Thelonious Monk: Working-Class Artist-Hero

Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original
by Robin D. G. Kelley
Free Press
608 pages

Dallas Morning News
20 December 2009

Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original adds significantly to our understanding of jazz’s aesthetic complexities and its dynamic emotional force. Author Robin D. G. Kelley’s close attention to Monk’s personal history and music discredits the weak caricatures that color the pianist as an untutored, mystical loon.

Kelley is a distinguished professor of history at the University of Southern California. His previous works include Hammer and Hoe (1990) and Race Rebels (1994), exceptional historical studies of, respectively, American labor politics and African-American working class cultural politics. Kelley’s historical studies influence his presentation of Thelonious Monk as a working-class artist-hero.

Kelley traces the Monk family history from slavery to freedom in North Carolina and maps their northward migration to New York City. Born in Rocky Mount, N.C. on Oct. 10, 1917, Monk spent his life in one of Manhattan’s most culturally fertile neighborhoods, San Juan Hill. Composed of black, Latino, and Afro-Caribbean working-class families, the neighborhood offered young Monk a social life full of running buddies, pool, basketball and girls.

He began studying piano at 11, learning classical technique, but turned quickly to jazz. In the mid-Thirties, Monk toured the country with a female evangelist, playing jazz-infused church music. That tour played Kansas City, Mo., then the capital of swing, where the teenaged Monk befriended Count Basie and Mary Lou Williams and heard the strains of his musical future.

Though Monk and his cohort created bebop in the early 1940s at Harlem’s Minton’s Playhouse, for much of the decade he struggled to support himself as a musician. For several chapters Kelley documents how Monk’s early tunes, including the brilliant “‘Round Midnight,” made many musicians money, but not the composer. As the forties ended, Dizzy Gillispie and Charlie Parker had serious media attention and financial opportunities, but Monk was underemployed outside jazz’s mainstream. He revised his style, however, mixing shards of gospel, Basie-swing, stride techniques, and Ellingtonia into an idiosyncratic, personal sound.

Full of off-key trills, weird harmonics and bursts of danceable rhythms, Monk’s mature compositions are joyous, complex, inventive, tough, and intriguing. Playing Monk’s music in his bands challenged and improved many sidemen, including Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane. On his records Monk’s solos begin with single notes pinged doubly or triply, but intermittently against the beat. Displacing rhythmically, “rhythm-a-ning” that one note (to riff on a Monk a title), the pianist can stroke individual notes into full, multifarious, melodic ideas.

Kelley suggests that Monk struggled with bi-polar disorder throughout his life. During the sixties, just as he achieved fame finally, as critics recognized his compositions as the mark of bebop’s foundation and the wellspring of avant-garde jazz, Monk’s body began to fail him. Monk stepped off stage in 1974 and remained silent musically during his final eight years. Yet, as Kelley illustrates elegantly and carefully, the silence of Thelonious Monk buzzes at the core of contemporary American music.

Walton Muyumba

Negro Folk Music: Giddins and DeVeaux's Jazz

Jazz
by Gary Giddins and Scott DeVeaux
Norton
704 pages

Dallas Morning News
15 November 2009

Duke Ellington warned against labeling as "jazz" the music he and his musical compatriots mastered. At the beginning of Ellington's 50-year reign in American music, jazz was a term synonymous with "race music," "Saturday night music" or "jungle music," pejorative labels meant to deny the artistry of African-American improvisational music.

Though Ellington often referred to his idiom as "Negro folk music," he wanted his efforts to receive the same critical appraisals and accolades awarded to his classical art music contemporaries. More important, he wanted his compositions, arrangements and recordings to exist "beyond category."

Jazz is an excellent, comprehensive primer for listeners new to America's "classical" music. Beginning with basic tutorials in music vocabulary, composition theory and the techniques of musical improvisation, authors Gary Giddins and Scott DeVeaux prepare readers for the close analyses they offer of essential folk and jazz tunes in each chapter. The book is paired with a CD compilation of those key songs to guide readers toward becoming listeners. Giddins and DeVeaux use their listening lessons to emphasize and amplify the critiques and profiles filling Jazz's 19 chapters.

As in their previous works, the authors have drawn upon the techniques of music theory and ethnomusicology, American and African-American studies, literary new criticism and new historicism, and cultural studies to delineate jazz's integral, central position in 20th-century Western history.

DeVeaux, one of America's best jazz scholars and educators, teaches music at the University of Virginia and wrote The Birth of Bebop (1997), the most comprehensive historical and musicological study of bebop's invention and development as a singular musical tradition. Writing for Jazz Times and The New Yorker, Giddins is America's most esteemed music critic. His essays, especially those in Visions of Jazz: The First Century (1998), display Giddins' abilities to match in quality the eloquent, lyrical and inventive music he critiques, and to make the innovations of Louis Armstrong or Bing Crosby or Billie Holiday relevant to contemporary tastes.

It's difficult to suggest which chapters of Jazz are the best because reading Giddins-DeVeaux on Sarah Vaughan and Frank Sinatra, Miles Davis and John Coltrane, or Count Basie and Ellington is to initiate a superb musical education. Yet Jazz is an important departure from other jazz histories whose stories end in the 1960s. The book is strongest in its final chapters when the authors mark spaces on the contemporary field for players such as Wynton Marsalis, a traditionalist; Keith Jarrett, a historical fusionist; the Art Ensemble of Chicago, an avant-garde group; and Jason Moran, a younger pianist whose performance catalog runs from traditional to electronica, including pieces by James P. Johnson, Thelonious Monk, Afrika Bambaataa and Bjork.

