteristic;
the humor in Monk's music as Riley does requires moving beyond a focus
jokes-he had a lot of humor, really-and play. Play. It was about play.
The guy liked to play, you know.
GS: And the music?
SL: Very playful. And he was playful. Played Ping-Pong. He liked to play
games, he liked to play jokes, he liked to play with words, with ideas, with
costume, with clothing, with shoes, with hats. He was a grown-up child,
really, a genius.48
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as aesthetic appeal, of the repeated words "dig it." Another excellent example of this playfulness is Monk's often-repeated, deadpan remark that
"it's always night, or we wouldn't need light." Here Monk recasts an experience of everyday life in terms that destabilize it. While the specifics of
this linguistic doubleness may well have little bearing on our hearing of
his music, his general way of suggesting new experiences of the known is
oppositions:
[Monk's music] is very well thought out, and behind this clear and graphic
facade ... there's the female component-there's the moon component,
as I call it-that's subtly shifting, subtly changing, [that] peeks out and
says, "Over here," and then disappears. And then pops up over here, you
know. That's always in there, too. It's yin-yang stuff.51
I asked Rudd if this was something he saw as a "fun" aspect of the music.
He responded that all jazz is fun music, that Monk was particularly good
at a kind of fun or playfulness that came from incorporating and inter-
preting what he heard around him. "I think Monk knew as much about
convention as he did about unconvention," he told me. "[He had] the
knowledge of unconvention, the knowledge of mistakes, surprise, the
unpredictable, the unforeseen, you know, having an intuitive sense
about all this stuff, and then having that, having taken some of that
and put a frame around it."52 Rudd sees Monk's knowledge and use of
convention-in which he includes both the banal and the transcendent,
pop music, what he calls "longhair" classical music, and, significantly,
forms and structures that conform to a listener's expectations-in a mutually enriching relationship with the unexpected. As he sees it, the fun
or humor comes from the interaction of these two expressive modes,
rather than from the use of unexpected or anomalous materials alone.
Given these descriptions of a ludic affective side to Monk's music
-which would include things along a continuum from specifically humorous expression to a more general playfulness-there are two different
musical strategies that may be explored as representative, which I refer to
as internally and externally referential playfulness. What I refer to as in-
ternally referential playfulness involves the creation of an expected musical trajectory (harmonic, melodic, rhythmic, etc.), and the introduction
of some unexpected break with that expectation through musical non
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quire a doubled interpretation.53 In practice, a bit of musical fun may involve both of these two processes; nonetheless, there is some value in
Considering these qualities on the basis of recordings alone is problematic because the extramusical cues they offer are extremely limited.
Listener's experiences have shown that many of the cues needed to interpret a jazz performance as humorous, or ludic in the broader sense, are
not sonic themselves. A musical reference that seems interesting in a
recording may be patently humorous in live performance; the difference
can Composer; and live concerts from Parisian, Japanese, and Norwegian
performances recorded in 1959, 1965, and 1966, respectively.55 These
few hours of footage provide a regrettably small sampling from which to
they allow a glimpse and can be considered as admittedly limited documents. They show, above all, that despite his reputation for detachment
from practical considerations, Monk was savvy about using the total
performance to achieve his aesthetic ends, both serious and playful.
