Customer Reviews

Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original

5 star:		(32)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

588 pages,including acknowledgments,appendices,notes,and compositions by Monk. This adds up to 129 pages out of the total. The paper used is a cream-white,and the the type-face is straight forward,clean and,together,make for an easy read. There are 16 pages of black and white photographs,starting with Monk's parents,on through his family,and several of Monk playing on the bandstand. These are a valuable addition,and give some depth to the writing.

This is an important book on Thelonious Monk. Not only his music,but an in-depth look at the person behind the music. The author,Robin Kelley,delved into Monk's life for ten years,with access to family papers and private recordings. In doing so Kelley has produced the first book to accurately portray what made Monk "tick". Many books talk about Monk the "hipster",the jazz player who wore hats (believe it or not,this was thought to be important) not in keeping with the current fashion of the day,the outspoken man who most deemed overly critical,and,an eccentric. Was Monk temperamental? Absolutely. Did he act in ways outside "normal" behavior? Yes. Was Monk a true eccentric? Probably most certain. But in this well written book the author digs deeply into Monk's life,starting with his upbringing,his family ties and influence,his early life,jail,and his mental and physical disorders,his one true love in life,Nellie,and his many friends (Baroness Nica de Koenigswarter for example),and associates in the music world.

This book shows why Monk--was Monk. His mother's encouragement to follow his own path,early in Monk's life,set him on his own individual path. The many people who misunderstood Monk (Bill Evans,for example,thought Monk's musical ability was because he was not exposed to Western music forms-not true),which led to the popular myth of Monk being some sort of musical savant,who had little knowledge of the "outside" world. In reality,Monk worked very hard at his music,and even harder to achieve his own individualistic sound. As for his perceived eccentricities,in this book Monk is shown to be a devoted family man,a man who was generous to his friends,but was also incredibly honest in his opinions and at times was brutally honest to a fault. His mental illness,and it's affects on not only his music,but his life are also brought into context with his views on people and life. In addition,readers get a good view of jazz,in N.Y. City,in the forties and fifties,into the sixties,and the many musicians who Monk employed,and played with on the bandstand.

Above all,Monk had a genuine love for music,especially his own,and that comes through clearly in this great book. Not only do readers (and listeners of his music) learn more about his music,that in the past,was sorely lacking,they get to know the man behind this incredible music. If you're not familiar with Monk's music,check out his album "Brilliant Corners",or his early stuff on Blue Note Records,or his superb (2 CD) solo recordings on Columbia records,for examples of his writing and playing skills. If you aren't familiar with these albums,I envy you your hearing this music for the first time. For anyone who listens to Monk's music and wonders,what kind of person could write such powerful,evocative music-this book will give the answers. Monk's music can be enjoyed to an even greater extent,after reading this well researched,well written book,on one of jazz's greatest composers and musicians.

If you're interested in jazz, post war urban American history or just enjoy reading well written biographies...buy this book. Deftly written, extremely well researched and highly readable this book is a great acheivemment.

Being a professional musician I have read many music bios (jazz and otherwise) and this ranks among the best. Robin Kelley clearly has a love for his subject and as an amateur pianist he writes intelligently about Monk and his music. But don't expect this book to be an academic bore. His detailed account of Monk, his circle of musician friends and the clubs he played made me feel like I was there. I could smell the cigarette smoke and hear the jam sessions at Minton's and feel the atmosphere of the San Juan Hill neighborhood where Monk grew up and lived for so many years. You'll find yourself in the back of a TV repair shop where pianists (known and unknown) jammed and shared ideas and eavesdrop on rehearsals at Monks apartment and Hall Overton's loft...and so much more.

Kelley had unprecedented access to the Monk family archives and in every step of the book it shows. But more importantly Kelley is a great writer that weaves the details into a saga of post war African American life. Perhaps most importantly, Kelley debunks the myth of Monk as some sort of idiot savant or "noble savage" that inherited his genius by osmosis. Monk worked damn hard to create his art and Kelly takes you along every step of the way. Poignant, funny, sad and triumphant this book's got it all covered. Do yourself a favor and check it out.