Jazz is not encyclopedic. The authors' choices emphasize their notion that jazz musicians created America's native-born music while pushing it beyond categorization. Giddins and DeVeaux illustrate that "jazz" is now a powerful, onomatopoeic expression of the music's traditions, joy, urgency, release, sexuality, seriousness, soul, suavity and swing.

Walton Muyumba

Brief Notes on Jazz Roots: A Larry Rosen Jazz Series

Art & Seek
6 November 2009

Al Jarreau makes “adult contemporary” music. That’s not a problem, except that Jarreau’s set at the Winspear Opera House on Wednesday (November 4, 2009) — which opened the Larry Rosen Jazz Series — offered the opposite of jazz. With his five-man band and a back-up singer, Jarreau interpreted four standards, including “My Funny Valentine” and “Midnight Sun,” as smooth jazz numbers. Though Jarreau’s vocal style and the band’s musicianship were buffed and well polished, the music’s sheen was glaring, saccharine, and annoying. Jarreau was playful and jocular throughout his show, teasing the audience with witty repartee and even serenading Donna Joyner, Tom’s wife, with sweet birthday wishes.

The Ramsey Lewis Trio opened the evening, working through a selection of original pieces from their recent album, Songs from the Heart. Lewis and his rock-solid band mates, Leon Joyce (drums) and Larry Grey (bass), capped the set with a rousing blues and gospel medley. The compositions were pleasant, but the soloing sounded perfunctory, rote. Lewis’ music sits both within and adjacent to mainstream jazz: He’s always been interested in referring to straight-ahead, improvised jazz while letting the music drift into the pop and smooth jazz idioms.

Both acts put on a show, made the opening an event; however, the music felt canned and easy, rather than interesting, risky, dangerous or compelling.

The whole series seems short on invention or challenge. I wondered as the evening proceeded why the planners did not think to bring Roy Hargrove to open the series. An alumnus of Booker T. Washington Arts Magnet High School and one of contemporary jazz’s premier trumpeters, Hargrove would have been an inspired choice. As well, had the organizers wanted to maintain the Texas flavor, the excellent Houston-bred pianists Jason Moran and Robert Glasper would have been fitting. Even more, given their annual appearances with the DSO, Branford or Wynton Marsalis would have given the series gravitas.

And had no one thought to invite Ornette Coleman back to Dallas-Fort Worth to blow the doors off the building, announcing his return to native grounds?

Though the Winspear Opera House is a beautiful, generous listening room, it seems suitable for almost any art music except for jazz. Jazz performances deserve — even demand — intimate performance spaces where listeners can dance, shout, sing or listen in close proximity to the musicians. Given the need to drum up physical and financial support for the programs at the AT&T Performing Arts Center, Rosen’s program is beneficial because of its strong commercial appeal.

Yet the jazz education promised from the evening did not materialize.

Walton Muyumba

Walton Muyumba and The Shadow and the Act on KERA's Think

Here is a video clip from a recent discussion of The Shadow and the Act: Black Intellectual Practice, Jazz Improvisation, and Philosophical Pragmatism:

Art&Seek on Think TV: Author Walton Muyumba




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Walton Muyumba

Victor LaValle's Big Machine

Big Machine
by Victor LaValle
Spiegel & Grau
384 pages

Dallas Morning News
30 August 2009

Victor LaValle’s weird and ambitious novel Big Machine is set in 2005 but peopled with junkies, prostitutes, and grifters resplendent in Harlem Renaissance-era fashion — tailored gabardine and calfskin boots. There’s also a secret research society in backwoods New England, murderous religious cults and hazy, yellow angels.

Though mixing elements of spiritual parable, African-American literary history, the detective novel, the graphic novel and speculative fiction, LaValle dresses the work as realism. In fact, the tension between sci-fi/noir material and realist approach makes Big Machine crackle.

We meet the narrator/protagonist, Ricky Rice, a recovering heroin junkie, when he is lured by mysterious invitation from his dead-end janitorial position at a dingy bus terminal in Utica, N.Y., to snowstorm-choked Vermont.

Once there, Rice is installed on the grounds of the Washburn Library, where he finds himself among a crew of recovering addicts and rehabilitated thieves, all African-American. At their welcoming banquet, The Dean, a cryptic, gnomic combination of Ricardo Montalban and Hervé Villechaize, offers a menacing initiation of the seven men and women into his secret society, the Unlikely Scholars. Their jobs at the library require the Scholars to scour newspapers for strange, buried, back-page stories, accumulating evidence for an alternative narrative of American life.

In these marginal stories The Scholars read and listen for the inscrutable directions of The Voice, a disembodied spiritual force. We discover that the Unlikely Scholars come to Vermont because The Voice has urged each away from self-immolation toward some version of personal redemption. The Scholars are validating their redemption by illuminating The Voice’s murmuring guidance.

Ricky’s scholarly proficiency improves and his true mission emerges: teamed with field agent, Adele Henry, Ricky is sent to the Bay Area in order to eliminate a rogue Scholar, Solomon Clay, who is set to reveal the Washburn’s agenda.

LaValle’s fiction claims that “…doubt is the big machine. It grinds up the delusions of women and men.” That is, we rely on compelling, enabling fictions to narrate our loves, joys, and disappointments. Yet doubting the narrative structures we participate in helps us hold our self-righteous deceptions at bay.

LaValle’s work sports hand-me-down finery from Ralph Ellison, Gayl Jones and Ishmael Reed. All three have produced novels that Ellison would call “big ole Negro lies”; their works artistically confront both the material tragedies and comic absurdities of black American life. LaValle settles himself on American literature’s “Liar’s Bench” with Big Machine: His big novel grinds up our delusions about reality, spirituality, and the principles of fiction.

Walton Muyumba