Hearing Monk - History, Memory and The Making of A Jazz Giant - by Gabriel Solis

Hearing Monk: History, Memory,
and the Making of a “Jazz Giant”

Gabriel Solis
Historical thinking has a prominent place in virtually every kind of

discourse surrounding jazz. Fans revel in constructing and debating lin-
eages of influence for their favorite musicians, record companies use the
cachet that accrues from being described as part of a tradition (or, occa-
sionally, of rebelling against tradition) to sell compact discs, and, per-
haps most interestingly, jazz musicians actively engage the making of
their own history in interviews, conversations, and the act of musical
performance itself. In the past decade, the literature of jazz scholarship
has offered increasingly sophisticated approaches to understanding this
music: investigating the process of enculturation when young musicians
learn the tradition from their predecessors, analyzing the variety and sig-
nificance of reference and interaction in improvisational performance,
and destabilizing the grand narratives and “great man” historiography of
influence. This study, building on the interpretive frameworks in this
growing literature, aims at an analysis of the significance of metamusical
conversations engaged in by the jazz community. It asks how ethno-
graphic 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
insider discourse as a significant location for an ongoing process of “his-
tory in the making,” one that destabilizes developmental or entropic
grand narratives and “great man” tropes while accounting for change
and stability over time and for the great respect given to masters of the
tradition by jazz musicians.
In 1998 I began researching Thelonious Monk’s life and music for a
dissertation combining historical and ethnomusicological perspectives
on Monk’s presence in American culture in the second half of the twen-
tieth century. To that end, I considered all the documentary material I
could find relating to him, from sound recordings and scholarly articles
to newspaper clippings and articles in the popular jazz press. I also con-
ducted interviews and listened to countless live performances. I focused
my ethnographic study on musicians who had distinguished themselves
as interpreters of Monk’s music, regardless of whether or not they had
The Musical Quarterly 86(1), Spring 2002, pp. 82–116; DOI: 10.1093/musqtl/gdg001
© 2002 Oxford University Press 82
Monk, History, and Memory 83
played with him or had known him personally. As I slowly developed a

growing familiarity with the various sources from which I would write,
I was struck by the complex webs relating the ethnographic and the his-
torical as modes of engaging the past. I noted convergences and diver-
gences in the ways musicians and writers chose to talk about the music,
similarities and differences in focus, and various ways in which the people
and “texts” involved were in mutually enriching dialogue: memories
built from a life of engaging music and stories about it, history gaining
resonance and meaning from retelling. It was my impression that here,
in a relatively compact case, was a demonstration of something of
broader significance, something common to cultural histories more
generally: that the various “texts” that make up the lasting substance of
culture do so only through the process of being personalized—that is,
read, recycled, and reused. This essay grows out of that initial recogni-
tion of the significance of the relationship between history and memory,
between music, musicians, and a broader culture, and represents what I
see as the beginning of a larger project of understanding Monk and the
way he has become part of jazz history.
The task at hand, then, is to ask how an ethnographic engagement
with contemporary interpreters of Monk’s music might bring a new per-
spective to musical analysis, and why, given an open-ended question
about what was significant in Monk’s music, musicians chose to articu-
late the things they did. What comes from this approach is not so much
an analysis of what Monk and his music are, or even were, but of what
they have been to a community (understood loosely as a collection of
people with Monk as a common interest). This is not so much a process
of translation, of finding the appropriate technical language with which
to re-express what I was told, but one of discovery, of asking the ques-
tion, What is it about Monk’s music that prompts these experiences? It
is my contention that although this project is not, strictly speaking, his-
torical, it provides a critical perspective on two of the most important
aspects of jazz history—the recordings and the people’s discourse about
them—ultimately making it possible to situate Monk more carefully in
some narrative contexts.
Five aspects of Monk’s music emerged as particularly significant to
the musicians I interviewed for this project. Considered individually and
together, they show the musicians’ interest in Monk’s ability to integrate
and satisfy modernist and vernacular aesthetics in the creation of music
in the context of a distinctly African American musical world. These
characteristics include the singularity of Monk’s approach to time, the
characteristic use of developmental logic in his soloing, a unified quality
in his individual performances, his use of humor or playfulness, and finally
84 The Musical Quarterly
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
this project chose overwhelmingly to address these large-scale aspects of
Monk’s music (rather than such small-scale issues as the idiosyncrasies of
his use of dissonance, particular chord voicings, or personal licks) when
asked open-ended questions about Monk’s lasting contribution to jazz.
I will consider this proposition in more detail in the conclusion.
Jazz studies, in its various historical, theoretical, and ethnographic
approaches, is a young branch of musicology, itself a young discipline in
comparison with other branches of the humanities and social sciences.
As such, jazz scholars have only begun to address some of the most press-
ing issues of metatheoretical and even metaphysical concern. Ontologi-
cal 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
Before moving on to a discussion of Monk’s music, it is important
to note how my interpretations and those of the musicians who partici-
pated in this study engage ongoing discursive practices concerning race,
culture, and jazz. The idea that this music is African American, marked
as different from the aesthetics and practices of European-derived classi-
cal and folk music traditions, goes back into the earliest writings on jazz
and has been an ongoing source of conversation and at times consterna-
tion 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
music as a vinaigrette, in which the two ingredients have commingled
but can still be rather easily separated in order to analyze the contents.
Moreover, such a construction has taken place in the context of a rela-
tively essentialist, reified understanding of race. This is made even more
problematic by the intertwining of discourses of racial difference and
social class in postwar America and the mapping of this composite race-
class discourse onto the aesthetic dichotomy in jazz between modernism
and the vernacular.
What seems fundamentally important at this juncture in writing
about an artist such as Monk is to construct a picture of what it might
mean to posit his music as “sounding blackness,” without relying on a
static, essentialist notion of blackness in sociocultural life generally and in

music more specifically. Such a project aims to appreciate the very real
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
working on topics within the African diaspora, has required an analysis
that extends Paul Gilroy’s theorization of a “third option,” an “anti-anti-
essentialism” counterpoised with “ethnic absolutist” and “anti-essentialist”
views of race and its functioning in the contemporary world.2 The better
we understand the ways race is performed—that is, the ways it is made
sensible, visible, audible, real—the closer we will be to understanding
the postmodern world. In a more immediate sense, addressing the impact
of blackness on Monk’s music and his position as a historical construc-
tion is important because it is a central trope in jazz history. It was a sig-
nificant aspect of how Monk saw his own position in the world of jazz
and American culture and has continued to be part of the ways his inter-
preters make sense of him and themselves in similar contexts.3
This is an opportunity to consider how race has functioned as an
“always already,” a “discursive formation,” a “precedent text,” or, follow-
ing Ingrid Monson’s usage, an important “riff” in the improvised texture
of contemporary life.4 The last metaphor avoids the central semantic
pitfall found in the others. Instead of foregrounding the qualities of sta-
sis, fixity, and monumentally, suggested by words like “always,” “forma-
tion,” and “text,” the term “riffs” lends itself to an interpretation of so-
cial and cultural phenomena such as race as materials circulating within
the regulated improvisation of everyday life—materials that individuals
are able to use whole or in part in order to enter into dialogue with that
polyphonic improvisation, interacting with, intervening in, and inter-
rupting the going regimes of truth, but (as in verbal conversation) lim-
ited by the interpersonal exigencies of intelligibility and believability.
Although Samuel Floyd Jr., Olly Wilson, and a number of ethno-
musicologists writing about contemporary music in Africa have provided
ample evidence of a number of musical traits forming an African dias-
poric style—call-and-response, repetition and troping, a “heterogeneous
sound ideal,” and so on—I find Travis Jackson’s discussion of a “blues
aesthetic” in jazz most useful as a starting point for further analyses of
jazz as an African diasporic music.5 Jackson’s work is appealing because
in situating jazz musicians’ significant musical concerns in the larger-
scale domain of an aesthetic—that is, what the music should do for a
person—rather than the smaller-scale field of the musical traits through
which that aesthetic becomes sensible, he points to a way of understand-
ing the construction of musical “blackness” as a mutable and geographi-
cally and historically contingent process.
Such an understanding provides a basis for exploring the interac-

