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Monk abides. That's Monk, as in Thelonious Sphere Monk. If the name rings with a slightly off-kilter resonance, at once elegant and a touch uncanny, it's only appropriate. The jazz composer and pianist, who would have turned ninety this October, was a singular brand of genius, an idiosyncratic marvel, and a pivotal figure in American music. Once you'd heard him, you could never forget him. His indelible melodies and brusque, angular rhythms adhered to their own internal logic, and they came to shape a radical new way of thinking about jazz, erupting out of Harlem in the early 1940s and permeating cultural consciousness ever since.
Monk's more protean contemporaries, such as Duke Ellington and Miles Davis, achieved greater renown earlier in their careers, and generated bodies of work that were both epic and epochal. But this composer was always an insider's favorite. He'd been performing and recording for a quarter century before he won mainstream recognition. Monk was an enigmatic character who took the stage with his goatee and his haberdasher's array of hats—jumping up from the piano bench in mid-tune to dance around the bandstand as his sidemen soloed—and was publicly known as a man of few and often coded words. "He was a true eccentric, that's the way you could put it," says Charles Tolliver, the jazz trumpeter and bandleader, who was seventeen when he first saw Monk at a concert in 1959. "A maximum eccentric." And so, he remained a tad obscure even as his music, including songs like " 'Round Midnight," "Straight, No Chaser," and "Misterioso" became instantly hummable staples of jazz repertoire.
"He set a standard of hipness," says Jason Moran, the thirty-two-year-old pianist who is one of Monk's contemporary heirs. "If you are able to find out who he is, you become part of a separate society."
Duke Performances, perhaps better known in the past for showcasing more mainstream fare, is making an unprecedented effort to spread the word. True, Monk has enjoyed retrospective tribute at jazz festivals worldwide, and has inspired programs at such cultural bastions as Jazz at Lincoln Center and the San Francisco Jazz Festival. But he's never gotten quite the kaleidoscopic treatment he received from Duke in the six-week "Following Monk" series, which ran through the end of October and comprised seventeen performances (music, theater, and dance), including commissions for Monk-themed projects created by Moran, Tolliver, and the Kronos Quartet. The series was scheduled to coincide with what would have been the late musician's birthday, October 10.
"We wanted to explore the legacy in a bunch of different directions," says Aaron Greenwald, interim director of Duke Performances, "but also be respectful and musically uncompromising. That was critical. We wanted to create enough opportunities so people who don't know Monk's music [but] who were curious would accept the invitation."
Monk's music can strike a novice listener as being what jazz fans call "out," Greenwald notes. Certainly that was the perception in the 1940s, when critics and musicians outside his circle disparaged the pianist's percussive verve and his shifting, elliptical use of space between the notes as mere bad technique. As jazz historian Ted Gioia wrote, Monk favored "the stark repetition of the simplest melodic fragments, serving almost as a parody of traditional thematic development; thick, comping chords laced with dissonances, and dropped with the subtlety of a hand grenade."
It wasn't easy listening in 1942, but, over time, the idiosyncrasies of Monk's style have become an essential part of jazz language. "He's the first thing you learn now," Moran says, adding that after he first heard Monk, as a teenager growing up in Houston, Texas, in the 1990s, "I measured everything else up to him. Monk wasn't outside, Monk was inside." At Duke, Moran performed the world premiere of a new full-length piece he composed, based on Monk's music. (He was also a visiting artist first semester, coming to campus a half-dozen times to work with undergraduate and graduate students in various departments.)
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