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Monk’s Music: Thelonious Monk andJazz History in the MakingMichael C. Heller aa Harvard University ,Published online: 25 Sep 2009.

To cite this article: Michael C. Heller (2009) Monk’s Music: Thelonious Monk and Jazz History in theMaking, Jazz Perspectives, 3:2, 177-181, DOI: 10.1080/17494060903152412

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Jazz PerspectivesVol. 3, No. 2, August 2009, pp. 177–181

ISSN 1749–4060 print/1749–4079 online © 2009 Michael C. HellerDOI: 10.1080/17494060903152412

Book Review

Taylor and FrancisRJAZ_A_415414.sgm10.1080/17494060903152412Jazz Perspectives1749-4060 (print)/1749-4079 (online)Original Article2009Taylor & Francis320000002009MichaelHellermheller@fas.harvard.edu

Monk’s Music: Thelonious Monk and Jazz History in the Making. By Gabriel Solis.Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-520-25201-1 (paperback).Pp. 239. $23.95.

The “great man” approach to jazz history is dead. It was eulogized and buried in thewake of the “New Jazz Studies” movement that emerged in the mid-1990s. In this trend,scholars from various disciplines began posing questions geared less toward musicalbiography and formalist musical analysis and more toward explorations of the variedsocial, cultural, and political meanings of jazz for musicians, listeners, and the world atlarge. Earlier historical texts, while usually respected for their research contributions,were now framed as conceptually limited, hagiographic, teleological, or overlyconcerned with historical minutia. These older historical paradigms were often charac-terized as being rife with oppressive marginalizations of various individuals, styles,races, or genders (as is readily evident in the very idea of a “great man” approach). Bycontrast, New Jazz Studies emphasized postmodern-inflected critical approachestoward analyzing musical meaning(s). As a newly-accepted academic discipline thatutilized the most up-to-date theoretical tools and critical perspectives drawn frommusicology, ethnomusicology, critical race studies, literary theory, gender studies,media studies, and a host of other fields, New Jazz Studies thoroughly transformed jazzscholarship. Or did it?

The “great man” approach to jazz history is alive and well. Its resonance throughoutthe jazz world can be seen at multiple levels of musical, academic, and organizationalpractice. Institutions like Jazz at Lincoln Center have become powerful forces in the artsworld through their entrenched emphasis on, and reverence for, the tradition’s seminalfigures. Each year, university library shelves are filled with dozens of new biographiesthat chronicle the lives of jazz luminaries large and small. Journalists and critics likewiseevaluate new artists by comparing them to canonic figures, while students and profes-sional musicians trade stories, legends, and lies about the exploits of these jazz giants onand off the bandstand. Thanks to the rise of academic jazz scholarship, American univer-sities regularly offer undergraduate jazz history survey courses, but these courses almostinvariably emphasize how legendary individuals revolutionized the music at specificmoments in time, in a succession from one great artist (usually men) to another. Thiscontinued presence of the “great man” narratives of jazz history paired with this tradi-tion’s now-respected home within academia, has had a considerable effect on the profileof jazz throughout the world. The music has been transformed from a symbol of youth,wildness, and danger, into an icon of high art that mirrors the canons of Western ArtMusic—canons which have themselves gone through intense deconstruction andreconstruction since the rise of the “New Musicology” movement in the mid-1980s.

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178 Book Review

While both of the above accounts involve some hyperbole, neither is intendedsimply as a “straw man” argument. On the contrary, as scholars such as Scott DeVeauxand Krin Gabbard have noted since the early 1990s, historical jazz studies is a deeplyparadoxical practice in which the right hand builds canons even as the left handattempts to deconstruct them. But I do not wish to imply either that these two criticalinterests represent a sort of pitched battle for the future of jazz scholarship. Indeed, thelast fifteen years have seen numerous instances of healthy cooperation between propo-nents of older and newer approaches to jazz studies. Many researchers have recognizedthat attempts to deconstruct overly-restrictive canons need not be made at the cost ofignoring the views and experiences of a wide range of musicians, listeners, and histor-ical actors and witnesses. Both individual scholars and newer organizations likeColumbia University’s Jazz Studies Research Group have worked together to includeboth old and new critical viewpoints in their activities and research, thereby developingnew ways of discussing not only what the history of jazz is, but how such historiesemerge and accumulate significance over time.

Gabriel Solis’s recent book, Monk’s Music: Thelonious Monk and Jazz History in theMaking, both resides in and confronts this critical gap, and in the process Solis makesa significant contribution to jazz scholarship. Far from being a traditional TheloniousMonk biography, this work explores the pianist’s changing legacy as it evolved bothduring and after his lifetime. Solis asks “not about what Monk is or was, but what hehas been” for several generations of musicians, listeners, and writers (7). While hegrants that these two concerns are not entirely separate, Solis is equally adamant thatthey are not identical. By tracing how different individuals and communities haveinterpreted Monk’s legacy in ways that nourish their own artistic, social, and personalpursuits, the book examines how (jazz) history emerges in ways that are fragmented,contested, and complex. In Solis’s words, the book is “an attempt to come to terms withjazz’s historicism, and to see why the past has become so important in this age of theputative death of history” (205). By doing so, the book provides a possible model foranswering an important question for jazz historians: how do we study a “great man”after the great man theory is dead?