tion between the vernacular and modernism in jazz. I would like to
build on it by noting the ways in which the terms “vernacular” and
“modernist” might be seen as representing relationships, in addition to
being more closely defined by particular musical characteristics.6 In gen-
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
resonant when understood as a creative engagement with the conditions
of modernity and a “progressive” approach to musical creation. In both
cases, the relationship is not limited to formal details of music, but ex-
tends to musicians’ engagements with technology, global capitalism, and
so on. As such, modernism and vernaculars are not diametrical oppo-
sites, but rather two aspects of most musicians’ involvement with con-
temporary life. Moreover, both relationships can be explored within the
broader context of a “blues aesthetic.” Use can still be made of Floyd’s
or Wilson’s analyses of African diasporic generic musical traits, in large
measure because the continued association of particular sonic practices
with musics played by African Americans allows those sounds to function
as markers of race—to effectively “sound blackness.”7 Indeed, this is par-
ticularly true if one agrees with Floyd’s assertion that musical African
Americanness is a function of “cultural memory.” So long as one bears
in mind the purposive, constructive aspects of memorialization, it is pos-
sible to avoid the impression of essentialism that might attach to Floyd’s
theory. Cultural memory is valuable to assert in this context because it
represents the practices people engage in to maintain through multiple
generations those aspects of the collective self deemed most valuable,
interesting, and important.
The descriptions of Monk’s music that I heard in interviews for this
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 aes-
thetic canons and practices, melding relationships to vernacular expres-
sivity and modernism, a process Houston Baker has described as an “Afro-
modernism.”8 Rather than cobbling together a European-derived melody
with an African-derived rhythm, or a modernist sense of individualism
and a vernacular communalism, Monk’s music created a synthesis on a
deeper level, and on such grounds that different listeners have often
found in the same performances the expression of those aesthetics that
speak most clearly to them. I wish to highlight the points of intersection
that have made this music so compelling to so many and to undermine a
kind of “hyper-difference” in the representation of musical Africanness
and Europeanness, while avoiding the erasure of the distinctly African
American qualities of the music in the construction of an “over-likeness”

to Western concert music.9
Playing Time, Feeling Time
The musicians who participated in this study often singled out Monk’s
approach to the temporal aspects of playing jazz as a fundamental, defin-
ing aspect of his musicianship. In particular, Ben Riley and T. S. Monk,
both drummers who played with him at one time and who now make his
music a significant part of their performance repertory (Riley with the
collective Sphere and T. S. Monk as the leader of his own sextet), re-
marked 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
playing alone, particularly in a quartet or trio context. This surprising
juxtaposition of experiences in hearing Monk points to the subtle
complexity of his approach to rhythm and meter.
In order to investigate how musicians’ descriptions of Monk’s ap-
proach to time can function as the starting point for some musical analy-
sis, 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 addi-
tion 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.”11 The term
often works as another way of talking about the creation of a “groove”
in collectively improvised music making. The importance of a musician’s
feeling for time is underscored in the drummer Ralph Peterson’s descrip-
tion of “how important it is—when you’re playing a solo—rhythmically
what the notes say. [It’s] almost as important, if not as important, as the
notes themselves, because if you miss a note and the rhythm is logical,
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
Given the potential for bad time to do “irreparable damage” to a
performance, it is not surprising that musicians would hold in particular
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 musi-
cian’s feeling for time is dialogic. The pianist Laurent De Wilde describes
a good rhythm section making time as “[a] truly mystical and communal
experience . . . an act of love as opposed to masturbation.”13 Because it
is central to the fundamentally interactive process of establishing and
maintaining a groove, good time involves both a solid, unwavering
sense of tempo and a sensitivity to and ability to interact with band-
mates’ collective approach to phrasing within a given tempo.
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-
standing of their expressive potentials. He was particularly impressed
with Monk’s ability to play “in between all of the tempos,” that is, not
to play everything in one of three generic tempos—fast, medium, and
slow.14 As Riley put it, playing a piece at many different tempos “makes
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.”15 In Riley’s opinion, this sense of rhythm, which is often
aligned with physical, intuitive, or nonintellectual musicality, is actually
a sign of Monk’s great intellectual achievement as a musician, because
it allowed him to understand the music better and thus take the perfor-
mance to another level with great regularity. This would seem less strik-
ing (and less ironic) were it not for the historically racial mapping of the
mind-body distinction.
Interestingly enough, Riley’s assertion that Monk played his own
compositions in a variety of tempos sits uncomfortably with De Wilde’s
claim that “Monk’s compositions have one specific tempo, sometimes
two, but they’re always the same.”16 De Wilde makes the unassailable
point that not Monk, but others, following Miles Davis’s lead, have
chosen a wide variety of tempos for works like “ ’Round Midnight” or
“Well, You Needn’t.” However, it does not necessarily follow that Monk
himself conceived his pieces as having one and only one proper tempo,
as De Wilde suggests. De Wilde looks to the recorded evidence for con-
firmation of his theory, and having checked each of Monk’s recorded
versions of a particular tune with a metronome, he determines that
“[a]side from a few rare exceptions, the tempo doesn’t budge a hair.
[Monk] hears his compositions at one tempo, just like there’s usually
only one way to play a certain chord behind the melody. This is almost
unheard-of in jazz—the ultimate protean form.”17
Although it is possible to take issue with De Wilde’s dismissal of

