Monk, Straight, no Chaser

Monk, Straight No Chaser is a reverential documentary about the jazz legend, Thelonious Sphere Monk.  The movie was released in 1988 about six years after Monk's death.  Clint Eastwood, a jazz aficiondo, produced the film and it is directed Charlotte Zwerin.  Monk is a seminal figure in modern jazz, one of the founders (with Charley Parker) of BeBop and, in some quarters, he remains controversial. He composed an immense amount of music and his work is often atonal and dissonant.  As is standard in jazz, Monk often uses bland show-tunes or pop songs as a framework for his piano improvisation -- very quickly, he ventures so far afield from the source material that only a professional musician can detect the original melody concealed by the variations that he works on the tune.  His music is demanding and, often, rebarbative -- he stands in relation to earlier forms of jazz in the position that the Second Viennese School bears to predecessors like Wagner, Mahler and Brahms:  Monk builds on the earlier music and, indeed, seems to take some of its ideas to logical extremes, but this cerebral and abstract art may be difficult for many listeners to assimilate.  The Monk documentary was shown as part of TMC's survey of jazz movies and, no less of a luminary than Wynton Marsalis vouches for Monk's incandescent brilliance in his introduction to the film (appearing in his quarantine spider-hole with the nattily dressed Eddie Mueller somewhere on the other side of the country.). Marsalis reveres Monk so greatly that he, even, contests Mueller's remarks that the musician was mostly inarticulate and extremely difficult to understand when he spoke:  Marsalis says that Monk "used few words" but "what he said was very wise, if only you would listen closely."  

Two allusions come to mind:  on January 10, 1931,  the ailing Charles Ives attended a concert in which his work "Three Places in New England" was played along with avant-garde compositions by Carl Ruggles and Virgil Thompson.  Ives sat stoically through "Three Places" as members of the audience booed and  hissed his music.  But when "Sun Treader", a work by Ruggles, was similarly booed, Ives stood up and waved his cane in the air, shouting:  "You're a goddamned sissy -- when you hear strong masculine music of this kind, get up and use your ears like a man!"  Clive James, in one of his last poems, notes that he has never been able to appreciate the "Second Viennese School" -- composers like Webern, Berg, and Schoenberg.  "After all," he says, "there's a lot of competition -- I haven't even heard all of Bach's cantatas."  Monk's music, at least to me, inspires similar reactions.

