MAD MONK:

Four months after Bird's death, his one-time personal assistant Miles Davis seduced everyone at the Newport Jazz Festival, performing a tune called "Round Midnight," written by someone who had been part of the Minton's scene but was still an underground figure: Thelonious Monk, who had only a handful of records under his belt and, then approaching forty, was still playing on other people's dates. Indeed, he was the pianist behind Miles for the Newport performance, which would help the younger musician sign with Columbia records, putting him on the road to stardom. An oft-told anecdote has the two sharing a car back to New York. "You weren't playing the tune right," Monk says, to which Miles replies that he is just jealous, at which point Monk orders the car to pull over and takes the ferry to the city alone.

The Newport set came about midway through Monk's career, which was long by the standards of jazz. Over three decades he played on more than a hundred records, collaborating with artists as different as Sonny Rollins and Gerry Mulligan, John Coltrane and Clark Terry, Art Blakey and Oliver Nelson. From the first, he was revered by fellow musicians, even those who would later do away with harmony and structure, aspiring toward a kind of "free" jazz. "Of all the bop greats Monk's influence seems second now only to that of Charlie Parker," Amiri Baraka wrote in 1967. Monk was also a committed teacher, including to Rollins and Coltrane, who both spent mornings practicing at his tiny apartment on West Sixty-Third.

Commercial success, however, had a way of eluding Monk. His career began with sporadic recordings on the Blue Note and Prestige labels, made through the 1940s and 1950s, none of which sold well. Already struggling to support his family, his financial troubles worsened in 1951 when he was arrested--with his friend, the great bebop pianist Bud Powell--on drug charges and was left without his cabaret card for a half dozen years, preventing him from playing in nightclubs. Switching to the Riverside label in 1955, he found new momentum but only reached a wide public in 1962, when he was signed by Columbia records, joining a roster that included Miles Davis and Charles Mingus. After that, his profile dramatically grew; two years later he even appeared on the cover of Time. By his death in 1982, he had become a respectable pillar of the music's evolution, as seen in Ken Burns's 2001 PBS documentary Jazz. But neither a cult reputation as a pioneer of bebop nor American canonization quite does justice to Monk, who was simply one of the most imaginative composers of the twentieth century, a judgment that in my view does not require the qualifiers "jazz" or "American."

What made Monk a great composer was his way of putting a tune together, and the stamp he put on pianism--his unique approach to chord voicing, phrasing and accent--was inseparable from his being a great thinker in song form. Like his hero Duke Ellington, he had a gift for reconciling musical experiment with the immediacy of pop, finding freedom in the constraints of a verse-chorus-bridge grammar that might otherwise default to clichés. Inventing a set of private aesthetic laws, he worked out their possibilities over the course of his career with admirable stubbornness and conviction. If the axioms were laid down at Blue Note (1947-1952), revised here and there at Prestige (1952-1954), the Riverside years (1955-1961), which I'll zoom in on in what follows, showed what kinds of proofs could be argued from them.

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