tempo variations in Monk’s recordings of “I Mean You,” for example, as
insignificant, to some extent his point remains valid.18 There are pieces,
such as “ ’Round Midnight,” that Monk recorded regularly over the
course of his career, and at a similar tempo each time. The contradiction
between Riley’s and De Wilde’s impressions of tempo in Monk’s perfor-
mances requires an explanation that encompasses both experiences.
This may be an object lesson in the result of a music history such as
De Wilde’s that relies exclusively on recordings.19 Despite the fact that
Monk recorded certain tunes repeatedly—more so perhaps than any of
his contemporaries—the recorded versions of a tune comprise only a
very small sample of the number of times he performed it. In this sense
someone like Riley, who played with Monk over the course of years,
clearly has a more reliable position from which to say how Monk played
his own pieces. He provides an otherwise unattainable glimpse of how
Monk played, because he heard Monk more often than even the most
avid fan, and he was inside the performances—not just hearing the
tempo, but playing in it. He would have felt even the smallest variations
in tempo, ones that might seem insignificant to an audience, because
they affected the way he played a piece. Nonetheless, the fact that Monk
chose to record many of his compositions at the same tempos multiple
times cannot be ignored. These recordings become documents and take
on importance, however problematic, by virtue of their permanence.20
Jed Rasula, drawing on Michel de Certeau’s compelling image of
the many murmuring voices submerged in the historical record, has sug-
gested that jazz recordings present a challenge to the historian’s claim to
authority. The attempt to write a history of jazz “will find that history al-
ready composed, and made audible, in recordings.”21 Rasula argues that
jazz scholars “have always used jazz records as primary sources, while pre-
tending that what they are really talking about is something else, some
putative essence of a ‘living tradition’ that cannot be ‘captured’ by the
blatant artifice of technology.” This much is undeniably true, and his
exhortation is well taken that as historians we can do better than to
force our interpretations of either an entropic or an evolutionary meta-
narrative onto the music.22 His answer to this conundrum—that we
should dedicate more time to the recordings in their own right—needs
qualification. I propose working toward an understanding of the record-
ings as a central aspect of the lives of jazz musicians and an important
part, though by no means the only one, of the durability of the music
through time, while recognizing that, indeed, there is a living tradition,
and that it is not captured entirely in the medium of recordings. Rather
than think of the recordings as constituting a history by themselves, I
would contend that histories emerge from recordings (among other

sources) through dialogic listening.
Beyond the difference in the performances that constitute Monk’s
music for Riley and De Wilde, the difference in their interpretations of
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 compo-
sitions 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
dynamic and open ended:
We make arrangements up as they go along, a lot of times. One guy de-

cides, “Uh oh, let me try this,” and the other two of us say, “Oh, okay,
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 listen-
ing 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
De Wilde also uses his description of Monk’s approach to tempo to

justify a performance style, but his is based on an understanding of Monk’s
compositions as musical “works,” concretized vehicles for expression,
much more akin to the way one might approach a classical piece. For ex-
ample, De Wilde credits the performances on That’s the Way I Feel Now,
a tribute album of Monk pieces played by jazz and rock musicians that
was recorded shortly after Monk’s death, as making Monk’s music sound
“amazingly fresh as ever” and says that the music will continue to do so
“ten centuries from now played on instruments you can hardly imagine
. . . as long as [the pieces are] played exactly as he wrote [them].”24
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 Ri-
ley, 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
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 car-
pet, man.” All of a sudden it was another rhythmic center that was com-
ing 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 remem-
ber, 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 Thelo-
nious 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 instru-
ment, in relation to the other instruments, as opposed to simply laying
down a rhythmic foundation for everybody.25
The vehemence of this statement is striking, even considering that T. S.

Monk is a man who speaks in superlatives, particularly about playing
with his father. Even more striking was the sense of awe in his voice and
facial expression when he described the experience of playing with
Monk. He was genuinely surprised by the power of Monk’s rhythmic sen-
sibility, his time feeling, to direct the flow of a performance.
This aspect of Monk’s feeling for time, like the question of his ap-
proach to tempos and the ludic side of his playing, is very difficult to ap-
preciate fully in the context of a musicology based predominantly on
recordings. The experience of time is different for musicians participat-
ing in its creation than for a listener, particularly a listener who is not
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.
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
sound like chaos, you know, sound like avant-garde somethin’-or-other.
You know, I produce a lot of records, so, in other words, I’m in
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 re-
quired solid, groove-oriented playing from the bassist and drummer is
completely borne out by his recordings. Though, as T. S. Monk notes,
playing with Monk may have opened up new melodic, “conversational”
opportunities for drummers, the conversation always took place within
the framework of a solid rhythmic groove. As the testimony of musicians
who played with Monk shows, however, recordings alone are not suffi-
cient for understanding how that groove was created. Sickler does not,
of course, suggest that Monk did not or could not play in a way that
swung. Rather, he hears Monk’s rhythmic phrasing as complicating a
sense of time created by the bass and drums. Underlying this may be an
unspoken explanation of why Monk chose “inside,” bebop-oriented
rhythm players for his quartets, despite the reproaches critics aimed at
him in the late 1960s and 1970s for not playing with more avant-garde
musicians. Regardless of exactly how the groove arose in Monk’s record-
ings, it is clearly the time feeling he wanted. Since a groove ultimately
depends on interaction, as strong as Monk’s time may have been, he
needed to play with musicians who were sensitive to his particular time-
feel and could add their own voices to create a whole groove greater
than the sum of its parts.28
Although a recording may not shed much light on the process
through which a performance develops a groove, it may provide at
least a document of the sort of rhythmic vitality Monk nurtured in his
quartets. The performance of “Eronel” on Monk’s Columbia recording
Criss Cross from 1963 shows the exemplary sound of his working band,
with Charlie Rouse (tenor sax), John Ore (bass), and Frankie Dunlop
(drums).29 Particularly noteworthy in this recording is the solidity with
which Monk sets a strong backseat four-four feel in the three-measure
solo introduction. This sense of a rhythmic feel pervades the rest of the
performance as well, with all the musicians participating in the mainte-
nance 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-
doubtedly so; but in the context of the performance as an event, Monk
may well have been responsible for initiating the time-feel. Given T. S.
Monk’s and Ben Riley’s descriptions of playing with Monk, such a per-
spective is likely the best. This is not intended to dismiss the importance
of Ore and Dunlop’s part in sustaining the groove. Rather, it is meant as
a reminder of the dialogic quality of Monk’s playing. The extent to
which Monk’s comping and soloing function along with the bass and
drums in projecting a sense of time should be seen as a prime example
of the functioning of call-and-response (which Floyd has described as
the trope of tropes in African American music) in Monk’s approach to
music making.
Developmental Logic, Musical Unity, Call-and-Response,

and Riff-Based Playing in Monk’s Music
While the issues of time in Monk’s playing (and the issue of humor,
which I will address later) have not been treated extensively by analysts
working within the paradigm of classical music theory, musicians who
participated in this study also noted aspects of Monk’s playing that are
part of more common music-analytical tropes, most importantly the in-
terconnected ideas of developmental logic and musical unity. These two
formal issues often occur together (as when Monk bases a performance
on the coherent development of motives derived from the head of the
piece he is playing), but not always.
Historically the discussion of development and unity in jazz perfor-
mances has taken place entirely in the context of a hegemony of Euro-
centric musical values. It has involved the use of a language developed
originally for European classical music, taking the Beethovenian model
of musical composition as paradigmatic. As such, the discussion has
largely ignored the importance to jazz musicians of a vernacular tradition
of logical musical construction through call-and-response chains and the
unifying quality of riff-based composition and performance. Entering
into a discussion of development, logic, and motivic unity in the work
of a jazz musician involves explicitly or implicitly interacting with a dis-
course (in the Foucaultian sense) that sits at the heart of the negotia-
tions of power in musicology over at least the past half century. This
discourse involves what qualifies as “serious” or “intellectual”—in a

