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Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original |  | Author: Robin Kelley
Publisher: Free Press
Category: Book
List Price: $30.00
Buy New: $4.50
as of 9/7/2010 08:09 PDT details
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Seller: thebookguyz
Rating:  34 reviews
Sales Rank: 7423
Format: Deckle Edge
Media: Hardcover
Edition: First Edition/First Printing
Pages: 608
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.9
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.5 x 1.7
ISBN: 0684831902
Dewey Decimal Number: 786.2165092
EAN: 9780684831909
ASIN: 0684831902
Publication Date: October 6, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
"The piano ain't got no wrong notes!" So ranted Thelonious Sphere Monk, who proved his point every time he sat down at the keyboard. His angular melodies and dissonant harmonies shook the jazz world to its foundations, ushering in the birth of "bebop" and establishing Monk as one of America's greatest composers. Yet throughout much of his life, his musical contribution took a backseat to tales of his reputed behavior. Writers tended to obsess over Monk's hats or his proclivity to dance on stage. To his fans, he was the ultimate hipster; to his detractors, he was temperamental, eccentric, taciturn, or childlike. But these labels tell us little about the man or his music.In the first book on Thelonious Monk based on exclusive access to the Monk family papers and private recordings, as well as on a decade of prodigious research, prize-winning historian Robin D. G. Kelley brings to light a startlingly different Thelonious Monk -- witty, intelligent, generous, politically engaged, brutally honest, and a devoted father and husband. Indeed, Thelonious Monk is essentially a love story. It is a story of familial love, beginning with Monk's enslaved ancestors from whom Thelonious inherited an appreciation for community, freedom, and black traditions of sacred and secular song. It is about a doting mother who scrubbed floors to pay for piano lessons and encouraged her son to follow his dream. It is the story of romance, from Monk's initial heartbreaks to his lifelong commitment to his muse, the extraordinary Nellie Monk. And it is about his unique friendship with the Baroness Nica de Koenigswarter, a scion of the famous Rothschild family whose relationship with Monk and other jazz musicians has long been the subject of speculation and rumor. Nellie, Nica, and various friends and family sustained Monk during the long periods of joblessness, bipolar episodes, incarceration, health crises, and other tragic and difficult moments. Above all, Thelonious Monk is the gripping saga of an artist's struggle to "make it" without compromising his musical vision. It is a story that, like its subject, reflects the tidal ebbs and flows of American history in the twentieth century. Elegantly written and rich with humor and pathos, Thelonious Monk is the definitive work on modern jazz's most original composer.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 34
 The Enigma of Monk Unraveled July 12, 2010
Herbert L Calhoun (Falls Church, VA USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Anyone who has listened to Thelonius Monk knows that the complexity of his angular dissonant music, and difficult to anticipate rhythms, are first a puzzle and a study in dissonance, then an intellectual challenge of the complex art of rhythms and chords, and finally a begrudging appreciation for the utter subtlety and beauty of Monk's enormous genius.
When Miles died, I discovered that Thelonius Monk's phone number was actually listed in the Philadelphia phone book. And for some crazy and unaccountable reason, I actually called it and asked to speak to Monk. It was obvious that it was Monk himself who had answered the phone and said to me "Monk don't live here." Click!
Such was part of my journey to understanding the man, the music, and the enigma that is Thelonius Sphere Monk. Like learning to understand and appreciate Billy Holiday and John Coltrane, understanding Monk his music and his strange persona have been an integral part of my intellectual journey in life. I think I called him just so that I could say that I had spoken to the great Thelonius Monk. Thus, I could not have been more please to discover this book. I am still searching for an equivalent book on Clifford Brown. The one that is available does not do the great trumpeter the justice he is due.
I do not believe that one can pretend to be musically literate without having wrestled with Monk and his music. There is something both scary and endearing about them both. One is that he always lived with one foot straddled in another world, one entirely of his own making. And until you understand it, the same seems true of his music. Were it not for his music however, he would surely have been dismissed as a "nut case." And yet he in all his many curious aspects, including his bi-polar illness, he symbolizes something essential about our culture.
To his credit, Robin Kelly has captured that essence here exquisitely. And although I can no longer remember the name of the book, this is not the first book I have reviewed by Robin Kelly. I know that as a pianist himself, he has had "Monk on the brain," for most of his life. Thus to him this book was clearly a labor of love, a life project -- and it shows. It is not just a biography of Monk but an archaeological dig and exploration of him, his history as a person and as a Jazz musician, his character, his music, his life and his loves, his demons. It is a book that both the musically literate and those just fascinated by the personality of Monk can all enjoy equally.