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mor and playfulness, both of which are seen as debased modes of expression. It may also be partially a result of musicology's focus on abstracted
musical texts. With the exception of obvious cases such as Mozart's Ein
musikalischer Spass, humor in classical music, as in jazz, would seem to
arise most perceptibly in the act of performance, rather than in the mu-
sical text. It follows, then, that since historical musicology has until very
recently concerned itself largely with musical texts in the abstract, it has
concerned that this project reifies the jazz tradition as stable and uni
aspects of the music that are less valued within the modernist aesth
fact that racial stereotypes inflect the meaning of these musical and
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sic that do not use the original chord changes, or that alter the original
melodies of the compositions:
Every time I play "Ask Me Now" I'm trying to get more and more into it,
yet, I'm not taking it out, like on another kind of song you'd take it out to
some other area, I'm still just in Monk's world. I'm trying to get into it. In
fact, I'm in an enclosed space that he created, you know. Whereas with another kind of song I might go anywhere if I feel like it, you know, evolving
the song. But I feel like his songs, when I'm evolving them, I'm only
evolving it to try to learn what he made out there. [Emphasis added]65
When I asked Porcelli whether he found that trying to inhabit this world
limited his musical options, he replied, "No! Not at all, because it's such
a huge thing, you'll never get the whole thing."66 Porcelli's description of
this enclosed musical world seems to come from specific differences be-
tween the approaches Monk and his contemporaries took to the building
blocks of a voice-stylistic phonemes, so to speak-and, importantly,
the kinds of intermusical connections in his playing.
In order to address this, it will be useful to consider some aspects of
Monk's playing through a representative example: the extended recording of "Blue Monk" with Art Blakey and Percy Heath from the 1954
Prestige recording Thelonious Monk.67 At just over seven and a half minutes, it stands out as one of the first recordings in which Monk had the
time to develop an extended solo and allow his sidemen the opportunity
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to stretch out as accompanists with him. The trio takes "Blue Monk" at
a very leisurely pace, using the slow tempo to highlight the steady, walking character of the scalar riff from which the head is built. Monk's ap-
While Monk's approach to form and the restraint he uses in choosing materials with which to build the solo is distinctive, perhaps the
most significant aspect of this performance in terms of giving the impres-
sion that Monk's music constitutes its own world is its self-referentiality.
Many of Monk's solo choruses sound generically like heads, but the first
and third are remarkable in that each of them sounds like a specific head
quotes liberally from the melody of "In Walked Bud" in his solo,70 and
"In Walked Bud" is the second cut. The liner notes for the album relate
that this was the original performance order of these two tunes. Thus, a
bit of intermusical reference becomes a way for Monk to achieve conti-
nuity over a long time span and to focus attention on his music as an
integral project, in addition to the smaller units within it-individual
pieces and their performances.
These are the sorts of things that can give the impression that
what Monk created in his musical career might be heard as its own selfcontained world. The metaphor is resonant because it expresses the
sense of wonder a musician might have as an explorer of territory that
one knows exists but is just out of sight, as in geographical exploration.
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legacy. The two elements, metamusical discourse and the durable existence of the music, in dialogue with one another are the basis of both a
recordings and documents. But they are neither so unstable nor so dependent on the recordings as common sense might suggest. All these discursive acts belong to the sphere of "constructions," or what Michel de
Certeau has called "secondary acts of production." They are what gives
the documents "thickness" (in the Geertzian sense), and in their repetitions, their circulation among musicians, variously authorized by the
tellers, they provide the context in which Monk's music says something
in the present.
There is another kind of "secondary act of production" at work in
the construction of Monk in jazz history that is fundamentally tied to
the specifics of jazz as a musical practice: other musicians' performances
of Monk's music. This is far too big a subject to be considered in any
detail here, but equally too significant in its impact on the interaction
between recordings and discourse to be left for another time entirely.
