Thelonious Monk Research Articles

Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, by Robin D. G. Kelley . New York: Free Press, 2009. xviii, 588 pp.

Book Review| August 01 2011 Review: Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original by Robin D. G. Kelley Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, by Robin D. G. Kelley. New York: Free Press, 2009. xviii, 588 pp. David Ake David Ake DAVID AKE is Associate Professor in the Department of Music at the University of Nevada, Reno. He authored the books Jazz Cultures (2002) and Jazz Matters (2010)—both University of California Press—and coedited, with Charles Hiroshi Garrett and Daniel Goldmark, the collection Jazz/Not Jazz (forthcoming, 2012). An active pianist and composer, he has worked alongside many of today's outstanding improvising musicians. Recordings include the solo-piano CD In Between (2005) and The Dark with EEA (Origin Records, 2010). Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the American Musicological Society (2011) 64 (2): 460–464. https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2011.64.2.460 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation David Ake; Review: Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original by Robin D. G. Kelley. Journal of the American Musicological Society 1 August 2011; 64 (2): 460–464. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2011.64.2.460 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentJournal of the American Musicological Society Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2011 by the American Musicological Society. All rights reserved.2011 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Naxos Music Library Jazz (review)

Reviewed by: Naxos Music Library Jazz Sha Towers Naxos Music Library Jazz. Naxos Digital Services. http://www.naxosmusiclibrary.com/jazz/ (Accessed August 2010-December 2010). [Requires a Web browser and an Internet connection, sound card with speakers/headphones, and Adobe Flash Player 9 or higher. Pricing: $70 per user (annual subscription).] In 2004, Naxos Digital Services launched both its classical music streaming service (Naxos Music Library) and what would be the first jazz-focused music streaming service, Naxos Music Library Jazz (hereafter NMLJ). As of November 2010, Naxos reports the inclusion of over 52,000 tracks representing nearly 9,000 artists. Coverage As of this review, NMLJ included 109 record labels with 4,463 albums, however all of [End Page 807] these recordings are not available in the U.S. (or several other countries) due to copyright restrictions.1 Considering just the materials available in the United States, 20 percent of the labels in NMLJ have only one album. Sixty percent of the labels in NMLJ offer ten or fewer albums. The second and third largest labels, Challenge Classics (357) and Enja (351), make up 16 percent of the database, while the largest portion of NMLJ is comprised of the labels under the umbrella of Fantasy Records. Totaling more than 2,100 albums, the body of materials from Fantasy Records makes up 48 percent of NMLJ. While Fantasy Records has been involved in recording all kinds of music (making its first big break thanks to its relationship with Creedence Clearwater Revival), the company got its start in jazz with their first recording artist, Dave Brubeck. Fantasy went on to record other jazz artists like Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, Cal Tjader, Cannonball Adderley, Woody Herman, Bill Evans, Sonny Rollins, and Vince Guaraldi. In the 1970s the company began acquiring a number of independent jazz labels, a move that resulted in an extensive reissue program of recordings of landmark figures like Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, and the Modern Jazz Quartet.2 Navigating NMLJ The NMLJ homepage is clean and functional. Recent and featured additions can be browsed here and clicking on "more recent additions" displays the most recent upload (including artist/title/catalog number and date added to NMLJ. This page also provides options to select different date ranges (roughly a month's worth at a time). An RSS feed for new additions is also available. The main navigation for the site is found in the header with tabs for Labels, Artists, Composers, Genres, Playlists, and Advanced Search. The header also includes a keyword search box. Links to help files (searching tips, user instructions, and FAQs), though present, might be more effective if displayed more prominently with the rest of the main navigation. The searching tips file was obviously borrowed wholesale from Naxos Music Library (as all of the examples are drawn from the realm of Western classical music), suggesting that support for NMLJ was an afterthought. Browsing The "Labels" tab provides quick, easy access to all labels included in NMLJ, though this page doesn't indicate the quantity of recordings associated with each (see Fig. 1 for total number of albums per label). Clicking on a label name links to a list of its recordings and includes an icon and brief description of the label (ex. from Naxos Jazz Legends: "This label is devoted to the great jazz musicians of the past, from Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman and Louis Armstrong to Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Django Reinhardt.") The description is most useful when encountering unfamiliar labels ("Oh, they focus on Icelandic rag time cylinder reissues?"), but for companies [End Page 808] that are not exclusively jazz-related, the description may not be that helpful, as the information is not customized to explain why recordings from this label are included in NMLJ. However, selecting recordings from the list will at least indicate the assigned genre, which may help to discern a label's focus. The "Artists" and "Composers" pages provide a convenient way to browse people in the database. Some birth/death dates are included. Both tabs suggest the inclusion of biographies, though these appear to be rare (ex. Louis Armstrong). What biographies do exist seem to come from...

