Epistrophy Epiphany

I just finished reading Robin D. G. Kelley’s Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of An American Original last week. It’s a heroically researched chunk of words and I’d have to stand in awe of it even if it wasn’t about one of my favorite musicians ever.

Kelley interviewed tons of family members, musical peers and friends as would be expected, but he goes deeper than any other musician biography I’ve ever read. He also rounds up people who went to see random gigs, checks the decades-old logs of the local musician unions and investigates mental health medical practices through Monk’s lifetime.

It all adds up to an incredible amount of myth-busting. The over-arching script on Monk has been that he was a naïve, unsophisticated genius whose weird plunkings on the piano magically produced brilliant music. It’s a classic bit of essentialism, one that posits Monk must’ve been tapping into some kind of native ooga-booga pool of talent that al Negroes must possess. Kelley puts all that to rest and does so pretty definitively, I think. He peels away the curtain of enigma and reveals Monk as a family man, a fiercely loyal friend and an artist attuned to the social and artistic changes of his time.

All of Kelley’s archeology flips the script of the eccentric genius living in a rarefied air. In fact, against the backdrop of previous understandings, the portrait of Monk as a community-minded paterfamilias is a radical one. The book’s intensively researched but that research is not just obsessive digging; it grounds Monk in a specific place and time. For example, you’d never know how many benefits for the United Nations and civil rights initiatives Monk played without reading this book.

Life & Times smartly focuses on work; it’s almost a labor diary of when, where and how much Thelonious earned. That’s important for two reasons. The first reason is such a thorough, chronological focus on gigs and contracts underscores the simple fact that, as a musician, you don’t eat if you’re not working. The The second is that you see how Thelonious’s genius didn’t pay off until relatively late in his life and the role that preconceptions and, occasionally, institutional racism played in all of that.

But, despite the mountains of footnotes, Kelley creates a lively, funny and fleshed-out rendering of Monk. Anyone who reads it will never hear Thelonious’ music the same way again.

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