It’s a testament to Thelonious Monk’s genius that no pianist has ever sounded like him, before or since. His flat-fingered, percussive performance style is instantly recognizable, and it has kind of—to borrow one of his song titles—an ugly beauty to it.
No one dares to try and sound like Monk, but musicians everywhere adore and perform his compositions. In the world of jazz, Monk’s tunes, angular yet instantly hummable, are second in number only to Duke Ellington’s in the recorded pantheon. (Which is even more impressive when one thinks about the ratio -- Ellington wrote more than 1,000 pieces, yet Monk’s output was around 100.)
Equal to Monk’s elusive and unique musical style was his persona—he would speak in cryptic circular phrases, show up just in time for gigs, or leave the piano bench for a spell to spin circles while the rest of the band played. He fit into the mold of the Beat Generation weirdo. He had a song titled “Misterioso.”
Late in life, Monk retreated entirely from music, and his son, T.S. Monk, explains on the new Criterion Collection Blu-ray of Charlotte Zwerin’s documentary, “Thelonious Monk Straight, No Chaser,” that his father was likely schizophrenic and bipolar.
But Monk's son also notes that Monk was a loving father who, despite heavy drinking, never became addicted to drugs, always came home at night, and remained faithful to his wife, Nellie, who was likely essential to keeping the man centered even when his internal world may have been spinning out of control.
I was fascinated by Zwerin’s film, and there’s more than one moment in the movie where Monk gives a sly look to the camera, offering a quip that seems to indicate that he was hip to how folks viewed him from the outside.
Zwerin, whose career began as a collaborator with the Maysles brothers in seminal docs “Salesman” and “Gimme Shelter” (both are also available from Criterion), was a music fan who was first presented in the early 1980s with rare footage of Monk performing in the late 1960s. Plans to include interviews with Monk himself were set aside when it was learned he was too ill to participate. Monk died in 1982.
Later, Clint Eastwood, a massive jazz fan, came on board with funding to finish out the documentary, and Zwerin shot new interviews with T.S. Monk, saxophonist Charlie Rouse, and performance footage of Tommy Flanagan and Barry Harris playing a duo piano arrangement of Monk’s music.
Their interactions are delightful, and the performance also illustrates how unique and rare Monk’s style was. Monk was always at his best in a live setting, and the concert footage in “Thelonious Monk Straight, No Chaser,” which was largely shot in 1967 for West German public television, is revelatory. At one moment, Monk is whirling around the stage, then he’s back at the piano bench at just the right moment to hit just the right note.
Most tantalizing to me as a musician was getting to see his hands, not just for the way he held them, but for the notes he played. It’s always a bit magical for me to watch great musicians improvise, and Monk’s idiosyncratic choices always fascinated me. To see exactly where and how he’s placing those chords and phrases is a revelation.
One of the terrific special features on this Criterion Collection edition of “Thelonious Monk Straight, No Chaser” is a 30-minute segment about Charlotte Zwerin’s career -- both with the Maysles brothers and on her own. Much attention is given to Zwerin’s excellent editing, which I’ve felt is just as musical as choosing what to cut and how to order the sequences. There’s a kind of circular rhythm to the film that keeps coming back to the performance footage, and it only tangentially dances around the linear story of Monk’s birth in 1917 and death in 1982. I don’t know if Zwerin was a musician herself, but her film sings.