The Right Mistakes: Confronting the “Old Question” of Thelonious Monk's Chops

Though once considered an incompetent pianist, Thelonious Monk has long been celebrated for his playing as much as for his compositions. Yet his pianism continues to occasion critical unease; a defensiveness is detectable in discussions of Monk's technique even today. This may be because considerations of Monk's playing tend to avoid or finesse peculiarities that raised questions about his ability in the first place. These include the jarring dissonances which strike some listeners as mistakes. Examination of Monk's dissonance usage suggests two analytic categories. “Timbral dissonance” is an aspect of tone, idiomatic to the Black music tradition. The more idiosyncratic “syntactic dissonance” serves, rather, to challenge or subvert musical conventions. An analysis of Monk's 1968 solo recording of “Round Midnight” focuses on syntactic “wrong-note” dissonances. Neither errors nor merely facets of Monk's tone, their significance is bound up with their “wrongness”: they make sense because they sound wrong in a meaningful way, as significations on musical norms. Considered in pertinent contexts—the chord changes, the jazz piano tradition, and the improvisational process—Monk's “mistakes” evince a trickster logic, wry humor, and a precision that speaks directly to lingering uncertainty regarding his technical accuracy.

Thelonious Monk Meets the French Critics: Art and Entertainment, Improvisation, and its Simulacrum

By the late 1950s, Thelonious Monk had become a figure of veneration in French modern jazz circles. But in the first years of the following decade, the pianist’s French critics—like those in other parts of the world—began to censure Monk for having ceased to “evolve”; this trend reached something of an apotheosis in a 1964 Jazz Magazine article, in which Michel-Claude Jalard condemned Monk for having presented the mere “simulacra” of former improvisations in his then-recent Paris performances. Focussing on Jalard’s argument, the article puts this French critical trend in context, showing how issues widely occurring in Monk’s 1960s reception were revoiced by French writers in the language, and to the ends, of a specific and local debate between jazz writers—one which centered on oppositions of modernity and tradition, art and entertainment, and the political left and right. The piece goes on to further explore some of these “French” arguments by way of a musical analysis of several live performances of the standard “Lulu’s Back in Town,” as given by Monk’s quartet during its European tour of 1966. In taking a somewhat unfamiliar theoretical literature as its interpretive starting point, this analysis aims to give new and newly precise answers to questions the French writers—and many commentators after them—would ask of the pianist, and which recent scholarly work concerned above all else with dialogue and interaction has only partly equipped us to answer: where in Monk’s music is the line between improvisation and composition, between improviser’s art and entertainer’s act, and why have critics thought it mattered?

Sharing the Gift of Jazz

The Society for Jazz Education seeks to meet the needs of MENC members concerned with jazz education—to provide them with a strong voice within MENC in the hope that every student in America might experience jazz in ways that broaden and deepen their musical lives. The society was established to improve the quality of jazz teaching and research at all levels, and at its heart is its founder and director, Willie L. Hill Jr. Currently a professor of music education at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and the director of the UMass Fine Arts Center, Hill has served as director of education for the Thelonious Monk

Monk Trio: A Sequence of Sonnets

Poet Mark Haywood presents three sonnets that explore the life and music of Thelonious Monk, the great jazz pianist and composer.

