Thelonious Monk, the great American jazz artist, during the first half of his
junior year at Stuyvesant High School in New York, showed up in class only 16
out of 92 days and received zeros in every one of his subjects. His mother,
Barbara Monk, would not have been pleased. She had brought her three children to
New York from North Carolina, effectively leaving behind her husband, who
suffered bad health, and raising the family on her own, in order that they might
receive a proper education. But Mrs. Monk, like a succession of canny,
tough-minded, loving and very indulgent women in Thelonious Monk’s life,
understood that her middle child had a large gift and was put on this earth to
play piano. Presently, her son was off on a two-year musical tour of the United
States, playing a kind of sanctified R & B piano in the employ, with the rest of
his small band, of a traveling woman evangelist.
The brilliant pianist Mary Lou Williams, seven years Monk’s senior and working
at the time for Andy Kirk’s Clouds of Joy orchestra, heard Monk play at a
late-night jam session in Kansas City in 1935. Monk, born in 1917, would have
been 18 or so at the time. When not playing to the faithful, he sought out the
musical action in centers like Kansas City. Williams would later claim that even
as a teenager, Monk “really used to blow on piano. . . . He was one of the
original modernists all right, playing pretty much the same harmonies then that
he’s playing now.”
It was those harmonies — with their radical, often dissonant chord voicings,
along with the complex rhythms, “misplaced” accents, startling shifts in
dynamics, hesitations and silences — that, even in embryonic form, Williams was
hearing for the first time. It’s an angular, splintered sound, percussive in
attack and asymmetrical, music that always manages to swing hard and respect the
melody. Monk was big on melody. Thelonious Monk’s body of work, as composer and
player (the jazz critic Whitney Balliett called Monk’s compositions “frozen . .
. improvisations” and his improvisations “molten . . . compositions”), sits as
comfortably beside Bartok’s Hungarian folk-influenced compositions for solo
piano as it does beside the music of jazz giants like James P. Johnson, Teddy
Wilson and Duke Ellington, some of the more obvious influences on Monk. It’s
unclear how much of Bartok he listened to. Monk did know well and play
Rachmaninoff, Liszt and Chopin (especially Chopin). Stravinsky was also a
favorite.
Robin D. G. Kelley, in his extraordinary and heroically detailed new biography,
“Thelonious Monk,” makes a large point time and time again that Monk was no
primitive, as so many have characterized him. At the age of 11, he was taught by
Simon Wolf, an Austrian émigré who had studied under the concertmaster for the
New York Philharmonic. Wolf told the parent of another student, after not too
many sessions with young Thelonious: “I don’t think there will be anything I can
teach him. He will go beyond me very soon.” But the direction the boy would go
in, after two years of classical lessons, was jazz.
Monk was well enough known and appreciated in his lifetime to have appeared on
the cover of the Feb. 28, 1964, issue of Time magazine. He was 46 at the time,
and after many years of neglect and scuffling had become one of the principal
faces and sounds of contemporary jazz. The Time article, by Barry Farrell, is,
given the vintage and target audience, well done, both positive and fair, and
accurate in the main. But it does make much of its subject’s eccentricities, and
refers to Monk’s considerable and erratic drug and alcohol use. This last would
have raised eyebrows in the white middle-class America of that era.
Throughout the book, Kelley plays down Monk’s “weirdness,” or at least
contextualizes it. But Monk did little to discourage the popular view of him as
odd. Always a sharp dresser and stickler for just the right look, he also
favored a wide array of unconventional headgear: astrakhan, Japanese skullcap,
Stetson, tam-o’-shanter. He had a trickster sense of humor, in life and in
music, and he loved keeping people off-balance in both realms. Off-balance was
the plane on which Monk existed. He also liked to dance during group
performances, but this served very real functions: first, as a method of
conducting, communicating musical instructions to the band members; and second,
to let them know that he dug their playing when they were in a groove and
swinging.
