By Kenny Mathieson

A crucial development arrived in 1941, when Teddy Hill was hiring a house rhythm section for the newly opened Minton's Playhouse in Harlem. Hill originally wanted his former band pianist, Sonny White, for the job, but he was unavailable, and Monk was hired to work with Kenny Clarke and trumpeter Joe Guy as the basis of a house band which would bring in young musicians for the jam sessions described in the opening chapter.

By this stage, Monk had already developed his unique style, with its highly original harmonic progressions, dissonant intervals and oblique, angular rhythms, although his scant recordings of the period also reveal his willingness to adopt more conventional bop strategies when the setting demanded, as in the live recordings made at Minton's with Don Byas and others, and his first studio recordings, cut with the saxophonist Coleman Hawkins on 19 October, 1944, which were originally issued as two 78rpm singles, and later collected by Prestige on LP as Bean and the Boys (tapes with Charlie Christian at Minton's, long thought to illustrate Monk playing in a Teddy Wilson-like manner, almost certainly actually feature Kenny Kersey rather than Monk on piano).

Even on the session with Hawkins, though, distinctive Monk touches can be discerned, notably in On The Bean, where he has a half-chorus solo, and Flying Hawk, where he manages to interpolate an allusion to his own Well, You Needn't. Unlike many of his swing-era peers, Hawkins was not dismissive of the new developments (he was, in fact, a forerunner of many of them), and relished the challenge laid down in the cut and thrust of places like Minton's, Monroe's and Kelly's Stables, all of which the pianist also frequented. Hawkins was ready to hire Monk when nobody else would, and the pianist was a regular part of the saxophonist's band at this time, and appeared with him in Norman Granz's first concert at the Philharmonic Hall in Los Angeles in November, 1945, the event which launched Granz's long-running Jazz at the Philharmonic series.

Monk went on to play with big bands led by Lucky Millinder, Cootie Williams, and Dizzy Gillespie, for whom he arranged some of his own music (he is heard on some selections on a live recording from 1946 with the trumpeter's band, released as The Legendary Dizzy Gillespie Big Band - Live 1946 on the Bandstand label, but his unreliability led to his being replaced by John Lewis). For the most part, though, he did not receive the kind of attention given to Gillespie and Parker until much later in his career, despite his crucial contribution to the emergence of bebop.

There are many reasons why this is the case, including his personal and musical eccentricities, and his unwillingness to push himself forward commercially in the way that Dizzy was happy to do, although in his own singular way, Monk was also something of a showman on stage. His famous dances around the piano were long interpreted as simple eccentricity, but more astute observers have recognized that they were Monk's way of encouraging, and even conducting, the band. According to Mary Lou Williams, it was Monk who first began to wear a beret and horn-rim glasses, but it was Dizzy who turned them into bebop's trademark image (headgear remained a preoccuption throughout the pianist's life, and he was rarely seen without a hat of some kind). Teddy Hill (in Peck's P.M. article) has surmised that Monk's home background may also have played a part in that reluctance.

"Monk seemed more like the guy who manufactured the product rather than commercialized it. Dizzy had gotten all the exploitation because Dizzy branched out and got started. Monk stayed right in the same groove. One reason for it, I guess, is that he was living at home with his own people. Maybe if the guy had to stand on his own two feet it might have been different. But knowing he had a place to eat and sleep, that might have had a lot to do with it. Dizzy had to be on time to keep the landlady from saying, 'You don't live here any more.' Monk never had that worry."

Monk, though, was never going to fit into anyone's neat pigeon-hole. His predisposition to withdraw into inward-looking reflection was contradicted by his eccentric behavioural habits and demeanour. More importantly, his music ran contrary to the central thrust of bebop -- he never cultivated the kind of consummate virtuoso single-line execution which made Bud Powell the quintessential bebop pianist, and his interests lay more in the compositional possibilities of the advanced harmonies developed by the boppers, rather than in using them as a vehicle for the kind of pyrotechnic uptempo brilliance heard in Bird or Diz. And above all, he was interested in melody and rhythm.

In structural terms, his music rarely diverged from the standard 12-bar and 32-bar forms of the era, although he would remould them if it suited his purposes, as in the odd-metre lengths incorporated in tunes like Brilliant Corners, with its 7-bar bridge, or the 5-bar melody on Coming On The Hudson. For the most part, though, he was content to work with received standard forms, and transform them by his own peculiar alchemy. Laurent De Wilde argues that for Monk, form "is a kind of basic necessity, since each music has one, but does not deserve any particular attention. The case of Evidence is a perfect example: it imposes a clever and original conception within a given form, without challenging the principle of the form", but goes on to acknowledge that the pianist invariably introduced his own twists within that form -- "Even in a basic blues like Straight, No Chaser, you get turned around."

Nor was Monk willing to make compromises to suit the whims of others on the bandstand. His insistence that anyone who played with him played his way did not sit well with many of his potential colleagues of the time, who were used to having their head rather than facing the discipline of trying to absorb this spiky, demanding music, where even familiar standards were re-cast in strange new harmonisations.

He worked only sporadically in the mid-1940s, but continued to develop his music whenever possible, and convened gatherings of musicians to work on his ideas in his kitchen, where the modestly-proportioned room was eventually dominated by a grand piano given to him by the Baldwin company (it took the place of the old upright piano of his early days, and visitors have reported that it was often covered in all manner of household paraphernalia). Bud Powell, Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins were among those who attended, while another participant, the saxophonist Budd Johnston, has reported that in private, Monk would admit to feeling somewhat bitter about the success enjoyed by Gillespie and Parker, and his own exclusion.

© Kenny Mathieson, 1999