Thelonious Monk on a Subway

JAZZ POETRY Thelonious Monk on a Subway I metMonk ona subway, coming through thetunnel. Hiswordsfell outbetween thick beardhairs, then lumbered toward me,pausedandsighed. Whenthetrain jerked, hislong fingers reached out, touched mypaleshoulder: heworea rust brown coat. Intervals rode thetrack with us:E-flat, D, C andD. Harmonious fifths, andmismatched chords. He explained that themelodies weredots hishandswanted toconnect. I didn'tunderstand soheinvited metohishome. Weemerged from underground and walked. Step, step, stop overthin tones ofSanJuan Hill.Thesunmovedcloser. Step, pause, step.He smiled that slowspreading smile, shookhandswith a man heknew, mumbled andmovedon. Step, step. OnWestSixty-Third, hefound hisdoor, removed hishat, andknocked. Nellietookhishat. Monk'sfingers lipped thewhite keys, unlocked blackones. He tapped, crossed andbangedagain, rolled hisring intoplace. Evolving patterns unclenched ina danceofabrupt imagination, infinite extrusion. 301WorldLiterature Today cc z O CO UJ cc < a. leftLauren Camp, LoudestNoise,2002, threadworkon layered and rustedcotton, rayonand silk,39" x 59" (adapted from a photo by Don Hunstein). Editorial note:For information about Camp's upcoming art exhibitioninPittsburgh, see page 80. Musicdidn't pourout, didn't puddle. He wrung it from hispalms, revived it,gathered itinagainand playedfor hours - "RoundMidnight" and"BlueMonk," theangles oflines merging until myheadwasfull ofsquares andcurves, thetruth ofspheres. He drewsilence onthat piano inhiskitchen until thesuncameup. I drank another cupoftea andleft through thesmalldoor tothecity, thegraygreen emerging light thesameas anyother day,but thecorners ofhismelodies kept opening andclosing, making infinite space inthechunky dankness oftheswilled avenue. Selectionsfrom Camp's Playlist Thelonious Monk playingany of hisown compositions (solo or ina group) EricDolphy's "Something Sweet, Something Tender" Anyof Duke Ellington'ssuites a Ella Fitzgerald,PureElla (1994) a VijayIyer& RudreshMahanthappa, Raw Materials(2006) March- April2011 i 31 ...

Hey, What’s That Sound?

Hey, What’s That Sound? Hua Hsu (bio) Struggling to Define a Nation: American Music and the Twentieth Century. By Charles Hiroshi Garrett. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. 312 pages, illustrated. $24.95 (paper). Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music. By David Suisman. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. 368 pages, illustrated. $29.95 (cloth). Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow. By Karl Hagstrom Miller. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010. 384 pages. $84.95 (cloth). $23.95 (paper). Medium Cool: Music Videos From Soundies to Cell Phones. Edited by Roger Beebe and Jason Middleton. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007. 360 pages, illustrated. $89.95 (cloth). $24.95 (paper). 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This to Sing About. By Joshua Clover. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. 198 pages, illustrated. $21.95 (cloth). $16.95 (paper). “You may be sitting in a room reading this book,” writes the American composer Aaron Copeland in the opening pages of his 1939 book, What to Listen for in Music.1 The title of Copeland’s foray into music appreciation presumes an answer. After all, who would buy such a book merely to confirm the accuracy of his own senses? Over the course of his gently didactic pages, Copeland carefully calibrates his reader’s critical apparatus and offers a readymade vocabulary to deal with issues of form, technique, and style. But he also captures another of music’s effects. In his introductory notes, as if by accident, he describes the sublime thrill that precedes issues of scale, tone, timbre, or rhythm, if it does not negate their importance altogether: “Imagine one note struck on the piano. Immediately that one note is enough to change the atmosphere of the room—proving that the sound element in music is a powerful [End Page 963] and mysterious agent, which it would be foolish to deride or belittle.”2 For many of us, this is answer enough: it is precisely music’s capacity to produce “powerful” and “mysterious” effects that strikes us to our very core. As that note trembles in the air, everything changes. Whether it is a composition that baffles or annoys us, drawing us deep into its inscrutable layers, or a charming tune that feels eerily familiar upon first listen, we react to music at a seemingly instinctual level first. Copeland’s authority notwithstanding, most of us do not believe we need to be told “what to listen for”—rather, music feels like a self-evident truth. Perhaps this is why writing about music has always seemed an undignified pursuit. The durable and oft-deployed comment comparing writing about music to “dancing about architecture” offers the swiftest retort, and maybe the murkiness of the remark’s origins—it has been attributed to Frank Lloyd Wright, Thelonious Monk, Elvis Costello, David Byrne, and Frank Zappa, among others—epitomizes the timeless, everyman nature of this resistance to intellectualizing musical pleasures, as if the plaint were so universal that it simply doesn’t matter who uttered it first.3 The keepers of mystery will always claim the high ground, for the connections we forge with pop songs seem beyond scrutiny. What motivates this distrust toward thinking too deeply about the history or effects of popular music? What is at stake when we write or theorize about music? And how did we come to anticipate such intimate responses to pop music—how did we learn what to listen for? Perhaps this ambivalence toward the concentrated study of popular music points to a fear that we will somehow taint or undo our feelings about the past—and perhaps this fear is a valid one. Pop songs do not exist outside of history, even if they work by making us think otherwise, as though time were standing still. One might hear, encoded in twentieth-century song the mythology of nation building, the consolidation of publics and counterpublics, the testing of new identities. Pop songs are artifacts cataloging discarded styles and formerly fashionable ideas about pleasure and pain, performance and spectatorship. These five new books about music in the twentieth century show what can happen when one listens closely...