"Two is one and one is two".

I approached this book with trepidation..there have been so many bios of Monk,Trane,Miles...and the 700 page hardbound looked a fearsome mix of dry research and lofty pronouncements. My scepticism rapidly gave way to ceaseless absorption as I devoured the pages..Not since Ross Russell's 'Bird Lives' have I torn though a biography of an artiste one has revered over the decades
Painstakingly researched and passionately written with a strong story line,"Monk" grips the reader from start to finish.The author gets behind the Monk character and psyche to portray what made him tick,how did he think and what went behind the man whose compositions and playing style continue to captivate millions even today as it confused thousands during his time.One lives and breathes each scene as you sit along with Monk as he relentlessly composes each of his tunes, rehearses with his sidemen and makes his recordings.

You are with him and the other greats at his gigs at Mintons, Five Spot, the 52nd Street clubs, Newport and all of Europe You are by his side as he scuffles and suffers poverty,house fires,mental illness,ridicule by critics and social ostracization....before gaining recognition.. You come within talking and breathing distance of Diz, Bird,Coltrane,Miles,Charlie Rouse,Bud Powell,Elmo Hope, and so many more that one has heard and read about.... its unbelievably realistic...
If you are a jazz person, this book has to be by your bedside, not just on your shelf

a "Reader's Digest Condensed" version so that casual fans can learn the essentials about Monk's life and career, without having to invest a month in reading all the details of his daily life presented here. The book is a good thing...but too much of a good thing for lovers of Monk's albums who are neither musicians nor historians of black life in the early 20th century. It's not just Monk's genealogy that gets into print, but that of his wife and some of his friends. We don't get a brief background of his major sidemen, we get extensive histories of some, and some history on almost everyone who ever played with Monk, even for a single outing. In addition, the history of NYC jazz clubs is detailed. I love Monk's music and I was glad I struggled through this massive work, and met Thelonious the real person, who loved his family, struggled against poorly understood manic depression, dabbled in hard drugs without becoming addicted, and was broke until about the last ten years of his long career. For decades, he got paying music work too seldom, then he hit a stretch in which he perhaps worked too much. For decades, he got too little attention from record buyers and club owners in spite of his innovations at the keyboard. I started my jazz listening as a teen, afraid of Monk. That was 50 years ago, and Brubeck, Bill Evans, Oscar Peterson and George Shearing were all I could handle, being a square white kid with little money or life experience. I actually did not own a Monk album until ten years ago. Since then, I've owned ten or more, and he is the one jazz pianist who gets extensive repeat listening from me. Yes, he played the same 20 original tunes over and over with different size groups, different instrumentation, at different lengths, and when he was in different moods...no one track of one of his "hits" sounds exactly like the next one. Listen to one of his songs on the labels Blue Note, Prestige, Riverside and Columbia, covering the late '40's to the late 60's, and find four different sensations. Most important, listen to solo Monk on any of those labels. He gets more out of a single note, or one repeated phrase, then I thought possible. If you fall in love with Thelonious, buy this book. I got my copy from the library, and had to renew it in order to finish it. I recommend "Monk's Dream" and "Monk Alone" on Columbia for beginners. If those please you, then search for his earlier products. He was really extraordinary, and this biography is a fitting tribute to his importance.

This is a lengthy biography written by a college professor who clearly loves his subject and possesses the chops to give him his due. I was suprised Kelley is writing about this. I'm more familiar with him as a leftist black intellectual and I was not aware of his own musical background. As a musician and a black intellectual, I feel that he was able to gain both the trust of the Monk family and access to some of the more private recordings that have not been released from T.S. Monk. T.S. Monk, called "Toot" in the book, Nellie, and Boo Boo all have prominent voices and are heavily quoted. But there's a lot of academic research as well and he goes through just about every recording date and many of the issues surrounding Monk's substance abuse, psychological issues, and adversarial relationships with the cabaret card licensing that kept him away from the clubs.

It's always illuminating to see the stories and backdrop that produced much of the music. The positive reinforcement between the Five Spot and Monk that helped him get back on his feet was so crucial and I was unaware how much he came back to the club to perform after the historic work with Coltrane and Johnny Griffin.

