This Day in Jazz History (Thelonious Monk, Bebop Pioneer, Dies)

February 17, 1982— After years of progressive withdrawal— first from recordings, then from concerts, then from the company of fellow jazzmen— pianist-composer Thelonious Monk died at age 64 in Englewood, NJ, from complications of a stroke. Once the subject of a Time Magazine cover story— one of only four jazz musicians accorded that honor at the time— he spent his last years in seclusion at the Weehawken, NJ home of longtime patron Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter.

The life and work of the composer of such standards as “Round Midnight” and “Straight, No Chaser” fascinates me for reasons extending beyond the off-center songs that amazed and perplexed jazz aficionados in the postwar years.

There was, for instance, his association with Bergen County, NJ, where I live. Not only did he die in my hometown, but one of his most fascinating tunes (one that has ended up on my iPod), the May 1954 recording “Hackensack,” from his Criss-Cross LP, takes its name from the location of his studio (maintained by engineer Rudy Van Gelder, a kind of Zelig who always seemed to be around every major jazz recording). On his blog, recording artist and Grammy-winning producer Joe Henry hailed “Hackensack” for “its playful melody, its willful dissonance, and its swinging take on the blues.”

Van Gelder would go on to establish a new, state-of-the-art facility in Englewood Cliffs, NJ, in 1959, but the Hackensack original was the spot of Orrin Keepnews’ indelible introduction to the offbeat ways of Monk. The Riverside record producer had enlisted the services of estimable musicians Kenny Clarke and Oscar Pettiford on his first project with Monk. The group was to go from the music label’s midtown Manhattan offices across the Hudson to Van Gelder’s Hackensack studio.

“I was relieved when Monk arrived almost on time,” Keepnews recalled, in an autobiographical piece collected in Robert Gottlieb’s fine anthology Reading Jazz (1996), “just after Pettiford, but Clarke was nowhere to be found. We waited with growing impatience and concern; we telephoned everywhere; eventually Thelonious suggested using a substitute.” Keepnews resisted the idea of using a relative neophyte for this initial session, and Van Gelder agreed to hold off for another day. “Kenny, when finally located, insisted quite convincingly that Monk had told him the date was scheduled for the next day. It was not the last time that Monk was to indicate a lack of concern for such routine things as time and place and passing on the kind of basic information that is important to ordinary people.”

For a time, Monk’s considerable eccentricities encompassed mostly his cavalier disregard for time, his hats, his tendency to dance onstage, his staring into space, and his mumbling. But he would need to be hospitalized for mental illness, and the disease worsened even more dramatically in the late 1960s.

Just what the exact disease was remained indeterminate at the time. Autism, Tourette’s Syndrome, and schizophrenia were commonly suggestged. In a recent biography, Robin D.G. Kelly presents evidence for a diagnosis of manic depression.

Whatever the condition was, pharmacology, then in the comparative dark ages, was in no state to treat it. Thorazine and Lithium were both tried, to no lasting positive effect. In fact, Kelly, while acknowledging in an online Atlantic Monthly interview that Lithium might have helped diminh Monk’s worst episodes, also believes that it “contributed to an unwillingness or a lack of desire to play.”

But in the end, it all comes back to the important thing: the music. Critic Dan Morgenstern, in his book Living With Jazz, notes vividly the nature of Monk’s technique at his creative zenith, before the wayward thoughts in his mind overwhelmed the sounds only he could hear:

“To Monk, the piano was a sounding board. A study should be made of his use of the pedals, both the damping and sustaining one. He used his feet as unorthodoxly as he did his hands, and as percussively. He struck his notes, aware that the piano is a percussion instrument, a big, tunable drum. His technique may have been eccentric, but it was intensely functional….He knew exactly what he wanted from the instrument.”