Even early in his career, Monk often insisted on showing up late to gigs,
driving bandleaders, club owners and audiences to distraction. And on occasion
he would simply fall asleep at the piano. He would also disappear to his room in
the family apartment for two weeks at a time. When he was young, these behaviors
or idiosyncrasies were tolerated and, more or less, manageable. But the manic,
erratic behavior turned out to be the precursor of a more serious bipolar
illness that would over time become immobilizing. From his father, Thelonious
Sr., who was gone from the scene by the time Monk was 11, Thelonious Jr. seems
to have gotten his musical gene (there always seems to be one in there). But he
also inherited his father’s illness. Monk Sr. was committed to the State
Hospital for the Colored Insane in Goldsboro, N.C., at the age of 52, in 1941.
He never left.
Kelley, the author of “Race Rebels” and other books, makes use of the “carpet
bombing” method in this biography. It is not pretty, or terribly selective, but
it is thorough and hugely effective. He knows music, especially Monk’s music,
and his descriptions of assorted studio and live dates, along with what Monk is
up to musically throughout, are handled expertly. The familiar episodes of
Monk’s career are all well covered: the years as house pianist at Minton’s
after-hours club in Harlem, which served as an incubator for the new “modern
music,” later to be called bebop; the brilliant “Genius of Modern Music”
sessions for Blue Note, Monk’s first recordings with him as the bandleader; the
drug bust, where Monk took the rap for Bud Powell and lost his New York cabaret
license for six years; his triumphant return in 1957 with his quartet, featuring
John Coltrane, at the Five Spot; the terrible beating Monk took for resisting
arrest in New Castle, Del.; the final dissolution and breakdown. Likewise, the
characters in Monk’s life and career are well served: his fellow musicians; his
family; his friend and benefactor, the fascinating Pannonica (Nica) de
Koenigswarter, the “jazz baroness,” at whose home in Weehawken, N.J., Monk spent
his final years. He would die, after a long silence, in 1982, in the arms of his
wife, Nellie.
Musicians — particularly jazz musicians of Monk’s period, and most especially
Monk, taciturn and gnomic in utterance by nature — tend not, as writers do, to
write hundreds of letters sharing with intimates what is going on in their
hearts or heads. A biography of Monk, perforce, has to rely on the not always
reliable, often conflicting, memories of others. Instinct is involved, surely as
much as perspicacity, in sifting through the mass of observation and anecdote.
The Monk family appears to have shared private material with Kelley that had
hitherto been unavailable. This trust was not misplaced. There will be shapelier
and more elegantly written biographies to come — Monk, the man and the music, is
an endlessly fascinating subject — but I doubt there will be a biography anytime
soon that is as textured, thorough and knowing as Kelley’s. The “genius of
modern music” has gotten the passionate, and compassionate, advocate he
deserves. h
Freddie Hubbard, a jazz trumpeter who dazzled audiences and critics alike
with his virtuosity, his melodicism and his infectious energy, died on Monday in
Sherman Oaks, Calif. He was 70 and lived in Sherman Oaks.
The cause was complications of a heart attack he had on Nov. 26, said his
spokesman, Don Lucoff of DL Media.
Over a career that began in the late 1950s, Mr. Hubbard earned both critical
praise and commercial success — although rarely for the same projects.
He attracted attention in the 1960s for his bravura work as a member of the Jazz
Messengers, the valuable training ground for young musicians led by the veteran
drummer Art Blakey, and on albums by Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and many
others. He also recorded several well-regarded albums as a leader. And although
he was not an avant-gardist by temperament, he participated in three of the
seminal recordings of the 1960s jazz avant-garde: Ornette Coleman’s “Free Jazz”
(1960), Eric Dolphy’s “Out to Lunch” (1964) and John Coltrane’s “Ascension”
(1965).