Monk’s Music is divided into three sections, the first of which focuses on Monk’sperformances of his own music. Following a thumbnail biography, Solis builds hisrich study through his personal interviews with a range of musicians. Through thesediscussions, he seeks to explore how contemporary performers talk about and relate toMonk’s playing. He notices, for example, that rather than focusing on small-scaletechnical details of the music (melodic patterns, chord voicings, etc.), these musicianstend toward broader conceptual topics of discussion (59–60). Five recurring themesare discussed in detail: Monk’s use of time; riff-based melodic unity in his composi-tions; the combination of linear development and cyclical repetition; the idea ofMonk’s music as “its own world”; and the use of musical humor. Solis closely interro-gates each of these concepts to reveal deeper theoretical concerns that arise fromthem. A few examples illustrate this approach. Solis considers, for instance, whetherMonk’s combination of linear and cyclical structures can be conceived as a musicalanalogue to Houston Baker’s concept of Afro-modernism, a theory that stresses the

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Jazz Perspectives 179

pronounced synthesis of vernacular and modernist discourses in mid-century,African-American art forms (48–49). He ponders how discussions of musical humorstraddle a precarious line between perpetuating harmful stereotypes of black maleidentity, on one hand, and lionizing a narrow Eurocentric image of the romantic artiston the other (he refers to this as a “cultural politics of playfulness” [54]). Solis furtherquestions how the idea of Monk’s music constituting “its own world” complicatessimple notions of musical communication on the bandstand, instead emphasizinghow musicians must constantly engage with an absent composer, even as they interactwith bandmates. In most cases, Solis raises more questions than he answers, but hisanalyses offer many fascinating directions for thinking about the varied viewpointsand insights of musicians.

Part Two of Monk’s Music explores how individual musicians attempt to engagewith Monk’s legacy in their own performances. A particular challenge arising here ishow a musician can incorporate elements of Monk’s musical language without sacri-ficing his or her own personal performance style. In exploring this topic, the bookdelves into issues surrounding the “double discourse” of unity and division thatpervades jazz performance (67). By extending Paul Berliner’s notion of jazz’s “eternalcycle” of pre-composition and improvisation, Solis explores how musicians struggle tocraft performances that are faithful to the original compositions, while also being unas-sailably new (68). As he notes, the multi-vocal nature of jazz creates a unique environ-ment wherein musicians must contend with the legacies of composers and well-knownrecordings of a given piece, even while attempting to develop their own personal voice.Solis argues that such concerns are heightened when considering a figure as pervasiveand idiosyncratic as Monk.

Solis expands upon this point by considering three case studies of pianists DaniloPerez, Fred Hersch, and Jessica Williams. Especially interesting are the different waysthat each musician discusses his or her own relationship with Monk. Perez empha-sizes his connection with the composer, using this affinity as a way to “[establish]himself as a part of the jazz tradition” (86). By contrast, Hersch downplays hisindebtedness, for fear of being labeled a musical imitator. While Solis notes that theseself-presentations may possess heightened significance due to the racial identities ofthe two musicians (Perez is Afro-Panamanian and Hersch is white), he avoidssupplying simple sociological explanations for their responses. In a shorter, buthighly effective, discussion of Williams, Solis notes the impact of gender withindiscourses of innovation, imitation, and creativity. Like Hersch, Williams rejects thedescription of her playing as “Monkish,” arguing that this description “fails to inter-rogate what she does with readily identifiable formal units that index Monk’s style”(103). While each case study is fascinating on its own, the larger message comes fromtheir juxtaposition. The work shows how individuals both construct and contendwith Monk’s legacy within a complicated matrix of musical, social, racial, and genderconsiderations.

The most provocative chapters come in Part Three, which explores Monk’s signifi-cance for various subcommunities of the jazz world. This section begins with a consid-eration of Monk’s importance in mainstream and/or repertory contexts, before Solis

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180 Book Review

turns to discuss more avant-garde and “countermainstream” approaches. Whilecertain groups view Monk as a model of musical excellence to be canonized in a fashionreminiscent of classical composers, others frame him as an icon of nonconformity whoresists canon-building impulses and legitimizes more experimental approaches toperformance. Once again, a common theme for all of these groups is their desire toremain true to Monk’s legacy while also creating music that is new and fresh. The devil,of course, is in the details; differences among these constituencies emerge in how theychoose to define what it means to be true, what it means to be new, and what it meansto be a musical clone.

