Melodious Thunk and Nellie

Melodious Thunk is what Thelonious Monk's wife Nellie used to call him. She did everything for him, sometimes, as for a child, as he was disoriented and slow, and so much about the music he conjured and played that he couldn't grasp much of anything -- unless it was music. I imagine he probably heard the noises made by those he loved, like Nellie cooking in the kitchen where he played his piano, also as a kind of music, and probably retreated deep into himself when the noises of the world got ugly. When its music got ugly.

There are geniuses like that who only know how to do one thing right, superbly. If they are lucky, they find a Nellie, someone to steer them or keep them in the vicinity of their art, where they can paint, write, make music. That was Nellie. Where is her prize?

I had a chance to recently savor the extraordinary nature and genius of Monk through a story told about him in Geoff Dyer's gorgeous collection, But Beautiful [A Book About Jazz]. The stories are an act of love, getting so deeply and thoroughly inside the skin of jazz greats, like Monk, that you honestly feel you carry away a piece of those artists, along with their music, when you finish reading.

David Thomson of the L.A. Times said that this book might have been the best "ever written about jazz." In my small sphere of experience with such literature, it is. If you are a jazz lover who cares, not just about the music, but about the individuals that created it and the culture and worlds from which they sprang, please pick up this book. It is a celebration of the art unlike any I have read to date. Dig this:

" -- See, jazz always had this thing, having your own sound so all sorts of people who maybe couldn't have made it in the other arts -- they'd've had their idiosyncracies ironed out -- like if they were writers they'd not've made it 'cause they couldn't spell or punctuate or painting 'cause they couldn't draw a straight line. Spelling and straight-line stuff don't matter necessarily in jazz, so there's a whole bunch of guys whose stories and thoughts are not like anyone else's who wouldn't've had a chance to express all the ideas and shit they had inside them without jazz. Cats who in any other walk of life wouldn't've made it as bankers or plumbers even: in jazz they could be geniuses, without it they'd've been nothing. Jazz can see things, draw things out of people that painting or writing don't see." - Geoff Dyer