Monk was born in 1917 and lived for most of his life near 64th and Amsterdam in Harlem.  He had a fierce-looking, obviously highly intelligent mother whom he replaced with an equally fierce and smart wife, Nelly.  Beginning in the late fifties, Monk's eccentricities developed into schizophrenia and he was often hospitalized.  Notwithstanding his shaky mental health, Monk was fantastically well-regarded, made many records, and, once, was on the cover of Time magazine.  The film is a good introduction to his work:  we see a number of pieces performed, without commentary, and in their entirety.  Most of the picture shows Monk at work playing piano.  The opening sequence is exemplary -- Monk is standing on stage, part of quintet that includes his most loyal side-man, the tenor sax Charlie Rouse.  Monk is shuffling in a tight circle, spinning around, not exactly like a dervish (he moves quite slowly) but, nonetheless, rotating on stage.  Suddenly, he stops turning in circles, skitters over to the piano, and starts playing at precisely the instant when the entry of the piano is necessary to the tune.  It's an odd exhibition of a seemingly distracted (and distracting) on-stage behavior that suddenly coalesces into a precise and completely musical performance that seems snatched out of apparent chaos.  (Monk had a tendency to pace when he was suffering from mental illness and he would often shuffle around in a circle, rotating it seems on his heel -- we see him doing this in an airport somewhere and interrupting his dance with sudden quick slashing movements, like karate chops.  (I can see how this would have been frightening to those around him -- Monk was a large man and looks very powerful.)   Monk wore eccentric hats, often pointed fezes or skull-caps, and he sometimes affected perfectly round granny glasses, even though he didn't have problems seeing.  The film documents a trip to Europe in which members of Monk's octet had to study their charts on the Transatlantic flight -- notwithstanding the last-minute preparations, the tour was a huge success.  In one scene, we observe Monk lying in a hotel bed wearing one of his fez-shaped hats and trying to order "chicken livers and rice" from a hapless and baffled German room service waiter.  Monk often mutters to himself but it's impossible to determine what he is saying -- there's an extended sequence in which fellow musician stand around Monk at his keyboard trying to figure out what his scribbled musical notations mean.  Usually, Monk responds to questions by saying "Just play what you want", although when pressed he will actually name a note, usually chromatic.  Late in his career, he seems to have abandoned the long-suffering Nelly and taken up with the redoubtable Countess Nica de Koenigswarter, the French woman in whose hotel room Charley Parker died.  She was very much alive when the movie was made and recounts some of her adventures with Monk.  Everywhere she lived was frequented by Black jazz musicians and, so, she got tossed out of various apartments and hotels.  In the end, she bought a condominium in Weehawken, New Jersey, and this is where Monk spent most of his time.  The Countess, who had been a Resistance fighter during the War (and actually flew bombing missions over Germany) ended up collecting battered, stray cats and one wonders if this impulse didn't color her relationship with Monk.  For most of the time that she knew him, he had renounced music and was no longer performing or composing.  The movie shows all sorts of odd details -- for instance, jazz clubs in Manhattan were, apparently, fire-hazards because big axes are always affixed to the walls in their backrooms and kitchens. The countess gives Monk a gold marker with which to sign autographs to which he responds enigmatically:  "Decipher that --" pointing to a scribble on a sheet of paper.  "Someone maybe will decipher that.  Then, they'll flip.  I mean flip for real."  The most interesting footage is old imagery of Monk at the piano -- he generally starts his improvisation by stating the melody, although spoofing it with what seem to be intentionally wrong notes and inept-sounding rhythms.  Then, he bends over the keyboard and really goes to work.  His right foot moves in perpetual motion, typically banging at the floor three times to the beat -- once with the sole of the foot, once on the ball, and, then, making a sliding or scooping motion withe his shoe.  Monk often plays in a way that seems to consciously eschew virtuosity -- you don't get any displays of flashy, if empty, virtuosity from this musician.  He slaps the piano, stabs at it with his fists and hammers the keyboard as if he's in a desperate fight to the death with instrument.  Sometimes, the notes seem to transmit shocks through his fingers and into his wrists and arms so that his shoulders twitch.  In one scene, he plays his signature tune "Blue Monk" with Count Basie sitting at the bottom of the piano looking up at him with a gaze of what seems to be unabashed love.  (Later, Monk was very angry and claimed that Basie was looking at him in an insulting way and says:  "Maybe, I will go to his show and look at him for awhile.")  For me, the highlight of the movie is Monk's performance of "Just a Gigolo" -- his variations on the melody were exciting to me, but just on the horizon of what I can interpret as intelligible.

Charlotte Zwerin, who directed the film, worked on it for a number of years.  (She was an associate of the Maysles' brothers and worked on Salesman as well as Gimme Shelter.)  The style of the film about Monk is studiously cinema verite.  The production of the picture was vexed by the fact that Monk died without a will and Nelly, his "common law wife", didn't own the rights to the music.  Some intricate legal proceedings were required to clear the music for the film -- this work was financed by Clint Eastwood.  The movie is musically of extreme importance -- Monk was self-taught on the piano and the picture shows his idiosyncratic fingerings and technique by focusing, often, on his hands as he plays.

The film is noteworthy in that acknowledges Monk's mental illness but doesn't dwell on it.  Like many other artists afflicted with sickness of the mind, Monk is not insane when he performs.  Indeed, he is absolutely, even mathematical rational, in his art -- it's his life that's a mess.   The film is clearly a labor of love -- I just wish that I were more educated as to how to enjoy this music.