word, worthwhile—in music. Because this discourse relies on the taken-
for-granted quality of hegemony, I will first explain the implications of
talking about developmental logic in Monk’s music before considering
how musicians described it and finally presenting some musical examples.
There was a moment, sometime between the mid-1950s and early
1960s, when jazz discourse, which had previously been the purview of
relatively informal media—conversation, liner notes, and record reviews
—began, in some instances, to take on more formal characteristics. John
Gennari chronicles this metamorphosis in “Jazz Criticism: Its Develop-
ment and Ideologies,” pointing especially to Martin Williams, Gunther
Schuller, and André Hodeir as early proponents of what has become
academic “jazz studies.”30 In particular he notes the attention Williams
and Hodeir, who were associated with the so-called new criticism, paid
to formal analysis of the music. The project of this emerging jazz schol-
arly tradition was to explore how exemplary pieces of jazz could be heard
as coherent products of some musical intellect. The model of coherence
in music to which they looked was the dominant post-Beethovenian
one, which equates development logic and motivic unity with intellec-
tual depth and, more important, all other kinds of musical structuring
processes with intellectual poverty.31
It should be clear that I address developmental logic in Monk’s
music not as the only, nor even as the most important, kind of “sense-
making”32 it participates in, but as one mode of musical thinking among
many. Moreover, while I agree with musicians and writers who see this
as distinguishing Monk from many other jazz musicians, I do not thereby
intend to place him above those others in an aesthetic hierarchy of
value. I want to highlight the ways in which the development and unity
in Monk’s solos is based in a distinctly African American musicality that
participates in both vernacular and modernist aesthetic canons. This is
true in the sense both that development and unity in Monk’s perfor-
mances are a result of the centrality of call-and-response troping and
riff-based melodic thinking, and that they are inherently part of the
way Monk interacted with his sidemen to create effective performances,
effectively taking the music to the next level.
Most important, I am interested in the way large-scale thinking in
Monk’s music, of which development and motivic unity are two exam-
ples, has participated in the kinds of sense that have been made of it.
This is a point in which Veit Erlmann’s description of a “black ecumene”
—that is, the African diaspora as a “community of style,” rather than a
naturalized, organic entity—can be helpful. Erlmann argues that black-
ness in music is created not on the semantic level, on the level of spe-
cific musical gestures, but on the metacommunicative level.33 Applica-

tion of his argument to the case in question would suggest an analysis in
which the specific formal structures of motivic unity and development
would be less relevant to the performance of race than would be the
kinds of communicative processes in which those formal properties play
out. This is extremely helpful in moving beyond an essentialist view of
race in music. It is further supported by Travis Jackson’s formulation of a
“blues aesthetic” in that he lists precisely these larger-scale aspects of
metacommunication as jazz musicians’ “normative views of jazz perfor-
mance.”34 Jackson explicates a significant aspect of this process that re-
mains largely unexplored in Erlmann’s work: that the metacommunica-
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,
sounds, licks, approaches to rhythm, and so on which can be heard as
“black” because of historically contingent processes that musicians can
engage in metacommunicative practices such as signifyin(g), and
thereby perform race.35
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
Michael Weiss. Weiss noted it as an aspect of correspondence between
Monk’s and Ellington’s soloing, along with harmonic language, use of
space, and use of the whole range of the piano.36 Drew noted the impor-
tance of motivic elaboration in his own solos as the shared legacy of his
interest in Monk and in classical music. Hersch described his sustained
interest in Monk’s music as coming from his general love of “develop-
mental music: you know, music that’s narrative, whether it’s Beethoven
or Brahms or neoclassic Stravinsky. . . . I think the best jazz, to me, still
is musical storytelling in real time, you know, using the subject at hand,
the specifics of the piece.”37 This metaphor of storytelling as a specific
type of saying something in a jazz performance surfaces repeatedly in
Paul Berliner’s discussion of how jazz musicians create meaning in solos,
particularly how they shape long solos.
“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
changes.38 It shows Monk’s engagement with the African American tra-

dition of riff-based composition, his striking integration of that aesthetic
with a penchant for abstraction and understatement that is a significant
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-
action and collaboration. Each musician had a well-developed sound by
then, and the significant differences between the three soloists made for
stylistically varied performances. Indeed, the players were so incompati-
ble that Davis asked Monk not to accompany him.39
Monk takes the third solo, after Davis and Jackson. He approaches
each of his nine choruses as a bounded unit that together build a larger
musical edifice—bricks in a wall, so to speak. Monk begins each chorus
with a characteristic riff, distinguished by its texture and rhythm, and
moves through the chorus with that musical idea, generally foreshadow-
ing in the final measures of each the following chorus’s riff. This can be
heard as a call-and-response chain: each chorus is heard as a call that is
answered by the following chorus, which in turn becomes another call.
He arranges these ideas in a clear pattern that creates a double-humped
structure to the solo, one line climaxing in the fourth chorus and the
other in the eighth.40
The first line of development involves the gradual addition of
pitches in tandem with a subdivision of rhythmic values. In the first cho-
rus Monk focuses on the interval of an open fourth, with an eighth-note
riff. He then uses triplet eighth notes in the second chorus, filling in the
harmony with an arpeggiation. In the second chorus, Monk derives a
reference to his composition “Misterioso”—a broken-sixth pattern—
from the end of the triplet riff with which he is working. The broken
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-
rus, a climactic “shout”: close-voiced block chord riffs reminiscent of
big-band arrangements. Here Monk broadens the rhythmic profile, using
longer note values to give a sense of arrival to the climactic point.
The sense of climax in this chorus depends in large part on the in-
creased volume and intensity Monk brings to the chorus. This is subtly
reinforced by Clarke and Heath’s accompaniment. Both clearly recog-
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
building sense of excitement. With Monk’s creation of a sense of climax
in the fourth chorus, Clarke and Heath both play somewhat louder, and
Heath takes the energy up a notch further by emphasizing ringing lower
pitches, those in which the string bass’s presence is fullest. The strategies
the three musicians use to build excitement serve the dual ends of bring-
ing out the individual musicians’ sounds while enabling them to commu-
nicate 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 group-
ings 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 en-
tire 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 particu-
larly the difference in the materials Monk used to fill out that form from
those used by his contemporaries. Describing the ways Monk’s influence
has shown up in the following generations, Michael Weiss first said that
Monk’s use of thematic material from the head in his accompaniment
and soloing was the most striking, singular thing that people had heard
and learned from. Fred Hersch added to this the idea that the experien-
tial 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
Virtually any Monk tune could serve as an example of Hersch’s

point that Monk composed with a limited set of resources in any given
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 ma-
terials that sound immediately rifflike, his approach to musical process
shows an affinity for the riff-based music of his youth.
“I Mean You”
In the blues Monk found a strong precedent for motivic unity and econ-
omy. Traditional blues songs are commonly riff based, composed from a
single melodic idea, though not always from such minuscule musical
kernels as Monk’s. Monk brought this same aesthetic to his compositions
in thirty-two-bar popular song forms as well. For these the precedent was
not for economy, but for long, lyrical melodies. Nonetheless Monk often
infuses the form with a distinctive, riff-based motivic conception, creat-
ing short pieces that work with a single musical idea. “I Mean You” pro-
vides an excellent glimpse of how Monk accomplishes this. The head is
forty measures long, divided into a four-measure intro, a thirty-two-
measure chorus, and a four-measure coda. At the beginning of the first

