THE NIGHT THELONIOUS MONK JUST STOPPED
There is a story about Thelonious Monk that gets told at music schools sometimes, usually as a warning. I have always thought it was the opposite of a warning. I have always thought it was the whole point.
Monk was playing a club in New York sometime in the early sixties. The kind of night where everything was working - the room was listening, the rhythm section was locked in, and Monk was deep in it.
Then he stopped.
Not the song. Just himself. He stood up from the piano in the middle of a take, walked to the center of the stage, and started turning in slow circles. Nobody asked him to. Nobody knew it was coming. He just stood there, rotating, while his band kept playing around him.
The bass player kept going. The drummer kept going. The audience sat there not entirely sure what they were watching.
After a while - nobody agrees on exactly how long - Monk walked back to the piano and sat down. And then he played one of the most ferocious solos of the set.
Someone asked him about it afterward. Why did you do that?
He said: I got tired of sitting.
That was Thelonious Monk in full. No performance of normalcy. No obligation to make the audience comfortable. No gap between what he felt and what he did. He was tired of sitting, so he stood. He felt like turning, so he turned. He was ready to play again, so he played.
Most musicians spend their whole careers learning to control that instinct. Monk spent his whole career refusing to.
He made it work because the music was always worth the wait. You could forgive a lot of eccentricity when the person being eccentric was also playing Round Midnight.
There is a version of discipline that is about suppression. And then there is the version Monk practiced, which was about total commitment to whatever was actually happening inside him at a given moment.
His peers called him difficult. His audiences called him unpredictable. History called him one of the greatest composers in American music.
I know which one I believe.
WHAT TO LISTEN TO
Start with Brilliant Corners (1957). It is the record that convinced a lot of people Monk was not a novelty act. Side one alone will rearrange something in your head.
THE MUSIC
If the history is what brings you here, the music is what keeps you here.
Stream or buy my latest at sidkingsley.com
Until next time.
Sid