Mainstreaming Monk: The Ellington Album

Abstract

He is, think, major jazz composer, the first since Duke Ellington. --Martin Williams (1963, 33) Monk took much of his style from Ellington and he would like to have been an accomplished pianist who could have articulated in the fashion of Ellington. --Clark Terry (quoted in Voce 1985) Ellington defined 101 arranging concepts and focused on sound. sound was the important thing. Thelonious did the same thing. --Larry Ridley (quoted in Gourse 1997, 259) continue to feel that to properly appreciate work and his position in jazz history it is essential to understand that he stands in direct line of succession from Morton and Ellington. --Orrin Keepnews (1986a, [2]) Duke Ellington's name surfaces often in discussions of Thelonious Monk. links between the two musicians seem so close as to be selfevident and irrefutable. Both excelled as composers in musical tradition known for its emphasis on improvisation. Both were distinctive pianists who displayed stylistic affinities--a percussive attack, penchant for dissonance, shared interest in Harlem stride. Both belonged to select group of exceptional figures in jazz--Jelly Roll Morton, John Lewis, and Charles Mingus also come to mind--who put their individual stamp on the ensembles that performed their works. Both created unique worlds of sound that set them apart from their contemporaries. Although their personalities and careers may have been poles apart, Monk and Ellington, so the literature on jazz reminds us repeatedly, were kindred spirits. Ellington thought so, too, apparently. He first heard music, according to trumpeter Ray Nance, in the summer of 1948. Nance was traveling with Ellington and small group of musicians on short tour of England and had taken with him a portable gramophone. As Nance told Stanley Dance in 1966 interview: I was on my way to Bournemouth, Hampshire, by train, and in my compartment put on one of my Thelonious Monk records. Duke was passing by in the corridor, and he stopped and asked, `Who's that playing?' told him. `Sounds like he's stealing some of my stuff,' he said. So he sat down and listened to my records, and he was very interested. He understood what Monk was doing (Dance 1981, 139).(1) In later years, Ellington and his orchestra occasionally appeared at festivals that featured Monk on the same bill. On one occasion, the 1962 Newport Jazz Festival, Monk sat in with the Ellington orchestra to play his own Monk's Dream and the Billy Strayhom homage Frere Monk, the latter twelve-bar blues with vaguely Monkian head and dissonant riff figures, including flatted-fifth chords in the last chorus. Both pieces were recorded by Ellington (without Monk) in September 1962 but not issued until the 1980s. They serve to reinforce the notion of musical kinship between Monk and Ellington--a relationship that Monk himself had invited listeners to consider seven years earlier. was July 1955 when Monk--a thirty-seven-year-old pianist and composer still not widely known to the public--made his debut recording for the Riverside label, released under the title Thelonious Monk Plays Duke Ellington (Riverside RLP 12-201). Backed by bassist Oscar Pettiford and drummer Kenny Clarke, the enigmatic, reclusive Monk interpreted eight compositions by the popular, internationally acclaimed Ellington. Nearly all were standards frequently performed by singers and instrumentalists: Sophisticated Lady, I Got Bad (and That Ain't Good), Solitude, Mood Indigo, It Don't Mean Thing If Ain't Got That Swing, I Let Song Go Out of My Heart, and the Ellington-Juan Tizol collaboration Caravan. exception was Black and Tan Fantasy, piece dating from 1927 that was closely identified with the Ellington orchestra and seldom played by others. Three years later, in 1958, the album was repackaged and reissued by Riverside with painting by Henri Rousseau, The Repast of the Lion, reproduced on the cover (see Fig. …