SILENT MONK

As we approach Monk's birthday, which takes place October 10, and, as my most recent post examined the role of silence in Miles Davis's music, I thought it appropriate to offer homage once again to Thelonious Monk, the founder of bebop. Silence in his music was as audible as the piano keys he played, always a cacophony of surprise -- lilting, funny and moving. But it is the silent Monk that interests me now, the man who is said to literally have spent the last seven years of his life without uttering a word. He spent his last six years with jazz baroness and art patron Pannonica Rothschild in her New Jersey home.

Many have no doubt wondered as I have what it is that drove Monk to the ultimate period of speech. Was it his wife Nellie's death? Was it the calamitous abuse suffered over the years, the beating with a blackjack by police of his hands while en route to a gig at the Comedy Club in Baltimore, Maryland, sadly, on occasion of my birthday, October 15, 1958? Was it the years of drugs prescribed and drugs abused? He was diagnosed as a schizophrenic, also as bipolar; he received shock treatments. One psychiatrist claimed he had experienced brain damage from being given the wrong drugs. Was it perhaps a combination of all these?

In October 2009, Italian satirist Stefani Benni's, Misterioso. A Journey in the Silence of Thelonious Monk, a theatrical production, ran as a double bill with a documentary about patron Rothschild, The Jazz Baroness -- An Unlikely Love Story -- at Riverside Studios in London. Did she perhaps play a role in silencing him? Or did she merely encourage it, let him have what he had wanted so long?

Monk is a man who would enter a room and say nothing, who could exist from day to day without the compulsion to speak, who thought perhaps longer and harder than most people about what the right thing to say might really be. Once, while attending a music lab, after listening to students perform, he paused a long while and then simply advised, "Just keep tryin'." To those frustrated by such verbal minimalism, I say, "Why does it ever have to be more complicated than that?"

Not enough can ever be said, written or interpreted, regarding Monk the man or his music, as far as I am concerned. His ideas, even his style of sunglasses, hats, coats and berets, were copped by other musicians and wannabees. Whatever Monk was, anyone who knows his music knows he is incomparably, lastingly, the true thing, an original.