Review of Robin D. G. Kelley, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original

New York: Free Press, 2009. 336 pp

Clawing at the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever

One of the greatest things about the collaboration between Miles Davis and John Coltrane during the mid to late 1950s was the fact that it occurred in two stages, with a significant break in between (during the year 1957) when Coltrane played with Thelonious Monk. In fact, one of the better things to come out of the Davis/Coltrane collaboration was the Monk/Coltrane collaboration. The trombonist J.J. Johnson described that band as follows: Since Charlie Parker, the most electrifying sound that I've heard in contemporary jazz was Coltrane playing with Monk . . . I had never heard that kind of performance—it's not possible to put into words. I just heard something that I've never heard before and I haven't heard since (Porter 110).

Giant Steps, freedom won over / by constraint

If we listen to all of the choruses available today amongst those recorded by John Coltrane in 1959 for the different takes of ‘Giant Steps’, we are left with the same feeling of whirling, caused by the extreme motivic repetition. Among the commentators of this piece, many have underlined the reoccurrence in the saxophone choruses, of a certain number of melodic figures (amongst which the emblematic ‘1-2-3-5’ motive, a defective pentatonic figure which pre-announced the polymodal system to be developed in the historic Coltrane quartet). This suggests, at least from the part of the saxophonist, a radical approach (restrictive and strangely constraining) to the principle of formulaic improvisation initiated by Charlie Parker. The limitation of melodic material, which Coltrane is confronted with throughout his improvisations on ‘Giant Steps’, is reinforced in the very particular arrangement of the formulaic material (a melodic matrix), which he systematically uses throughout the solos of a single session (even more so, to a certain extent, from one session to another): a paradigmatic and reductionnist analysis of the choruses, indeed shows Coltrane’s recourse to combinatorial principles, allowing him to open up the field of repetitive temporal extension, thus guaranteeing this sensation of whirling which it was manifestly aimed at. Obviously, one cannot help but establish a parallel between this reductionnist/combinatorial principle and the rigorous (if not serial) principles (similar to Alexander Tcherepnin’s and Joseph Schillinger’s) which underlines the composition from the melodic/harmonic theme. Such a cross-cultural adaptation of compositional techniques to improvisationnal context shows us on Coltrane’s part, a desire to find a new ‘way’, an original sound in close relation to the originality of the melodic-harmonic theme (from which the saxophonist seems to adopt as his own, the principle of theme-solo unity, so dear to Thelonious Monk, whose partner he had been). Finally, far from confining the analysis to observation of structural principles separated from all potential esthetic function (that is, from any musical realization), we conclude by attempting to discern what John Coltrane may have wished to feel (or make others feel) by means of what could seem to be simply a challenge, unnecessarily constricting. Besides the idea of an opening onto a circular sound world made accessible by combinatorics (close to the concept of ‘open work’), we even envisage that of freedom won over / by constraint.

ECCENTRIC, GIFTED, AND BLACK: THELONIOUS MONK REVEALED

Do not miss Robin D. G. Kelley'sThelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, for it will stand as the definitive biography of the great American composer and pianist for many years to come. What distinguishes Kelley's treatment of Monk's complicated and enigmatic life is the sheer depth and breadth of primary research, including, for the first time, the active cooperation and involvement of Thelonious Monk's family. In his acknowledgments, Kelley describes a long process of convincing Thelonious Monk, III to grant permission culminating in a six-hour meeting in which his knowledge, credentials, and commitment were thoroughly tested and challenged. Once he had secured “Toot's” blessings, as well as that of his wife Gale and brother-in-law Peter Grain, Kelley was introduced to Nellie Monk, Thelonious Monk's wife, and a wide range of family and friends who shared their memories and personal archives of photos, recordings, and papers. This is not an authorized biography, however, since Thelonious Monk, Jr. never demanded the right to see drafts or dictate the content. Rather Kelley was admonished to “dig deep and tell the truth.”

