Who takes that note that nobody wrote and puts it down?*
(You know who) I mean…Thelonius Sphere Monk — aka. Melodious Thunk.
If Jelly Roll Morton and Duke Ellington traversed jazz’s stratosphere, TS Monk travelled through the mesosphere. B-yond B-Bop. The NO zone: just below satellite territory and just above where aerospace crafts cruise. Breaking the speed of sound requires breaking down chaos. The higher you fly, the bigger the picture. Eventually, the scope and diameter of the sphere hits the eye, so — naturally — now, Monk, jazz’s Chuck Yeager — is an institution. Everyone else can finally see through the hole he punched in the paper ceiling with his spherical mass.
Spheres have a unique property. (Usually) Idealized for the sake of simplicity, they are capable of colliding with other objects occupying space. They got bounce…they got groove. And true to his name’s physical property, TS was axis bold –- an odd BALL r-evolving his own solar system.
Calculating the volume of the M-Sphere… WELL, YOU NEEDN’T be prolific when every time you play your own tunes you reinvent the wheel. His composition — Ugly Be yoU T — spans divergent lines and points. Rue B M(eye) D(ear). A gem. Intricate, singularly lustrous with clarity and enough carat to outshine any diamond. I ME(AN) yoU (No ambigYOUity there, ‘cept, you try to follow those incremental steps to where one thinks they’re leadin’… well…they ain’t goin’there, MC Escher. ‘ROUND mIDnight — Sphere perfection. Brilliant CORNERS — parallel parking was tough in that space— they had to cut trax 24 x‘s, and they STILL had to edit tape. ePISTrophy (Who entered that contest?) scores as the “first modern jazz classic”.
Monk expected his players to step up 2 the IMPprovisso with their own take from his give… WHAAAT?! No charts? (sometimes he uncharacteristically acquiesced) Unheard of… DON’T follow the herd? Just play what you heard… and, not even that. “Don’t pay attention to what I’m playing cause I might confuse you.” Put your ear to the ground — get it. BAM! Watch me dance…
And how. TS Monk moved to his own drummer (and bass player, and tenor sax). Literally bustin’–a–move between solos during concerts, or whenever the spirit moved him. TS’ done, maaaan. Your turn. K — Now, I turn. (Like he thought he saw something over his shoulder of which he couldn’t quite catch a glimpse…) SPINNIN’ ROUND and round.
The Thelonius Theorem: “All musicians are subconsciously mathematicians.”
Let’s do the math. Perhaps Monk’s economical playing is parity. His melodies exist in stops-gaps-space. (John Cage [resident Ionospherean] must’ve siphoned some of that rocket fuel, cause he took Monk’s math 4 a fixed point and blasted through a worm hole with his 3 movements of silence – 4’33’. It’s a null set.)
Mathematically speaking, Monk is a product of an odd number of primes. Yeah, in an audience full of parity sensitive sieves, it allowed for 0 discussion. COLTRANE, ROUSE, and a handful of other seminal soloists could mingle with the Monk modality. The rest? Ears perked, heads slightly cocked — staring at the tapping foot…the hat full of brain… at the village idiom swatting the boards… they couldn’t find the point of convergence.
Numbers aside, Monk changed the language of jazz using the absence of grammatical structure. Hey! That’s no dangling participle, that’s my tune, man. Participate in the conversation, he winked, as he squashed the termites running amok across the keys.
Auditing Monk’s sound is like sifting through microfiched conversations in your own head, those of which whose cadence and dynamics one isn’t consciously aware —1 phrase stepping on the next in hammering shorthand. Hungry. Hun-gaaareee. What do I want — to eeeaT: SWAT … SWAT. SWAT that/ SWAT that…bug. Not a bug… HAIR. Ahhhhair. aH… ai ir… a hair in my eye, EE!. (Everything essential, but not necessarily fodder you share with the rest of society. Pitched anxiety. Low to hiGH.) F-a-l-l-i-n-g down the stAAAAAIRSs!! Timing isn’t everything (or anything) in your own head, because there is no space and time between those hemispheres. It’s all imposed by the outside world. Monk grasped those fractals and threw them under the airbus.
Vamos a calculate Misterioso Monk’s divergence from the unit “normal”.
TS Monk. A homebody. A family man willing to take a hit for his B-loved Bud (Powell) on a trumped up drug charge that cost him dearly. His cabaret license, that is. With a family to support, it was dire times. “Patron Saint of B-Bop Jazz” butterfly Baroness Pannonica Koenigswarter set it right and they remained true blue (blood) friends throughout his life and career. (Hear his tributes, In Walked Bud, Pannonica.)
T Sphere Monk, touched by a lack of mental equilibrium, deeply loved by his tribe. According to his son, he spent time in the hospital in the mid 2 late 1960’s after pacing for 4 days straight and collapsing into himself, not speaking a word. Just like those other big, bright shiny objects in the sky, T Sphere imploded. Spheres have polarity issues. Perhaps he was spinning even faster than the speed of sound. Sooo fast, that, to the rest of the world, he appeared to be standing still.
Melodious Thunk nothing WRONG with being RIGHT brained, covering standard TIME squared (including the magazine cover, BTW). His music — 12 bar ba-lues — dissonance — stride — atonality — he could travel all those circles — he had them all in the spaces between his 2 hemispherical antipodal points. The dots on the page are round, man. Monk’s surface area is always in between — Straight…No Chaser.
* Thanks, Jon Hendricks