In the 1970s Mr. Hubbard, like many other jazz musicians of his generation,
began courting a larger audience, with albums that featured electric
instruments, rock and funk rhythms, string arrangements and repertory sprinkled
with pop and R&B songs like Paul McCartney’s “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” and
the Stylistics’ “Betcha by Golly, Wow.” His audience did indeed grow, but his
standing in the jazz world diminished.
By the start of the next decade he had largely abandoned his more commercial
approach and returned to his jazz roots. But his career came to a virtual halt
in 1992 when he damaged his lip, and although he resumed performing and
recording after an extended hiatus, he was never again as powerful a player as
he had been in his prime.
Frederick Dewayne Hubbard was born on April 7, 1938, in Indianapolis. His first
instrument was the alto-brass mellophone, and in high school he studied French
horn and tuba as well as trumpet. After taking lessons with Max Woodbury, the
first trumpeter of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, at the Arthur Jordan
Conservatory of Music, he performed locally with, among others, the guitarist
Wes Montgomery and his brothers.
Mr. Hubbard moved to New York in 1958 and almost immediately began working with
groups led by the saxophonist Sonny Rollins, the drummer Philly Joe Jones and
others. His profile rose in 1960 when he joined the roster of Blue Note, a
leading jazz label; it rose further the next year when he was hired by Blakey,
widely regarded as the music’s premier talent scout.
Adding his own spin to a style informed by Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis and
Clifford Brown, Mr. Hubbard played trumpet with an unusual mix of melodic
inventiveness and technical razzle-dazzle. The critics took notice. Leonard
Feather called him “one of the most skilled, original and forceful trumpeters of
the ’60s.”
After leaving Blakey’s band in 1964, Mr. Hubbard worked for a while with another
drummer-bandleader, Max Roach, before forming his own group in 1966. Four years
later he began recording for CTI, a record company that would soon become known
for its aggressive efforts to market jazz musicians beyond the confines of the
jazz audience.
His first albums for the label, notably “Red Clay,” contained some of the best
playing of his career and, except for slicker production and the presence of
some electric instruments, were not significantly different from his work for
Blue Note. But his later albums on CTI, and the ones he made after leaving the
label for Columbia in 1974, put less and less emphasis on improvisation and
relied more and more on glossy arrangements and pop appeal. They sold well, for
the most part, but were attacked, or in some cases simply ignored, by jazz
critics. Within a few years Mr. Hubbard was expressing regrets about his career
path.
Most of his recordings as a leader from the early 1980s on, for Pablo,
Musicmasters and other labels, were small-group sessions emphasizing his gifts
as an improviser that helped restore his critical reputation. But in 1992 he
suffered a setback from which he never fully recovered.
By Mr. Hubbard’s own account, he seriously injured his upper lip that year by
playing too hard, without warming up, once too often. The lip became infected,
and for the rest of his life it was a struggle for him to play with his
trademark strength and fire. As Howard Mandel explained in a 2008 Down Beat
article, “His ability to project and hold a clear tone was damaged, so his fast
finger flurries often result in blurts and blurs rather than explosive phrases.”
Mr. Hubbard nonetheless continued to perform and record sporadically, primarily
on fluegelhorn rather than on the more demanding trumpet. In his last years he
worked mostly with the trumpeter David Weiss, who featured Mr. Hubbard as a
guest artist with his group, the New Jazz Composers Octet, on albums released
under Mr. Hubbard’s name in 2001 and 2008, and at occasional nightclub
engagements.
Mr. Hubbard won a Grammy Award for the album “First Light” in 1972 and was named
a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 2006.
He is survived by his wife of 35 years, Briggie Hubbard, and his son, Duane.
Mr. Hubbard was once known as the brashest of jazzmen, but his personality as
well as his music mellowed in the wake of his lip problems. In a 1995 interview
with Fred Shuster of Down Beat, he offered some sober advice to younger
musicians: “Don’t make the mistake I made of not taking care of myself. Please,
keep your chops cool and don’t overblow.”