My hat is off to Kelly for writing a book that does justice to this great American musician and hero. Five stars
Enjoyed the book - Kindle Edition May 20, 2010
Dan S.
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
These are some excellent reviews - I have little to add other than to comment that I found the research thorough, the level of detail appropriate to the subject matter, and the writing accurate appealingly non-academic - an all around enjoyable and informative read about T. Monk and this seminal period of American jazz history in general.
For my Kindle brethren: the pictures from the center of the book ARE included in the end material of the Kindle edition. However, because you are viewing them on the Kindle e-ink, and not on glossy paper stock, they are not of the high quality you will receive in the paper edition. Despite this, I found it completely worth the Kindle price.
 Lots of details but the center is missing May 18, 2010
Louie the King (Detroit, MI USA)
7 out of 12 found this review helpful
The author is not a biographer per se, but rather a (much published) social historian with a leftist/racial grievance axe to grind. He frequently portrays, without any evidence, Monk's supposed reaction to events like the Sharpeville massacre in South Africa, or the death of Emmett Till in the U.S.; yet he will then go to the absurd extent of documenting exactly which airplane took Monk on his first trip to France! Thus there is an uneasy combination of free-associating politico-racial attitudes with little or no evidence, combined with a pedantic literalness of documentation on other matters.
Kelley's portrait of Monk shifts depending on which source he is following. For example, sometimes Kelley sympathetically treats Monk's reputation, from very early on in his career, for being undependable, as a slander/falsehood; but then he quotes sources repeatedly describing Monk's being hours late for gigs, or not showing up at all, or leaving his band on the stage to fend for themselves during a concert. To my knowledge Kelley is the first biographer to state that Monk used heroin regularly at some points in his life (without, however, apparently becoming an addict). The evidence for this seems to be based upon one or two individual, unpublished personal interviews; one wonders what other sources would have to say on this issue? Throughout, Kelley shifts perspective on Monk depending on what his sources say. He does not synthesize or reconcile these contradictions into a coherent account of Monk's character.
He pursues often irrelevant details at great length even though they take him away from the object of his study. When he sticks to Monk, it becomes clear that Kelley has amassed a huge amount of data about the life of this seminal figure in jazz, but it is all relatively undigested. Kelley has done yeoman work in tracking down and interviewing sources and unearthing documentation, but the writing is stiff, academic, and dull, with little narrative momentum. This book is worth reading as "raw material" for anyone interested in this fascinating, frustratingly enigmatic musician; but the definitive portrait of Monk as a man and artist remains to be written.
 "Sometimes I play things I never heard myself." May 3, 2010
John Sollami (Stamford, CT)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
From his great-grandparents to his wife, children, and friends, Thelonious Monk, the High Priest of Bebop, is presented in full. Embedded in the context of American history, race relations, and the American black experience in the twentieth century, Monk's life begins in the South, but his mother Barbara takes her struggling family and young son north to New York City and leaves her suffering husband behind. There she gets a job as a cleaner in Children's Court. Monk studies the piano and soon outstrips his instructor as he moves into new directions and eventually into jazz and the musical haunts of Harlem. The early chapters of this book are far more interesting, I found, than the later chapters. Monk was fully formed when he took the bandstand in the forties, but it took decades for the public to catch up to his musicality and to appreciate how much he had expanded the musical landscape. His personal freedom and refusal to bend to convention made him stand above the crowd. But it also cost him years of impoverishment, struggle, frustration, and lack of work. Club owners refused to hire him. Others didn't like his latenesses, his odd behavior, and his attitude. Nonetheless, the music triumphed. At the end of this book, I grew weary of all the details of every club date, but I also longed to hear the music again: of Bud Powell, Sonny Rollins, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Charlie Rouse, but most of all the High Priest himself, the great Monk!
 not for the man April 25, 2010
Steven Deroos (indiana)
1 out of 26 found this review helpful
Really. 5 stars? Come on. Yes the book was well written. Who cares. Monk is just not that interesting. I finished the book because it became a mission. A quest. If your interested in Monk, don't get your information here. The main problem with the book is this. I have to put this delicately. The author sees things in black and white if you know what I mean. I'm sorry I bought this book new.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 34
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