Giant Steps, freedom won over / by constraint

If we listen to all of the choruses available today amongst those recorded by John Coltrane in 1959 for the different takes of ‘Giant Steps’, we are left with the same feeling of whirling, caused by the extreme motivic repetition. Among the commentators of this piece, many have underlined the reoccurrence in the saxophone choruses, of a certain number of melodic figures (amongst which the emblematic ‘1-2-3-5’ motive, a defective pentatonic figure which pre-announced the polymodal system to be developed in the historic Coltrane quartet). This suggests, at least from the part of the saxophonist, a radical approach (restrictive and strangely constraining) to the principle of formulaic improvisation initiated by Charlie Parker. The limitation of melodic material, which Coltrane is confronted with throughout his improvisations on ‘Giant Steps’, is reinforced in the very particular arrangement of the formulaic material (a melodic matrix), which he systematically uses throughout the solos of a single session (even more so, to a certain extent, from one session to another): a paradigmatic and reductionnist analysis of the choruses, indeed shows Coltrane’s recourse to combinatorial principles, allowing him to open up the field of repetitive temporal extension, thus guaranteeing this sensation of whirling which it was manifestly aimed at. Obviously, one cannot help but establish a parallel between this reductionnist/combinatorial principle and the rigorous (if not serial) principles (similar to Alexander Tcherepnin’s and Joseph Schillinger’s) which underlines the composition from the melodic/harmonic theme. Such a cross-cultural adaptation of compositional techniques to improvisationnal context shows us on Coltrane’s part, a desire to find a new ‘way’, an original sound in close relation to the originality of the melodic-harmonic theme (from which the saxophonist seems to adopt as his own, the principle of theme-solo unity, so dear to Thelonious Monk, whose partner he had been). Finally, far from confining the analysis to observation of structural principles separated from all potential esthetic function (that is, from any musical realization), we conclude by attempting to discern what John Coltrane may have wished to feel (or make others feel) by means of what could seem to be simply a challenge, unnecessarily constricting. Besides the idea of an opening onto a circular sound world made accessible by combinatorics (close to the concept of ‘open work’), we even envisage that of freedom won over / by constraint.

Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original

Book Review| October 01 2009 Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, Robin D.G. Kelley. Ken Prouty Ken Prouty Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google International Jazz Archive Journal (2010) 03 (3): 107–111. https://doi.org/10.2307/44758737 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Ken Prouty; Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original. International Jazz Archive Journal 1 January 2010; 03 (3): 107–111. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/44758737 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJazz and Culture Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. International Jazz Archives journal© Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Neurological Problems of Jazz Legends

A variety of neurological problems have affected the lives of giants in the jazz genre. Cole Porter courageously remained prolific after severe leg injuries secondary to an equestrian accident, until he succumbed to osteomyelitis, amputations, depression, and phantom limb pain. George Gershwin resisted explanations for uncinate seizures and personality change and herniated from a right temporal lobe brain tumor, which was a benign cystic glioma. Thelonious Monk had erratic moods, reflected in his pianism, and was ultimately mute and withdrawn, succumbing to cerebrovascular events. Charlie Parker dealt with mood lability and drug dependence, the latter emanating from analgesics following an accident, and ultimately lived as hard as he played his famous bebop saxophone lines and arpeggios. Charles Mingus hummed his last compositions into a tape recorder as he died with motor neuron disease. Bud Powell had severe posttraumatic headaches after being struck by a police stick defending Thelonious Monk during a Harlem club raid.