A section, Monk presents a riff from which he then draws most of the
melodic material for the rest of the piece through playful repetition and
revision. Through this use of a single motivic riff with numerous permu-
tations, Monk imbues the piece with a sense of call-and-response troping.
The effect of this piece, like that of all AABA song forms, is that of
a circular path: a departure and return, with the strongest sense of clo-
sure reserved for the end of the final A section. What sets this piece, like
many of Monk’s songs, apart from the standard repertory is that Monk
manages to create a sense of contrast in the bridge using riffs derived mo-
tivically from the A section. He accomplishes this by means of harmonic
contrast, textural changes, and changing rhythmic feels, in addition to
melodic transformations.
Monk surrounds this song form with a four-measure statement that
serves as introduction, transition, and coda. In a way, this short state-
ment is the most intriguing part of the entire tune, because its relation-
ship to the head cannot be explained by traditional tonal theory, even
taking into account common jazz extensions of tonality. Moreover, it
presents motivic material that is only very distantly related, if at all, to
the riffs that suffuse the head proper, yet it sets up another level, a juxta-
position of E-flat dominant seventh and F, on which the piece may be
heard as unified. The introduction begins with an E-flat dominant sev-
enth riff emphasizing the root, fifth, and flat seventh. This motive is im-
mediately repeated, shifted back a half beat, and foreshortened by one
beat, creating a new rhythmic profile. The only notable relationship be-
tween 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 pro-
ject a sense of an E-flat seventh chord, with no suggestion of a move to
F. When F comes as the tonic at the beginning of the A section, it is not
so much a consequence of what preceded it (as it might sound were it
prepared by a progression from its dominant), but as a departure, a new
starting point, shifted a step up. The effect is even more surprising when
this material is used as a coda. Far from reinforcing the sense of closure
on tonic, as is typical for a coda, ending on an E-flat seventh chord un-
dercuts the tonic, suggesting either some further movement—that is,
pointing forward in time—or simply reveling in the dissonant, unexpected
sound of the E-flat seventh chord in the context of a fairly straightforward
F tonality. This second interpretation gains credence from the fact that
the juxtaposition of the E-flat seventh chord with the F chord also oc-
curs 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
harmonize an F in the melody. This E-flat seventh chord is followed by

another unmediated move back to F two measures later, reinforcing the
centrality of the juxtaposition.
Monk’s use of motives from the head in his soloing and accompani-
ment is one of the most frequently noted aspects of his personal style
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
with John Coltrane in 1957.43 These examples show Monk working at
something much like the synthetic “Afro-modernism” Baker theorized,
creating a kind of unification of the piece as a set of abstract musical
relationships and at the same time as a way of furthering the dynamic
interactivity of the dialogic improvisational performance context.
In both of these performances of “I Mean You,” Monk takes the
second solo, following Jackson and Coltrane, respectively—each a musi-
cian 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 transi-
tions Monk then begins to work within his own sound world, introduc-
ing materials drawn from the head. In the recording with Coltrane,
Monk then uses an extended solo as an opportunity to intertwine mate-
rials from the head with new materials handled motivically. In the ear-
lier 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 perfor-
mance 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.
This aspect of Monk’s playing is compelling precisely because of
his sensitivity to the objective potential of the pieces he composed as
vehicles for improvisation and his sensitivity to and ability to work cre-
atively with the other musicians in his ensembles to actualize that po-
tential. This might seem ironic, given Miles Davis’s famous objection to
Monk’s comping style, alluded to earlier, but it is strongly supported by
the loyalty of musicians in Monk’s working quartets of the late 1950s
and 1960s. If Davis found Monk a difficult accompanist, clearly Charlie
Rouse found him sympathetic. This aspect of Monk’s playing, and the
strong differences in musicians’ comfort playing with him, provides an
interesting extension to Jackson’s formulation of jazz musicians’ “norma-
tive values” in that it clearly demonstrates that the satisfaction of a

value such as “creating music that is ‘open enough’ to allow other musi-
cians 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 ante-
rior to performance. In this case it need not be contradictory to speak of
a synthetic Afro-modernism and at the same time to note that this syn-
thesis functions in the intersections between the vernacular and mod-
ernism: the aesthetics in the abstract can be seen as distinct, yet satisfied
by the same musical sounds in Monk’s performances. Thus a listener
with little or no knowledge of or appreciation for traditional African
American aesthetic concerns can listen to Monk and appreciate him
entirely as a musician working with the same issues as did modernists
from the classical music world and vice versa.
Monk and Lightness
The expression of a ludic quality described variously as play, fun, humor,

or joyfulness is another commonly cited characteristic of Monk’s music.
Critics suggested this sort of hearing as early as the late 1940s, as can
be seen in Paul Bacon’s “High Priest of Be-Bop,” one of the first articles
published about Monk in the jazz press.45 Since then Monk’s playfulness
has been noted in liner notes and articles, becoming a standard item of
discourse. Nevertheless, it remains generally unexamined. Comments
regarding the ludic in Monk’s music also surfaced regularly in interviews
for this article. Despite the frequency with which this discourse appears,
it bears further consideration in order better to understand the issue and
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 success-
fully. “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
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 play-
ing itself, as well as ascribing it to him as a personality characteristic;
however, unlike many commentators, he provides a suggestion of what
makes the music fun, citing the subtleties of Monk’s phrasing. Hearing
the humor in Monk’s music as Riley does requires moving beyond a focus
on Monk’s idiosyncratic melodic and harmonic language to hear how he
places notes in time, as can be seen in Riley’s criticism of others for get-
ting everything correct in their interpretations of Monk “notewise and
whatnot,” yet still falling short of demonstrating an understanding of
the music, at least in Riley’s estimation.
Lacy highlighted a more general sort of humor that pervaded his
interactions with Monk, expanding on a description of Monk as “a very
humorous person.” Lacy recalled learning about Monk’s sense of humor
from spending time in his company as a young musician:
SL: I used to go [to Monk’s house] almost every day and soak it up, really.
Hang out with him. Take a walk. Listen to his little, you know, asides and
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
These remarks focus attention on a very light-hearted, ludic humor,

situating Monk’s jokes within a broader category of play. Moreover, they
link Monk’s music with his penchant for playing with words and ideas
and allow Lacy to see Monk’s much-noted sartorial style as an expression
of this same playfulness.
Lacy directs us to consider two kinds of playful humor as character-
istically Monkish, both hinging on doubleness: first, the limited aspect of
double meaning—punning and irony—and second, the more expansive
aspect of reinterpretation or multiple experience of the mundane. Lacy
tells with pleasure of Monk impressing on him the importance of taking
the music very seriously by telling him, “You got to dig it to dig it, you
dig it?”49 Here a simple message is elaborated with the playfulness, as well
as aesthetic appeal, of the repeated words “dig it.” Another excellent ex-
ample 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 expe-
rience 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
important, as is his delight in playing with double meaning, what Henry
Louis Gates describes as “repetition with a signal difference” in African
American linguistic traditions: in a word, signifyin(g).50
Like Lacy, Roswell Rudd commented on the importance of playful-
ness, if not humor, in Monk’s music. He noted a doubleness in Monk’s
playing and composing, which he described in terms of a number of binary
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 mu-
tually 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 hu-
morous 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 musi-
cal trajectory (harmonic, melodic, rhythmic, etc.), and the introduction
of some unexpected break with that expectation through musical non
sequitur, or a shift that requires reinterpretation of the original material.