While the larger argument of this section is strong, one could perhaps take issue withhow Solis chooses to subdivide jazz musicians into discrete musical subcommunities.The categories Solis uses are the mainstream/canonical movement, the avant garde,high modernism, Africentrism, and the pop avant garde. Admittedly, Solis notes thatthese categories are overlapping and provisional, yet the book sometimes reifies thedistinctions between these communities in ways that both overstate and understatetheir significance. It overstates insofar as these divisions undermine how musiciansmay travel between these constituencies at various moments; it understates by mini-mizing the degrees of differentiation and dissention within each community, many ofwhich are made up by even smaller sub-constituencies. Roswell Rudd and Steve Lacy,for example, are framed as purveyors of a high-modernist approach (despite their longexperience playing in avant-garde contexts1), while Gary Bartz and Kenny Barron arementioned representing the avant garde (despite both having impressive mainstreamcredentials). Solis seems aware of this difficulty and carefully qualifies his statements,but his choice to frame his analyses in terms of distinct communities sometimes worksagainst his efforts to present a broad spectrum of subject positions. A longer conclusiondiscussing the relationships between these communities could have been helpful to re-emphasize the fluidity of such boundaries.

Solis’s study uses an impressive combination of methodologies to bolster its argu-ments. These include ethnographic fieldwork, critical approaches drawn from literaryand cultural theory, and a healthy dose of musical transcription and analysis. But it isthe work’s grounding in an engagement with living musicians that ensures that the textnever feels like a mere academic exercise. The author’s theoretical prowess is usedprimarily as a tool to interpret and contextualize the views of these musicians, not toovershadow or discount them. As a result, Monk’s Music remains constantly engagedwith very direct concerns impacting the jazz community, even as it works to frame abroader argument about the constructedness of historical narratives. Solis’s goal is notto take sides among the various views and interpretations of Monk that he encounters,

1 Solis justifies this distinction between high modernism and the avant garde through a lengthy discussion drawingfrom Andreas Huyssen’s After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press, 1986). Though the argument raises several interesting points, I found that it still tended to overlyobscure the connections of Rudd and Lacy with musicians of the jazz avant garde (who are discussed in an entirelyseparate chapter). In addition, I was surprised that Solis did not probe any potential racial resonances underlyingthis distinction, particularly in the way that he had done in the aforementioned discussion of Danilo Perez andFred Hersch.

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Jazz Perspectives 181

but rather to present them without resolving their contradictory elements. He is notlooking to solve particular “problems” surrounding Monk interpretation, but rather topresent the sum total of Monk’s legacy as a richly interrelated web of musical and socialmeanings.

While the book’s broad-based methodological framework is generally quite effec-tive, there are moments where the reader is left to wonder why Solis chooses oneapproach over another in addressing a given topic. In particular, the tone of the writingseems to change in sections where Solis interviews musicians directly versus thosewhere his analysis is based on recordings, published interviews, or liner notes. This isnotable in chapter six, which presents a thought-provoking examination of Monkpresentations that draw on classical music models. Once again, three case studies areused to explore the issue: T. S. Monk’s engagement with his father’s music; MarcusRoberts’s album Alone with Three Giants; and Wynton Marsalis’s album Marsalis PlaysMonk. While the discussion of T. S. Monk is based largely on interviews, the analysesof Marsalis and Roberts are based solely on recordings, along with liner notes andcontemporaneous reviews. In the latter two cases, Solis’s tone seems somewhatmore critical of the musicians’ approaches, referring to Roberts’s album as a “blanderrecording … for better or worse” (150) and Marsalis’s as “remarkable” despite comingoff as somewhat “mannered” (152). Though subtle, this shift is palpable whencontrasted with Solis’s evenhanded tone throughout the remainder of the book. Whilethere may be reasons that Solis was unable to speak with Roberts or Marsalis, theabsence of their direct input is a slight shortcoming of this otherwise persuasive section.It fails to allow the musicians an opportunity to voice their own rationales and motiva-tions for pursuing the projects in the way they did—the type of input that is so power-ful in other parts of Monk’s Music.

But these difficulties are minor in comparison to the book’s success in reframing ourmost basic notions of musical legacy. Solis views history neither as a search for objectivetruths, nor as a deconstruction of abstract texts, but rather as an ongoing processconducted and contested by musicians and listeners in the real world. In this sense, thestudy has implications for more than Thelonious Monk alone. By examining the waysin which legacies are established, Solis elucidates how control over history acts as apowerful tool through which musicians work to formulate identities and to legitimizetheir own artistic work. This point may come as little surprise to those who havewitnessed the explosion of historical approaches in jazz over the past twenty years, butSolis’s book provides a particularly thoughtful approach for addressing it.

The great man approach to jazz history still exists, and scholars must develop tech-niques for grappling with it. Monk’s Music provides one place to start.

Michael C. HellerHarvard University

Editor’s Note: As Gabriel Solis is this journal’s book reviews editor, Michael C. Heller’scontribution to this issue was both commissioned and edited by the Editor-in-Chief, JohnHowland.

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