Jazz Is Freedom

Jazz Is Freedom
thebaffler.com

Just listen to his solos on "It Don't Mean a Thing," one of his recordings mentioned in the article (I hadn't heard it before):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pU-5pEpfmE

In this Ellington tune, the second half of the first phrase is a bunch of repeated b-flats. And you hear that same segment repeated three times before the tune is done. That's a lot of repeated b-flats.

Like any jazz player, Monk plays that tune at the beginning. Then it's the part of jazz where he's supposed to solo-- that is, show his prowess at improvising and creating new melodies, harmonies, and rhythms. To do so, he... just keeps hammering those fucking b-flats! I mean there are other little flourishes and ideas in there, but he always comes back to those incessant b-flats.

To top it all off, he gives both a four-bar intro and four-bar outro with... guess what? Yep, the b-flats. And he drags over them every time, giving each one plenty of time and volume. There may be other artists from the time who played slower than Monk, but Monk feels slower than any other jazz artist I know.

I think a lot of the praise his contemporaries heaped on him was revisionist. We know Miles Davis initially found his comping distracting. I'd bet there were a lot more who thought he was essentially "doing jazz wrong," but they couldn't easily dismiss him because he could obviously swing. Just listen to his surprise acceleration 19 seconds in to "Don't Mean a Thing" above. He doesn't even retain the "correct" number of measures for that part. Who else was doing stuff like that at the time? Art Tatum is the only one who comes to mind, and he was usually playing solo piano.

Edit: Oops, that's actually the record skipping! Hehe. But I also noticed that after a few choruses the repeated b-flats start to infect the other part of the phrase and take it over, so there's that. (And regardless, Art Tatum did actually do jump cuts like this in his own playing. There's even a recording of him playing a Chopin waltz where he takes that technique to an extreme.)

It's as if Monk was "wrong warping" through jazz. The only comparable thing I can think of was Debussy internalizing Wagner's mature operas and then writing What-Would-Wagner-Not-Do tone poems and character pieces. And unlike, say, a Brahms or a Coltrane-- whose styles typically featured long chains of continual development that left us with clear proof of their compositional work-- Debussy and Monk have a lot of output where there's often nearly nothing there.

It's very difficult to write like that without either falling into incoherence, or convincing your contemporaries that there's something wrong with you.

But then it's dangerous to try to point out exactly what Monk was doing wrong-- after all, one could end up accidentally revealing one's own confirmation biases and assumptions that hamper one's own creativity. Hence, the Diogenes comparison.