What I refer to as externally referential playfulness, on the other hand,
involves some kind of intertextual or, more precisely, intermusical signi-
fication in which the signified material is framed in such a way as to re-
quire a doubled interpretation.53 In practice, a bit of musical fun may in-
volve both of these two processes; nonetheless, there is some value in
maintaining the distinction. It should be noted that both these processes
are strongly reminiscent of the rhetorical strategies of signifyin(g) in
African American verbal arts.
Considering these qualities on the basis of recordings alone is prob-
lematic because the extramusical cues they offer are extremely limited.
Listener’s experiences have shown that many of the cues needed to in-
terpret 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
lies in the listener’s involvement with the live performance, including
the ability to see the gamut of nonmusical interaction between the musi-
cians. Performers give visual cues in order to allow each other and the
audience to interpret their performances, in much the same way people
generally provide such cues in everyday conversation. A musician’s
posture, style of movement, and facial expressions may all be involved
in broadcasting his or her intentions regarding a particular musical ges-
ture.54 Because recordings lack this context, they tend to seem less hu-
morous and more affectively neutral than live performances.
In Monk’s case the opportunity to see his style of interaction in a
live performance is limited to the footage currently available on video.
This includes material excerpted from Columbia Records’ archive for
the film Straight, No Chaser; the documentary Thelonious Monk: Ameri-
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
investigate any issues of Monk’s performance style, but at a minimum
they allow a glimpse and can be considered as admittedly limited docu-
ments. 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.
Cultural Politics of the Ludic

Relatively few musicologists dealing with the Western classical tradition
have written about the ludic aspects of music. This seems to be partially
a result of the investment modernist aesthetics has placed in music as a
serious, intellectual endeavor and a corresponding discomfort with hu-
mor and playfulness, both of which are seen as debased modes of expres-
sion. 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
not been in a position to address humor and playfulness to a significant
extent.
In the case of jazz, and perhaps especially Monk’s music, an added
problem of cultural politics attends the scholarly investigation of musical
humor that stems from jazz’s constant negotiation of a space within the
dualistic oppositions of popular and classical music, of modernism and
vernacular expression. This duality must be viewed through the filters
of race and class, not simply in formal musical terms, if it is to be under-
stood. Jazz scholars have been in the uncomfortable position of having
to justify their subject to an academic community that has been deeply
invested in a separation between valorized “art” and denigrated “enter-
tainment.”56 As a result they have felt a very real need to argue for the
seriousness and intellectual rigor of jazz and to demonstrate the ways it
masterfully satisfies a classical aesthetic. Scott DeVeaux eloquently ar-
gues that the much-needed scholarly construction of the jazz tradition
“[a]s an artistic heritage to be held up as an exemplar of American or
African-American culture” has a potentially limiting effect on the possi-
ble historical narratives with which it can be told.57 He is particularly
concerned that this project reifies the jazz tradition as stable and unified,
and thus smoothes over or omits altogether those details of historical
particularity that do not fit what he calls the “romantic” narrative. I
would argue that it also leads scholars to pay insufficient attention to
aspects of the music that are less valued within the modernist aesthetic,
including, among others, playfulness. This is further complicated by the
fact that racial stereotypes inflect the meaning of these musical and aes-
thetic issues. The history of portraying African American men as lacking
seriousness—as lazy and comical buffoons—in literature and the media
goes back well into the nineteenth century. This typology was important
in the construction of race in vaudeville acts and made its way into
twentieth-century cinema in the archetypal figure of Stepin Fetchit.58
While artists such as Richard Pryor have used this comedic tradition as
a position from which to critique the dominant culture, it remains
problematic.
The association of humor and play with childhood adds a layer to
the issues involved in considering Monk’s use of these types of musical
expression. The tradition of seeing African American men as incapable
of serious intellectual attainment has been coupled with white America’s

troubled stance toward their masculinity more generally. Toni Morrison
captures this evocatively in her description of Cholly Breedlove in The
Bluest Eye. In her account of Breedlove’s sexualized degradation at the
hands of a white southern power structure and his subsequent personal
disintegration, she powerfully portrays whites’ fascination with black
men’s physical manhood and concomitant lack of access to social and
cultural masculinity, as well as the potential consequences of this rela-
tionship.59 Ralph Ellison considers similar issues in Invisible Man.60 In a
less extreme way, jazz critics in the 1950s and 1960s often interpreted
Monk through a similar lens, taking particular interest in his physical
transgressions of the dominant culture—odd clothing, hats, and sun-
glasses, along with unorthodox sleeping and eating schedules—and using
these and his gruff style of interaction to construct him as a “man-child.”
As early as 1949 Paul Bacon described him as “unmalleable, exasperat-
ing, sometimes perverse to the point of justifiable homicide,” explaining
that Monk sees things “very much in the manner of a child.”61 In a later
article Lewis Lapham reiterated the contention that Monk was “an emo-
tional and intuitive man, possessing a child’s vision of the world.”62
Despite the patently racist associations connecting African Ameri-
can men with humor and fun and thereby with childishness, as well as
the implicitly Eurocentric logic historically requiring that jazz be justified
in terms set by classical music aesthetics in order to be accepted into the
academy, a complete understanding of Monk’s music requires hearing
the playful side of his expressive palette. This does not mean accepting
the baggage that comes with it, however. Indeed, in an interview for this
project Fred Hersch specifically singled this out as a mistake, adamantly
saying that he always heard Monk’s music as playful, but at the same
time, “of course, very profound.” When I asked him if these were not
conflicting descriptions, he responded, “No, no, no. Fun, you know, is
serious. You know, just because something is fun—I know just how hard
he worked on his themes and the effort that he put into doing things just
so, so that it sounded effortless, or sounded natural, or sounded easy, but
in fact, it wasn’t.”63
“Monk Created a World”
As writers who have spent time working ethnographically within the

jazz community, including Ingrid Monson, Paul Berliner, and Travis
Jackson, have all found, jazz musicians use metaphors of communication,
especially that of developing one’s own voice, to describe their aesthetic
goals at every level of achievement. This governing metaphor suggests
an understanding of a shared space within which a performer can use his