One thing that struck me is how much of Monk's work is simply about earning bread as a musician. It was very illuminating to see how this bebop musician who couldn't get a cabaret club was propelled to a Time cover and playing benefit concerts for his children's private schools, a degree of social accpetance that Bird never achieved.

The one area where Kelley may have been less equipped is in assessing whether Monk was bipolar and how that impacted his music. There's an interesting online article on this issue at [...]. It's very tough to retroactively assess this and I wish there had been some more professional doctors to comment on the diagnosis that Kelley accepts with out much debate in the book.

For someone who had been marginalized it's clear that there was a sharp contrast between down times where he could be himself without resources and the pressures of producing for a major label in Columbia that expected him to approach the successes of label mates Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, and Dave Brubeck.

I hope that anyone who picks up this book will invest in at least 5 Monk albums, especially Genius of Modern Music on Blue Note, Monk with Coltrane, Monk's Music, Brilliant Corners and one of the sessions with Charlie Rouse, a stabilizing force in Monk's more popularly appreciated band.

Anyways I could write so much more about this book. It had me enthralled for about 4 days and I strongly recommend it, a magisterial tribute to a profoundly signicant artist.

4.5 stars

Actually- this is wonderful stuff and it's difficult to imagine anyone topping this bio. This is the place to start if you really want to know as much about Monk as possible. For someone with a mild interest in Monk (oh, how I do feel for you if you interest is only mild) this is not the place to start. The book takes you from top to bottom, around the world, downtown, uptown, and back again. The research and connectivity to Monk's world are fabulous.

It took me forever to finish it because I constantly went to my CD collection and Youtube to see if I could find what song or performance was being discussed.

Occasionally the author slips in to "I" which I personally don't prefer in the regular sections of the book. Oops, I just slipped into "I" myself. Also some of the conjecture about what Monk might have been doing or what Monk might have been thinking is a bit distracting.

Minor quibbles. This is an outstanding and enlightening work, the best portrait we have of one of the greatest creatives forces, well, ever. Lately, I walk around thinking about what I have learned about Monk from this book, and sometimes I even dance a little.

From his great-grandparents to his wife, children, and friends, Thelonious Monk, the High Priest of Bebop, is presented in full. Embedded in the context of American history, race relations, and the American black experience in the twentieth century, Monk's life begins in the South, but his mother Barbara takes her struggling family and young son north to New York City and leaves her suffering husband behind. There she gets a job as a cleaner in Children's Court. Monk studies the piano and soon outstrips his instructor as he moves into new directions and eventually into jazz and the musical haunts of Harlem. The early chapters of this book are far more interesting, I found, than the later chapters. Monk was fully formed when he took the bandstand in the forties, but it took decades for the public to catch up to his musicality and to appreciate how much he had expanded the musical landscape. His personal freedom and refusal to bend to convention made him stand above the crowd. But it also cost him years of impoverishment, struggle, frustration, and lack of work. Club owners refused to hire him. Others didn't like his latenesses, his odd behavior, and his attitude. Nonetheless, the music triumphed. At the end of this book, I grew weary of all the details of every club date, but I also longed to hear the music again: of Bud Powell, Sonny Rollins, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Charlie Rouse, but most of all the High Priest himself, the great Monk!

I've been a lover of Jazz for over 50 years and a fan of Monk for most of that time. In the past few years I've grown fonder and fonder of Thelonious Monk. When this book came out I was anxious to buy it.

At first glance I was intimidated by the shear volume, the footnotes and appendixes. It was a daunting read but one that I will most certainly do again in a few years. I learned more about the history of jazz, not just Monk, but pre and post war Jazz heros. As a mostly casual listener of the genre I'd never given much thought to what went on behind the scenes of my favorite albums and clubs, this book was a real eye opener.

Why did the book cost me hundreds of dollars? During the reading of this tome I must have gone to iTunes six or seven times and downloaded more of Monk's music. The albums I could not download I found on eBay and purchased. My already thick Monk collection doubled at least in size and I'm the better for it.

