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What made Monk's music remarkable was the way it could juxtapose a basic theme with a heady, complex treatment. At its core, a lingering ballad like "Crepuscule with Nellie," which Monk wrote for his wife, offers pleasures as instant as a lullaby. Something jauntier, like "Ba-lue Bolivar Ba-lues-are," was so accessible that it snuck onto the soundtrack for Disney's 1961 animated film One Hundred and One Dalmatians, its melody appropriated for a tune called "Cruella De Vil." Children across America were singing along to Monk without even knowing it. But just to certify Monk's underground cachet—he also turned up, after a fashion, in Thomas Pynchon's first novel, V., which featured a cameo by an avant-garde saxophonist named McClintic Sphere.
"This is curiously complicated music to listen to," Greenwald says. "It's remarkable that so many people do. There're all kinds of elements we're trying to chase down in the series. Folk elements, for instance. He was born here in the Piedmont, so he would have been influenced by railroad songs, certain types of blues, of gospel music."
To best account for all those facets of Monk's life and art meant bringing in an array of Monk's more remarkable interpreters and contemporaries, such as jazz vocalist Andy Bey and jazz pianists Jessica Williams, Hank Jones, and Randy Weston, who could explore various facets of the composer's musical DNA: gospel, blues, stride piano, Negro spirituals, and folk songs. But Greenwald also wanted to explore the world that the pianist influenced.
"If you Google 'Thelonious Monk' and the name of any major hip-hop producer, you'll find some interview where they're going to be talking about what a huge influence he is," Greenwald says. "There's a legacy that hasn't been explored fully. I don't mean just his impact on jazz, but his impact on contemporary music and dance."
That meant looking at Monk through the prism of his influence on contemporary classical music, salsa music, and ballet and modern dance. Choreographer Robert Battle cites Monk as a formative influence, especially in what he calls a "deconstructive" approach to melody and rhythm. What he heard in Monk was a process of taking apart essential aspects of a piece of music and sticking them back together again, casting the familiar flow of notes askew through the use of suspenseful pauses and tempos that lingered and crashed. "He had a way of turning the thing upside down and shaking it a little bit," says Battle, whose Battleworks Dance Company's Monk Movements, a program of short pieces devised especially for Duke, reflects that sensibility. "It's one of the things I try to emulate in my own work, even when I'm using classical music."
Perhaps it was the way that Monk's sound countered mid-twentieth-century jazz convention that now makes it so congruent with other forms in which artists think outside the box. "Monk's music always felt very natural to where I was coming from," says David Harrington, a founder of the San Francisco-based Kronos Quartet, a chamber group known for its embrace of eclectic sources and new composers. The group kicked off the six-week Duke series. "He's quite close to the avant-garde classical tradition, except for his rich sense of melody. That's something he had that they didn't."
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