Monk's Music: Thelonious Monk and Jazz History in the Making (review)

Monk's Music: Thelonious Monk and Jazz History in the Making (review)

Monk’s Music: Thelonious Monk and Jazz History in the Making

Book Review| July 01 2009 Monk’s Music: Thelonious Monk and Jazz History in the Making Monk’s Music: Thelonious Monk and Jazz History in the Making, Gabriel Solis. Frederick Moehn Frederick Moehn Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Music (2009) 27 (2): 258–263. https://doi.org/10.2307/25602274 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Frederick Moehn; Monk’s Music: Thelonious Monk and Jazz History in the Making. American Music 1 January 2009; 27 (2): 258–263. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/25602274 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressAmerican Music Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2009 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2009 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Thelonious Monk's Pianism

Abstract The jazz pianist Thelonious Monk's highly idiosyncratic instrumental technique has long been a topic of controversy. Examination of competing views sheds light on the circumstances under which Monk's detractors have accused him of incompetence, whereas his devotees have generally argued either that he was proficient in a conventional sense or that his pianistic imperfections were irrelevant to his music's intellectual content. New perspectives on Monk's pianism may be sought through the analysis of concert films that document his playing in close detail. The films indicate that sometimes Monk intentionally created technical hurdles for himself in order to imbue his playing with a degree of expressive tension.

Melancholia, Mammon, and Magic

always night, or wouldn't need light.-Thelonious Monk1LIKE 'ROUND MIDNIGHT, his best known composition, Thelonious Monk's dictum speaks to a cross-cultural basis for complex emotions called melancholia and deep involvement of those emotions with creativity. With Monk's words in mind, I will turn toward some landmarks in Renaissance culture in which dynamic interplay of night and light is explored.This essay offers a wide-ranging discussion of melancholia in The Faerie Queene. By a circuitous route, it will arrive at a focus on Sir Guy on in his encounter with Mammon and narrative's descent into Mammon's underworld. My argument proceeds first through Marsilio Ficino's Three Books on Life, placing Ficino's diagnosis of consequences of being born under Saturn within framework of a treatise that covers several other topics, all of which offer ways to counter ill effects of severe melancholia. I will argue that Ficino's treatise helps us to understand The Faerie Queene, and that his rationale for therapeutic magic should be taken seriously by readers of Spenser. I remain committed to proposition, advanced tentatively in Spenser's Supreme Fiction, that the poet's worldmaking and procedures of a magician whose power comes from daemon Love may be much alike.' I will say at outset, however, that anyone who embraces possibility of therapeutic magic, along with any poet who aims to move readers toward virtuous action, must also confront possibility of failure and a return of melancholy theme, It's always night.1Most readers of The Faerie Queene are acquainted with melancholia and recognize traits of that distemper in several of poem's characters, but subject has not received a deep treatment specific to Spenser/' As an obvious trait in major and minor characters on dark side of poem (Night, Aesculapius, Despair, Mammon, Huddibras, Maleger, and Malbecco), melancholia is presented to us as something to be feared, and to be avoided if possible. The poem's melancholy lovers (Timias, Marinell, Amoret, Florimell, and Priscilla) receive sympathy in their predicaments, but they are somewhat culpable, never glamorous in their suffering. Redcrosse, Una, Arthur, and Britomart experience melancholy at times, but they are not overcome by it. And last but not least, since Merlin's role in poem resembles poet's own, when great seer looks into future with Britomart and Glauce his spirite is first enabled, then in end overcome in a halfe extatick stoure, by a prophetic furor that is akin to melancholia (IH.iii.21 and 50).The figure of Phantastes, one of honorable (II.ix.47) lodged in turret of Alma's castle, is full of melancholy, and a special case. He occupies a position of prestige, yet his appearance-Bent hollow beetle browes, sharpe staring eyes,/That or seemd-is as grotesque as Mammon's, indicating that he was borne with ill disposed skyes,/When oblique Saturne sate in house of agonyes (52). Fowler observes that while Saturn's influence is to be expected in a book dominated by Aquarius, we are hardly prepared to find it exerted in Castle of Alma itself (Numbers of Time 101). I follow Hamilton's commentary in correlating three sages and their rooms with three higher faculties of soul (fantasy or foresight, judgment or understanding, and memory), and also with future, present, and past, all constituting an allegory of Prudence, intellectual virtue most closely allied with moral virtue of Temperance.4What is melancholia, as manifested in a figure so mad or foolish as Phantastes seems to be, doing in an allegory of Prudence, and what could wild energy in his chamber possibly contribute to future-oriented education of Guyon and Arthur? Melancholia typically afflicts older people, and it is surprising to find it embodied in a young man with a hyperactive imagination. …

Monk's Music: Thelonious Monk and Jazz History in the Making. By Gabriel Solis. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.

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