Read this informative biography to where Monk has found his way in life as a jazz musician and innovator, then put the book down and listen to something from his solo work - you'll swear he is just across the room from you sitting at an upright, working his magic. Spooky (if I'm permitted to use that word). Four stars? For a non-musician some of the musical references are challenging, mea culpa. Also, when Monk's career has finally taken off and he's touring and playing clubs and concerts full time, the book follows the man from gig to gig, country to country, city to city, replacement musician to replacement musician (and there were many), good reviews to bad - it all becomes a bit tedious, even if necessary.

Thelonious Monk (1917-1982) rose from a humble beginning as the son of day laborers in Rocky Mount, North Carolina to become one of the legendary'though misunderstood and underappreciated'composers and musicians of modern jazz. The subtitle of this masterful biography claims that Monk is an "American Original", which has been applied to countless other public figures. In this case, however, the author is absolutely correct; "The High Priest of Bebop" was unlike anyone else, in or outside of the world of jazz.

Robin Kelley, a professor of History and American Studies at USC, spent 14 years researching and writing this biography, which includes 100 pages of footnotes from hundreds of colleagues and members of Monk's family. Although the book has an extensive amount of detail, this reader did not get bogged down in it, as Kelley did a masterful job in portraying Monk's complicated and tormented life. Thelonious, whose name represents the Latinized spelling of St. Tillo, a former slave who became a renowned 7th century Benedictine monk in France, was named after his father, who bestowed his love for music to his son, along with his mother Barbara, who took her children to New York City to escape the crushing poverty of the Jim Crow South. Thelonious Sr. was plagued by mental illness throughout his adult life; his son also suffered from what was ultimately diagnosed as bipolar, or manic depressive, disorder. However, this diagnosis did not come until late in his life, and he was institutionalized and jailed multiple times when he was in the throes of a manic episode, and received medical treatments that exacerbated his symptoms. His illness contributed to his reputation as being weird and unpredictable, but it may have also led to his creative genius, as his compositions were innovative and complex.

His music was widely misunderstood, as many of the leading jazz artists had a difficult time playing alongside him, and critics often described his music as primitive and abstract. However, he had extensive musical training, considering the limitations he faced as a poor black male in mid-20th century America, as he received piano lessons from noted jazz and classical teachers, and played piano in his mother's church and for a traveling evangelist as an adolescent. He initially performed in jazz clubs, most notably Minton's Playhouse in Harlem, but he was barely able to make ends meet despite his growing popularity. Monk, like many jazz musicians of that time, was plagued by unscrupulous club owners who paid him poorly, fellow musicians who claimed his music as their own and stole royalties from him, and record producers who did not utilize his talents fully and underpaid him routinely. His break finally came during an extended gig at the Five Spot Café in the East Village in 1957, with a group that featured John Coltrane on tenor saxophone.

He achieved a moderate amount of success over the next few years, with sold out concerts in the US, Europe and Japan, although he was paid far less than Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis or other notable jazz artists. The music scene changed in the mid-1960s, due to the influence of rock music, and his stature and popularity waned as he refused to adopt to the new trends and as his illness prevented him from writing new material. His last years were spent in seclusion, with the aid of Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, known to her friends as Nica, an artist, jazz aficionado and estranged member of a wealthy Austrian family, who befriended and supported Monk throughout much of his adult life.

However, the true stars of this amazing biography are Monk's mother Barbara and his wife Nellie; without these strong and determined women, Thelonious would probably have never been heard outside of Harlem. Barbara Monk allowed her son to set his own path, and supported him financially in his early years. Nellie was everything to her husband: devoted wife and mother to their two talented children, personal assistant, manager, cheerleader, and caretaker, despite her own poor health. He recognized her love for him, and he stayed true to her throughout his life. The book is richly infused with the essential nature of their relationship, and the love that Monk had for his children and dear friends.

This is one of the best biographies I have read, and it will stand as the definitive story of the incredible life of Thelonious Monk. Kelley's labor of love cuts through the myths and mistruths of this complicated man, and Monk is effectively portrayed as both a larger than life public figure and as a sensitive, loving and troubled human being.