Addison Road

In 1988, I was a young pianist quickly burning out on classical music. After studying for nearly a decade with half a dozen teachers, every note I played was a drudgery, a chore, and I began to hate piano. I spent a year working with Peter Yazbeck, a renowned artist whose sole focus was coaching young pianists to win international competitions, and they did win them, frequently, and I won them too, frequently. And I hated it.

I was only 13, and ready to quit.

For my 13th birthday, my Aunt Nancy performed a miracle. She raised me from the dead. She sent me 2 tapes - Wynton Marsalis’ “Standard Time”, and Thelonious Monk’s “The Composer”.

Monk. I remember listening to the tape the first time. Image that you had been training for 10 years to be a black and white photographer, and suddenly, instantly, for the first time, you saw the world in gloriously bright technicolor.

My mind exploded. My ears opened up. He made impossible leaps of angular logic. He drew melodic lines like a drunk man might stagger through a crowded subway car - with fits and starts, and violent bursts of dissonance and cognizance. His harmonic structures were a blur of colors, and seemed to be fit together only by being in parallel motion to other, more densely blurred tones.

Monk was, to a young and frustrated competitive classical pianist, like heroin. I bought every recording I could find. I studied his voicings, his impossibly dense coloration of scale groupings. I imitated his solos, trying to find the mysterious logic that pinned those notes to those chords.

The thing about Monk, the thing that a young pianist just entering his world would have to wait another 10 years to learn, is that nothing can be lifted from him. You can’t borrow his solo phrases, because they only make sense strung together in larger lines. You can’t borrow his melodic lines, because they only make sense within the tonal palate of his chord structures, those bizarre and impenetrable fortresses of tension that suffer no analysis. You can’t borrow his chord structures, because they only work properly when they follow the internal logic of his own devising, moving alternately in parallel motions or angular leaps.

My mentor, Phil Shackleton, moves effortlessly through musical constructs, giving cogent analysis of the functions and structures without ever diminishing the musicality of the overall effect. He loves music, passionately, and his analysis is an act of devotion.

He and I sat, once, when I was a student of his, at a piano in his office, and spent an hour analyzing 4 notes of a Monk piece. They come from a piece called “Rhythm-a-Ning”, and all four of them are wrong. They are wrong in every possible way. The harmonic structure is an F7 chord in the key of Bb, which is normally a very welcoming sort of chord - it allows all manner of vagrants and dissonant factions to sit at the table. In fact, the only two notes that aren’t welcome in a Dominant 7th chord are the Major 7th, and the 4th. So what does Monk do? Right toward the end of a phrase, he drops 4 big fat quarter notes that move from E - F# - G# - Bb (the major 7th, the flat 9th, the sharp 9th, and the fourth). It breaks every rule. If it appeared on a student project, they would fail.

And yet, it’s perfect. It’s right. When you hear him play it, he fits it together in the line, in the chordal structures, in the section, in a way that makes it inextricable.

I’m currently working my way back through his catalog, trying to fit my mind around what he did. I’m arranging that same piece, “Rhythm-a-Ning”, for two pianos, and I’ll be performing it with another teacher here at the University for an upcoming recital. The other prof is arranging a Bill Evans piece for us to do. I think he got the easier gig. I still, after 15 years with Monk, cannot find a handle for his work. I have no way to grasp a hold and move it around.

Nothing can be lifted from Monk. He’s not Parker, or Dizzy, or Miles, or Bill Evans. We don’t cop his lines or his voicings or his harmonic sense and speak his vocabulary with our voice, as a way of augmenting our own expression. He remains whole. He obviates our conventions for isolating the constituting pieces of his creative work.

He is whole. He is as he always was. So what do we do with Monk? On every list of influences I’ve ever drawn up, Monk is at the head of the list. The same thing is true of almost anyone who plays jazz piano; we all count him as an influence. But not in the way that we count Bill Evans or Duke Ellington. We don’t lift things from him. We don’t borrow from his vocabulary.

Monk means, to us, that art will always stand ahead of analysis. That creativity needs no rails to move forward. That to truly do something new sometimes requires us to be ignorant of what’s been done before, requires us to reform the raw materials with eyes squinted.

Most of all, Monk reminds us that any worthwhile act of creativity is always an act of rebellion. It is the violent overthrown of the banal, the shattering of safe harbors, and the full-throated cry of insatiable lust for human expression.

Click here to see the iTunes essential Monk Playlist.

Art
Bebop
Creativity
Jazz
Music
Piano
Thelonious Monk