or her voice and, one hopes, be heard. In an interview for this project,
Joe Lovano, like many other musicians, referred to Monk as having a
unique voice. He described being drawn as a teenager to Monk’s playing
because he could recognize this voice and hear in it what he describes as
Monk’s musical “personality.” Lovano found this particularly interesting
because as a horn player he had already discovered, from listening to the
stars of the day, the individualized sounds that are possible on saxophone,
but this helped him hear them in other instruments as well.64
In addition to this communicative metaphor, a spatial metaphor
that describes Monk’s music as its own world surfaced in some musicians’
descriptions. This is of interest because it is not a commonplace; it sets
Monk apart from other musicians. He has not merely created an individ-
ual voice, he has built a separate whole space for discourse. Entering into
conversation within this world is seen as requiring a major effort beyond
that needed to converse within the broader jazz world. The alto saxo-
phonist Bob Porcelli first suggested this metaphor in an interview. He
was talking about his dissatisfaction with interpretations of Monk’s mu-
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 an-
other 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 record-
ing of “Blue Monk” with Art Blakey and Percy Heath from the 1954
Prestige recording Thelonious Monk.67 At just over seven and a half min-
utes, 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
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, walk-
ing character of the scalar riff from which the head is built. Monk’s ap-
proach to realizing the head emphasizes the melody’s riff-based structure,
generally leaving the accompaniment to Heath and Blakey. Monk’s solo
is remarkable: it stretches out to fourteen choruses, each of which uses
short, rifflike motives that give the sense that each chorus is a new head.
While Monk’s approach to form and the restraint he uses in choos-
ing 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
chorus. The second is strongly reminiscent of “Bolivar Ba-Lues Are” (Ex.
1) and the third is the head of “Blues Five Spot” (Ex. 2). Both of these
tunes Monk only recorded later (“Bolivar” in 1956 as part of the Brilliant
Corners album, and “Blues Five Spot” in 1958 in live performance at the
Five Spot nightclub), and so may indeed not be so much references as
newly composed lines that Monk liked, kept, and later used as heads per
se, each with its own name.68 Later, in mm. 9–12 of his ninth solo cho-
rus, Monk quotes the broken-sixth pattern from “Misterioso,” a blues he
had recorded some years earlier for Blue Note.69 Regardless of whether
he is referencing previously composed tunes or composing new ones in
this performance, the listener’s impression is that Monk is working in his
own sound world, creating a large intermusical context in which to hear
all his blues performances as part of a single pursuit of that form’s mean-
ing and musical possibility.
Monk brings this approach to intermusical reference to performances
of other pieces as well, particularly his own compositions in standard
song forms. This is apparent in live recordings, such as the one with
John Coltrane discussed earlier. In the first cut, “Trinkle Tinkle,” Monk
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 self-
contained 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.
− ²Ł − Ł ¦ Ł ý Ł Ł Ł Ł ð
Š − 00 ½ ¼ ¹ Ł ŁŁ ŁŁ − Ł Ł Ł ý ¦ Ł Ł Ł Ł −ð ¹ ŁŁ ŁŁ ŁŁ ŁŁ Ł Ł Ł −Ł ðý
Ł Ł
! ¦ ŁŁ ýý
Ý −− 0 ÿ ÿ ÿ ÿ ½ ¹− Łý
0
Example 1. “Blue Monk,” from Thelonious Monk, Thelonious Monk. Monk’s solo, chorus 2, mm. 1–4.
3 3 3 3 3
− Ł Ł ¦Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł
Š − Ł Ł −Ł Ł ¦ Ł −Ł Ł ¦ Ł −Ł Ł ¦ Ł −Ł Ł ¦ Ł −Ł Ł ¼ Ł ¼
3 3 3 3 3
!
Ý −− ÿ ÿ
3 3 3 3 3 3
−
Š − Ł Ł −Ł Ł ¦ Ł −Ł Ł ¦ Ł −Ł Ł ¦ Ł −Ł Ł ¦ Ł −Ł Ł ¼
ÿ
!
Ý −− ÿ ¼ Ł Ł Ł Ł
Example 2. “Blue Monk,” from Thelonious Monk, Thelonious Monk. Monk’s solo, chorus 3, mm.
1–4.
That such a hearing is facilitated by the breadth of experience of Monk’s

music made possible by our position in time—listening to a collection of
recordings long after their creation—should not be dismissed. This view
can introduce misinterpretations, or at least different interpretations
than one might have made hearing this music as it was performed for the
first time, but it is the view from which a legacy is constructed, and as
such it must be recognized as significant.
Hearing: Production, Consumption, and Making Monk

Historical
None of the descriptions of Monk and his music that came up in inter-
views for this project amount to a history, not even taken together; nor
do they, by themselves, constitute Monk’s legacy—that is, his presence
in the tradition as a figure with some current relevance. Neither, how-
ever, I would argue, do the recordings constitute either a history or a
legacy. The two elements, metamusical discourse and the durable exis-
tence of the music, in dialogue with one another are the basis of both a
legacy and a history. The discursive materials—the stories, analyses, and
shards of memories about Monk and his music—are never independent
of what one might think of as the more stable features in this history, the
recordings and documents. But they are neither so unstable nor so de-
pendent on the recordings as common sense might suggest. All these dis-
cursive 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 repeti-
tions, 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 composi-
tions and in learning from his improvisations that jazz musicians (and
occasionally others) have most powerfully created a historical and con-
temporary figure out of him. This troping, versioning, or signifyin(g)
process is one of the most significant distinguishing aspects of jazz. Monk’s
compositions have a life as “musical works”—that is to say, as distinct
musical entities that are not entirely defined by one specific performance
—that allows them to retain the sense of Monk’s authorship in any per-
formance; but in the act of reinterpreting them, the musicians who en-
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 Western classical tradition would not. Though clearly productive,
this way of engaging Monk’s music strains the use of de Certeau’s termi-
nology in that its fit with the idea of “secondness” is uncomfortable.
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 mu-
sic 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 ac-
tivity 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
about self-creation. The topics musicians chose to discuss when I asked

them what was most significant about Monk’s music and what were his
lasting contributions to the tradition were precisely those aspects of his
music that are most easily translated into a general category: a particular
logic; a sense of humor; and an intimate understanding of the broad cat-
egory “time.” These, rather than the idiosyncrasies of his style in the
most recognizable sense—for instance, his particular use of whole-tone
saturated harmonic and melodic language, specific chord voicings, or
characteristic riffs—are precisely the facets the musicians with whom
I worked have been able to incorporate into their own playing while
minimizing the risk of sounding like “Monk clones.”
This element of self-production through a creative engagement
with the past is at the heart of my contention that jazz history emerges
in a dialogue between musicians and music. The notion that individuals,
through the practices of collective memory, are involved in the produc-
tion of history resonates with current historiographic theories, and I be-
lieve a sustained look at jazz as a locus for the practices of memory and
history will add something to that discussion. Michael Kammen, in a re-
view of Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen’s recent study of memory and
history in everyday American life, asks the question, “Is Everyone Really
a Historian?” His response is to remind us, in the face of a celebration
of a purported democratization of historical sensibility and the power of
“the people” in the making of history in contemporary America, that
“knowledge and understanding are simply not the same as nostalgia and
enthusiasm.”72 I think this distinction is important precisely because
there is something significant and extraordinary in jazz musicians’ in-
volvement in the construction of history. I would argue that the particu-
lar creative engagement with a past becoming a history distinguishes jazz
as an improvisational practice, and that jazz musicians have participated
as actors, agents, subjects, and narrators in their own history in both
musical practice and metamusical discourse.
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.:
Duke University Press, 1995), 117–33; Jed Rasula, “The Media of Memory: The Seduc-
tive 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,
Travis Jackson, and Ingrid Monson.
3. It is difficult to say with certainty exactly what Monk’s views on the issue of race
were. As with most aspects of his interiority, Monk was often cagey, even with close
friends, and apparently self-contradictory (consciously misleading, it seems) with jour-
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 François 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 prononcé une telle insanité: je connais les mots que j’emploie et je
n’emploie jamais celui-là]; François 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 Mu-
sic 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 Chernoff, 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”; Olly 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.
(Warren, Mich.: Harmonie Park Press, 1992), 327–38.
6. I am indebted to Guthrie Ramsey Jr. for suggesting, in a number of personal commu-
nications, the reconceptualization of modernism and the vernacular in relational terms.
7. Kyra Gaunt, “Translating Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop: The Musical Vernacular of
Black Girls’ Play,” in Language, Rhythm and Sound: Black Popular Cultures into the Twenty-
First Century, ed. Joseph K. Adjaye and Adrianne R. Andrews (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh
University Press, 1997), 147.
8. Houston A. Baker, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1987), xiv–xv.
9. Richard Fox uses the terms “hyper-difference” and “over-likeness”; “Passage from
India,” in Between Resistance and Revolution: Cultural Politics and Social Protest, ed.
Richard G. Fox and Orin Starn (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997),
67. This article deals with the transnational flow of cultural styles, particularly those
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”
“depends on a magnification of difference, a supposition that a cultural practice located
elsewhere cannot travel anywhere else.” By contrast, “over-likeness” occurs when the in-
formation saturation of contemporary life minimizes “real contrasts and . . . so [washes]
out difference that we see similarity when it is not there.” The one produces “an ex-
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
of Chicago Press, 1994), 151, 316, 318, 326, 337.
12. Quoted in Monson, Saying Something, 29.
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
meaning. In all such cases I have marked my changes in brackets.
15. Riley, interview.
16. De Wilde, 72.
17. De Wilde, 72.
18. See the variation in tempo on this piece as recorded by Blue Note, Riverside, and
Columbia. Perhaps most striking are the versions recorded with Gerry Mulligan, released
on the CD reissue of Mulligan Meets Monk (Thelonious Monk, tracks 2 and 3 on disc 6
of The Complete Riverside Recordings [Riverside RCD 022-2, 1986]. Take 4 (track 3) is
markedly slower than take 2 (track 2).
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 record-
ings. 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.
21. Rasula, 136.
22. Rasula, 135.