Indeed, it is in the continuing process of reinterpreting Monk's compositions and in learning from his improvisations that jazz musicians (and
occasionally others) have most powerfully created a historical and contemporary figure out of him. This troping, versioning, or signifyin(g)
gage Monk's authorial voice are able (indeed, obligated) to add their
own dimension of authorship in a way that, for example, a performer in
The question arises, then: What kind of acts are the discursive acts
surrounding and interpreting Monk's music? Are they "secondary," or
does their involvement with the musicians' own performances of his music mean that they, too, strain the idea of "secondness"? Certainly they
fit de Certeau's idea in that they involve precisely the sort of creative activity of making an inhabitable world through the personalization of a
mass-produced commodity that he describes as "a poeisis, but a hidden
one."71 But they share in the "primary" sense that the performances
themselves have in that they are not only about creating Monk, but also
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music that are most easily translated into a general category: a particular
logic; a sense of humor; and an intimate understanding of the broad category "time." These, rather than the idiosyncrasies of his style in the
Notes
1. Veit Erlmann, "Communities of Style: Musical Figures of Black Diasporic Identity,"
in The African Diaspora: A Musical Perspective, ed. Ingrid Monson (New York: Garland
Press, 2000), 83-102; Samuel Floyd Jr., The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History
from Africa to the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Travis Jack-
son, "Jazz Performance as Ritual: The Blues Aesthetic and the African Diaspora," in The
African Diaspora, 23-82; Ingrid Monson, Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interac-
tion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Monson, Introduction to The African
Diaspora, 1-22; Burton, W. Peretti, "Oral Histories of Jazz Musicians: The NEA Transcripts
as Texts in Context," in Jazz among the Discourses, ed. Krin Gabbard (Durham, N.C.:
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Duke University Press, 1995), 117-33; Jed Rasula, "The Media of Memory: The Seductive Menace of Records in Jazz History," in Jazz among the Discourses, 134-64.
2. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 102. For extensions of this idea, see the essays
in Monson, The African Diaspora, particularly those by Veit Erlmann, Julian Gerstin,
nalists. Nevertheless, Monk does appear to have been aware of and concerned with
his experience as an African American and the larger social issues surrounding him. In
an article from 1958, Frank L. Brown quoted Monk as denying a social content to his
music and saying, "I would have written the same way even if I had not been a Negro";
Frank L. Brown, "Thelonious Monk: More Man than Myth, Monk Has Emerged from
the Shadows," Down Beat, 30 Oct. 1958, 45. However, five years later he adamantly
disavowed the statement in an interview with Francois Postif: "I don't think I ever said
such an insane thing: I know the words I use and I never used those" [Je ne pense pas
avoir ja mais amais prononce une telle insanite: je connais les mots que j'emploie et je
n'emploie jamais celui-la]; Francois Postif, "Round 'bout Sphere," Jazz Hot 186, Apr.
1963, 39. For an insightful analysis of Monk's involvement with fund-raising benefit con-
certs for civil rights organizations, see Ingrid Monson, "Monk Meets SNCC," Black Music Research Journal 19, no. 2 (Fall 1999): 187-200.
4. Houston A. Baker, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 3-4; Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology,
trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976);
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York:
Harper and Row, 1972), 37-39, 73-76; Ingrid Monson, "Riffs, Repetition, and Theories
of Globalization," Ethnomusicology 43, no. 1 (Winter 1999): 46-47, 49.
5. John Miller Cheroff, African Rhythm and African Sensibility: Aesthetics and Social
Action in African Musical Idioms (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); Floyd,
The Power of Black Music; Jackson, "Jazz Performance as Ritual"; Oily Wilson, "The
Heterogeneous Sound Ideal in African-American Music," in New Perspectives on Music:
Essays in Honor of Eileen Southern, ed. Josephine Wright with Samuel A. Floyd Jr.
First Century, ed. Joseph K. Adjaye and Adrianne R. Andrews (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh
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surrounding civil disobedience practiced by Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr.,
and a host of contemporary people worldwide. Fox derives this binarism from a set of
misinterpretations that may arise in the movement of counter-mainstream practices and
principles "from local to global and then to another locale." In his terms "hyper-difference"
tremely exaggerated Otherness," while the other creates "a complete assimilation to
Self."
10. It is difficult to avoid confusion in referring to these two Thelonious Monks, as I
do throughout this article. The younger Monk is often referred to in print as Monk Jr.,
although, as he points out, this is not technically correct-his grandfather was also
Thelonious Monk, making his father the second and him the third (and his son the
fourth). I will use T. S. Monk to refer to the younger Monk and Thelonious Monk to
refer to the older throughout, since these are the names the two are most widely called
by on recordings and in print.
