Thelonious Monk

In A New Biography, Monk Minus The Myth

Monk died more than 25 years ago, but his music is still played and heard around the world. When critical attention came his way, myths were spun around him, many of which remain to this day. Among them: that he was difficult, a recluse, an untrained genius. He was connected to his New York City community, and he played benefits for the social causes of the day.

Transcript

'Monk': A New Look At An American Original:Robin D.G. Kelley

Mr. KELLEY: Well, there - a few things. One, Monk loved dissonance, and by dissonance, those clashing intervals, you know? Sometimes he'll play, like, an F and F sharp at the same time. Now, on the one hand, that sounds like it's innovative and fresh and new, but a lot of these devices, the dissonance, the kind of off-meter playing, these are devices that he learned from the old-stride pianists in Harlem, people like James P. Johnson and Willie The Lion Smith. He just took it to a more exaggerated place.

And so Monk is very much rooted in these older traditions, and so he would take these old practices, even the bent notes that he played, and he'd take that James P. Johnson and Willie The Lion and, you know, give it a kind of modern twist.

 I find evidence of bipolar disorder, you know, the manic depression, and these cycles of manic depression, as early as the 1940s.

But these examples, the evidence always got portrayed as examples of Monk's eccentricities, you know, that he would be up for two or three days at a time. Then he'd crash. He'd go from house to house, looking for a piano.

This became part of the story or the lore around Monk, but of course no one knew about bipolar disorder in the 1940s and couldn't see it as a diagnosis.

Kelley teaches history and American studies at the University of Southern California.

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