Charlotte Zwerin’s Monk Documentary

Cover of the DVD packaging for the documentary being discussed (from its Amazon.com Web page)

Listening to Philip Greenlief’s solo tenor saxophone account of the music of Thelonious Monk ten days ago turned out to trigger two key personal memories of Monk and his music. The earlier of those memories came from when, during my graduate student days, I would take a break by traveling down to New York, where I was able to listen to Monk perform at the Village Vanguard. The other was the recollection of seeing Charlotte Zwerin’s Monk documentary, Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser. The New York encounters took place during the second half of the Sixties. Zwerin’s documentary was released in 1988, but almost all of the content footage was shot by cinematographer Christian Blackwood and his brother Michael around that same time that I was hanging out at the Vanguard. The two of them closely followed Monk for six months, capturing both performances and day-to-day life primarily in New York and on tour in Europe. Blackwood also filmed Monk’s funeral after his death on February 17, 1982.

Prior to the first of my visits to the Vanguard, I was aware of a few Monk recordings and less than a handful of his tunes. Having spent almost all of my time with the classical repertoire, I was pathetically ill-equipped to listen to jazz as far out as any of Monk’s themes, let alone his improvisations on those themes. I also knew nothing about Monk’s practices as a performer, and my most salient recollection of those Vanguard sessions was that he scared the living daylights out of me.

Much of that was probably a reaction to his keyboard technique. He tended to keep all ten fingers in play with almost violent force. As a result, just about every tune emerged through a maelstrom of arrhythmic tone clusters, almost as if the tune was the signal trying to work its way through the noise of Monk’s unmistakable keyboard technique. The Blackwood brothers captured that technique with such accuracy that all of my fearful impressions once again rose to the surface while watching Zwerin’s documentary. Furthermore, they were punctuated by off-stage views of Monk that tended to capture a mind that was always somewhere else, possibly teetering delicately on any sense of stability.

Revisiting that documentary, I realize that no one could ever play Monk’s music the way that Monk did it himself. Early in Zwerin’s documentary, we encounter two of the foremost jazz pianists of the second half of the twentieth century, Tommy Flanagan and Barry Harris. They are in the process of preparing a two-piano account of one of Monk’s tunes, and the documentary captures them poring over Monk’s charts trying to make sense of how the marks on paper will guide them through their performance efforts. If pianists as skilled as they were struggled to figure out how to give an acceptable account of Monk’s music, what hope can there every be for the well-intentioned efforts of any listener?

The fact is that, in working with all that footage from the Blackwood brothers, Zwerin never tries to elaborate on, let alone explain, the phenomena behind either Monk making music or the effort behind trying to listen to the music being made. Having struggled with those listening efforts for half a century, I find that I can offer little more by way of explanation than that God-awful cliché: “It is what it is.” Mind you, one can always find a point of reference in the six CDs that Frank Kimbrough’s quartet recorded for the album Monk’s Dreams: The Complete Compositions of Thelonious Sphere Monk. This is not to say that Kimbrough’s account of Monk’s thematic material is inadequate. However, every one of those tunes has been “untimely ripp’d” from the context of “being Monk,” particularly when that tune has emerged from what is almost a tortured relationship between an extraordinarily imaginative jazz pianist and his instrument.