24. De Wilde, 71.
25. T. S. Monk, interview by author, South Orange, N.J., 13 Aug. 1999.
26. For an enlightening discussion of jazz performance as ritual, see Jackson, “Jazz Per-
formance as Ritual.”
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,” cred-
ited 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 change—
Suleiman 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, not-
ing Gunther Schuller’s role as “the most prolific and visible exponent of a larger intellec-
tual trend in jazz historiography that has left the evaluative standards of Western musical
scholarship relatively unquestioned.” Monson, Saying Something, 136.
32. I have borrowed this term from Joseph DuBiel, “Senses of Sensemaking,” Perspectives
of New Music 30, no. 1 (Winter 1992): 210–21.
33. Erlmann, 85–86, 87.
34. Jackson, “Jazz Performance as Ritual,” 35.
35. The literature on African American music abounds with examples of this process,
though seldom interpreted in this way. I would like to single out Paul Berliner’s and Kyra
Gaunt’s writings as exemplary in the ethnographic documentation of the individual ways
this information about the connection of sound and race is learned in African American
culture. See Berliner, Thinking in Jazz; Kyra Gaunt, “The Games That Black Girls Play:
Music, Body, and Soul” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1997).
36. Michael Weiss, interview by author, Brooklyn, N.Y., 5 Jan. 1999.
37. Fred Hersch, interview by author, New York, N.Y., 10 Aug. 1999.
38. Miles Davis, track 1 on Bags’ Groove (Prestige 7109).
39. This episode has been covered at length elsewhere. See Miles Davis, Miles: The
Autobiography, with Quincy Troupe (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 186–87;
and De Wilde, 124.
40. Permission to publish a transcription of this solo was denied by the Milt Jackson
estate.
41. Such an approach seems particularly problematic in light of the evidence provided
in Monson, Saying Something.
42. Hersch, interview.
43. Thelonious Monk, track 6 on disc 2 and track 4 on disc 4 of The Complete Blue
Note Recordings (Blue Note D 207178, 1994).
44. Jackson, “Jazz Performance as Ritual,” 35.
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 Kernfeld, vol. 2 (London:
Macmillan, 1988), 379.
48. Lacy, interview.
49. Lacy, interview.
50. Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary
Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), xxvi.
51. Roswell Rudd, interview by author, Accord, N.Y., 18 Aug. 1999.
52. Rudd, interview.
53. The term “intermusical” is taken from Monson, Saying Something, 8.
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 (Warner 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 Amer-
ican 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).
61. Bacon, 9–10.
62. Some musicians who knew Monk well use the description of him as possessed of a
childlike quality affectionately, to make the point that he was unencumbered by the triv-
ialities and superficialities of adult life; but there can be no mistaking the disdain in a
statement like Bacon’s for such a positive view of Monk as a child.
63. Hersch, interview.
64. Joe Lovano, interview by author, New York, N.Y., 8 June 1999.
65. Bob Porcelli, interview by author, New York, N.Y., 13 July 1999.
66. Porcelli, interview.
67. Thelonious Monk, track 1 on Thelonious Monk (Prestige OJCCD 010-2, 1982).
68. Thelonious Monk, track 3 on disc 2 and track 10 on disc 7 of The Complete River-
side Recordings (Riverside RCD 022-2, 1986). It is problematic to attach dates of compo-
sition to Monk’s pieces, as with most jazz compositions. In the absence of a scholarly
biography of Monk, the best one can do is to consider the date of first recording. The
trouble with this tactic, in the case of Monk’s music, is that he was actively composing
throughout the 1940s, before he began recording, making any chronology on the basis
of recordings of only limited value.
69. Monk, track 5 on disc 2 of The Complete Blue Note Recordings.
70. Monk, track 3 on disc 4 of The Complete Blue Note Recordings.
71. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1984), xii.
72. Michael Kammen, “Carl Becker Redivivus: Or, Is Everyone Really a Historian?”
History and Theory 39, no. 2 (May 2000): 233.

Hearing Monk - History, Memory and The Making of A Jazz Giant - by Gabriel Solis

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Hearing Monk: History, Memory,

and the Making of a “Jazz Giant”

Historical thinking has a prominent place in virtually every kind of

played with him or had known him personally. As I slowly developed a

static, essentialist notion of blackness in sociocultural life generally and in

Such an understanding provides a basis for exploring the interac-

American qualities of the music in the construction of an “over-likeness”

Playing Time, Feeling Time

Although it is possible to take issue with De Wilde’s dismissal of

would contend that histories emerge from recordings (among other

We make arrangements up as they go along, a lot of times. One guy de-

De Wilde also uses his description of Monk’s approach to tempo to

The vehemence of this statement is striking, even considering that T. S.

Developmental Logic, Musical Unity, Call-and-Response,

discourse involves what qualifies as “serious” or “intellectual”—in a

cific musical gestures, but on the metacommunicative level.33 Applica-

changes.38 It shows Monk’s engagement with the African American tra-

I think every Monk tune . . . has to be about something. It can be about a

Virtually any Monk tune could serve as an example of Hersch’s

measure chorus, and a four-measure coda. At the beginning of the first

harmonize an F in the melody. This E-flat seventh chord is followed by

tive values” in that it clearly demonstrates that the satisfaction of a

Monk and Lightness

The expression of a ludic quality described variously as play, fun, humor,

GS: And the music?

These remarks focus attention on a very light-hearted, ludic humor,

sequitur, or a shift that requires reinterpretation of the original material.

Cultural Politics of the Ludic

of serious intellectual attainment has been coupled with white America’s

“Monk Created a World”

As writers who have spent time working ethnographically within the

an understanding of a shared space within which a performer can use his

That such a hearing is facilitated by the breadth of experience of Monk’s

Hearing: Production, Consumption, and Making Monk

about self-creation. The topics musicians chose to discuss when I asked

22. Rasula, 135.

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