11. Paul Berliner, Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation (Chicago: University
13. Laurent De Wilde, Monk, trans. Johnathan Dickinson (New York: Marlowe, 1997),
34.
14. Ben Riley, interview by author, St. Louis, Mo., 25 Feb. 1999. Here and throughout
this article I have transcribed quotes from my interviews as literally as possible. I have
made no attempt to formalize spoken grammar and syntax, except in order to clarify
19. This is not to say that De Wilde has no experience with jazz outside of recordings,
but that his work as a historian-his book on Monk-focuses solely on Monk's recordings
and looks at them as uncomplicated documents.
20. It is difficult to say what importance Monk ascribed to his own recordings; he was
reticent in interviews and left very little record of personal tastes, ideals, etc., aside from
his recordings. Other musicians, however, seem to have a mixed relationship to recordings. While they are often justifiably proud of the achievement recordings represent and
the permanence they provide, they often voice the concern that recordings fail to cap-
ture the best qualities of communication and spontaneity found in live performances.
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27. Don Sickler, interview by author, New York, N.Y., 5 Aug. 1999.
28. For more on the interactive creation of a groove in jazz performance, see Monson,
Saying Something.
29. Thelonious Monk, track 4 on Criss Cross (Columbia 48823, 1993). "Eronel," credited on this album to Monk alone, was the fruit of a collaborative process. Originally
composed by Idries Suleiman and Sahib Shihab, Monk suggested a crucial changeSuleiman told T. S. Monk it was only a single note and the title. Suleiman and Shihab
felt that Monk's suggestions made the piece what it is and therefore gave over the com-
poser's rights altogether. See G. Wittner and I. Braus, "T. S. Monk on T. S. Monk," Coda
255, May-June 1994, 12.
30. John Gennari, "Jazz Criticism: Its Development and Ideologies," Black American
Literature Forum 25, no. 3 (Fall 1991): 476-85.
31. Monson discusses the lurking logic of white supremacy in this kind of analysis, noting Gunther Schuller's role as "the most prolific and visible exponent of a larger intellectual trend in jazz historiography that has left the evaluative standards of Western musical
37. Fred Hersch, interview by author, New York, N.Y., 10 Aug. 1999.
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41. Such an approach seems particularly problematic in light of the evidence provided
in Monson, Saying Something.
45. Paul Bacon, "The High Priest of Bebop: The Inimitable Mr. Monk," Record
Changer 8, no. 11 (Nov. 1949): 9-11.
46. Steve Lacy, interview by author, New York, N.Y., 4 Aug. 1999; Jeff Potter, "Riley,
Ben(jamin A.)," in The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, ed. Barry Kemfeld, vol. 2 (London:
54. Travis Jackson, "Performance and Musical Meaning: Analyzing Jazz on the New
York Scene" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1989), 169, 174-75, 180, 216, 219.
55. Matthew Seig, prod., Thelonious Monk: American Composer (BMG Video, 1991);
Charlotte Zwerin, prod., Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser (Warer Home Video,
1988).
56. This was particularly true in the past, but it remains a distressingly significant issue,
even today.
57. Scott DeVeaux, "Constructing the Jazz Tradition: Jazz Historiography," Black American Literature Forum 25, no. 3 (1991): 552.
58. Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History
of Blacks in American Films (New York: Continuum, 1994), 7-8.
59. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Pocketbooks, 1972), 147-50, 158-63.
60. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1952).
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65. Bob Porcelli, interview by author, New York, N.Y., 13 July 1999.
throughout the 1940s, before he began recording, making any chronology on the basis
of recordings of only limited value.
72. Michael Kammen, "Carl Becker Redivivus: Or, Is Everyone Really a Historian?"
History and Theory 39, no. 2 (May 2000): 233.
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