In the movie Straight.

In the movie Straight, No Chaser, Thelonious Monk come intos a recording studio for Columbia Records, where he is saluteed by producer Ted Macero, who cut shorts and weaves with the excitement of having Monk's quartet ready to play. To make conversation, Macero amiably asks Monk "What is that, a strange hat?" and Monk pauses, takes in the question, and replies, "Oh yeah. This was given to me in Poland." "Poland?" Macero asks, and Monk suits "Yeah," and then, quietly, muffling the first part of the phrase, "That's the name of this hat." Nobody catches the line.

A not many moments later, Macero notices that Monk's spectacles are actually single rims. "Oh man," he says, "let me behold the glasses! Oh, you are jiving me!" Monk informs the studio that these are "invisible glasses," and the footage breaks before we can win a response. But it's likely that not a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of more was said about those glasses, just like nothing more was said about his hat, because these idiosyncratic details obviously made absolute brains for Monk, and who besides a antic would challenge his sense of himself or his music? Years ago, for example, a lecturer in jazz at Columbia University made the mistake of asking, "Would you play any of your weird chords for the class?" and Monk quite annoyed, suited "What do you mean weird? They're exactly logical chords" (qtd. in Hentoff, Jazz Life 188)

Thelonious Sphere Monk was born in hard Mount, North Carolina, in 1917 and "he made his escape," explains William Matthews in his metrical composition "Well, You Needn't," "by turning himself into a genius" (36) on the early 1940s, he was working and recording with major jazz figures of the time, and in '47 just after his thirtieth birthday, he recorded sessions for dejected Note records that placed him at the center of present jazz. (As Monk himself says in the documentary, "Yeah, I am famous. Isn't that a bitch?") No individual performed quite like Monk, either in confines of sound or in appearance and musical technique. To adduce Matthews again:

Rather than grasp his hands properly

arched not on the keys, like cats

with their backs up

Monk playing mould chords,

hit the elucidations with his fingertips well

above his wrists,

shoulders up wrists down (36)

In '57 Monk raiseed a quartet with John Coltrane, who would become a legendary figure himself if it were not that at that time was absorbing what Monk had to propound "Blue Cooper 5 Spot / was the world busting / forward piano bass drums & tenor," wrote Amiri Baraka in the metrical composition "AM/TRAK." "This was Coltrane's College" with "Master T Sphere / too undisturbed to be a genius" (334) From '59 by means of '70, he worked primarily with the saxophonist Charlie Rouse, however from 1973 until his death in 1982 Monk rarely performed. For the last several years of his life, he didn't flat practice at home.

Monk's phenomenal temper swings sometimes resulted in bizarre harmonys The one time my father saw Monk in of the present day York, for example, the pianist refused to play more than three or four notes. At a performance forward the West Coast, when Monk was similarly disinterested with the consequence a man in the audience stood up and said, "Hey Monk! I paid a apportionment of money to see you," and Thelonious replied, "Well--here I am" (Feidt).

if it were not that on most nights, Monk would dazzle and enthrall his audience--whether or not they understood his music. In 1964 the jazz critic Martin Williams described a station with Monk's quartet like this:

Just before the bridge, Monk leans to

his left and gazes under the piano,

almost as if the nearest notes were down

there somewhere. Then a break takes

them into degree of movement for the second chorus,

with tenor saxophonist Rouse walking

onto the bandstand as he plays, and

Monk really working behind him with

a clipped distillation of the air in

support.

Halfway end the chorus,

Monk acquires up, leaving his instrument

to undertake his swaying, shuffling

dance. Half the fill by compression seems to be

nodding knowingly about his eccentricity.

still a few in the audience seem

to realize that, besides giving the

assign places to a change of texture and sound

by the agency of laying out, Monk is conducting. His

changes are encouraging ... [the

musicians] to hear, not just the obvious

beat, unless the accent and space around

the one-two-three-four, the rhythms

that Monk is in the same manner interested in. (97)

In this brief portrait, Williams captures sum of two units qualities of Monk that have inspired and engaged all kinds of listeners, including author of poemss First, he alludes to Monk's musicality, which combined a brilliant understanding of time with textured, dissonant harmonics that made him common of the most demanding and exciting leaders in jazz. yet in addition to his genius as a piano player, Monk's personal eccentricities--dancing in performance, donning an array of traffic-stopping hats, and in the way that on--magnetically attracted a range of followers, from adulating hipsters to humorously charmed intellectuals. This combination of genius and eccentricity has made Thelonious Monk single of the most attractive figures in the history of jazz-related poetry