Monk and Jazz

“So a lot of critics didn’t like me back then—still don’t today—because they saw me as an arrogant little nigger. Maybe I was, I don’t know, but I do know that I wasn’t going to have to write about them. Anyway, Max and Monk felt like that, and J.J. and Bud Powell, too. So that’s what brought us close together, this attitude about ourselves and our music.” – Miles

When I think of my favorite Jazz – and especially when I think of Monk – it’s through the prism of race relations. Emasculating bigotry and the consequential “double consciousness,” permeated both the playing of, and listening to, this American art.

For Monk, there was even a third consciousness, that of a man possessed. “he was a great put-on artist, too, and that’s the way he kept people off him, by acting crazy like he did.” – Miles

“Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist.”

Monk takes Emerson’s words to heart. So much so that he refuses to conform to even his African American contemporaries. One can imagine Monk quoting Shakespeare:

“I am too high-born to be propertied,
To be a secondary at control
Or useful serving-man and instrument”

Miles gushes over Monk in his autobiography, but he also recounts the legendary controversy over his asking Monk to lay out and not play behind him on the album they did together. Because “Monk never did know how to play behind a horn player.”

What I read into the controversy is that Monk did not want to be secondary to Miles…nor should he be…nor will he be.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBP9tYncw8E

Great interview, and I love the insight about Monk influencing the sounds of the album “Money Jungle.”