Chin20: "Pitman's Gramophone Course of Typewriter Keyboard Instruction"

An amazing slice of unintentional avant-garde, minimalism before minimalism, and a kind of motorik version of light orchestral music.



A bizarre audio course for fluency in typing, this recording, which comes from the first decades of the 20th century, consists principally of what can only be described as an unrelenting click track of various tempi, over which an orchestral ensemble plays rigid and tightly locked in versions of popular classical music, occasionally interjected by a tersely voiced narrator repeating the phrase "Carriage Return".

Find out all about Isaac Pitman at Wikipedia.

Discovered in an envelope amid a plethora of 78 RPM records lovingly collected from the rubbish tip by Bryan "the vinyl man" Parker.

Chin19: Various Artists "Sounds to Come"

"Sounds to Come" is the second installment of a series on Chinstrap of music and sound-design cut from public-domain horror and science-fiction films from c.1930-1970.



The aim of the releases is the reframing of digital artefacts - although the pieces have been recut and equalised, we are not aiming to present definitive versions of these recordings, we rather present the work for the possibility of further investigation into the composers, sound-designers, film-makers, and of course the films themselves, which are available, in the main, for free download at Archive.org.

"Teenagers Battle the Thing" - Director: Don Fields
"The Man Who Changed His Mind" - Director: Robert Stevenson * Music: Louis Levy
"Svengali" - Director: Archie Mayo * Music: Vitaphone Orchestra
"The Phantom Ship" - Director: Denison Clift * Music: Eric Ansell
"Attack of the Giant Leeches" - Director: Bernard L. Kowalski * Music: Alexander Laszlo
"Horrors of Spider Island" - Director: Jaime Nolan

Legal disclaimer: This release is made under the belief that these scores and sound-design are in the public-domain, and is intended to disseminate and raise appreciation of this film music. If you represent the interests of any of the composers and object to this release, we will willingly (though a little grudgingly) remove it.

Chinstrap is a not-for-profit music gallery.

Chin17: Pete Um "Look Sharp! and hear the difference"

Poet, composer, gentleman, raconteur, and well-dressed person Pete Um has ploughed his own particular, distinctive and very fertile furrow since the heady days of the 20th century. A master of the miniature electro-acoustic song-poem, a form he has more or less invented and crystallised himself, his work displays a sardonic wit combined with a healthy misanthropy, in marvellous micro-collages of voice, instruments, samples, and electronics.



Mr Um is, however, far too inventive and curious a gentleman to isolate himself within one proscribed way of working, all of his work across countless Cdr, vinyl releases, and performances being marked by a ceaselessly exploratory and open-ended approach. This release on Chinstrap presents a cross-section of his work in Reel-to-Reel tape music.


Rather than bang on further, we will hand you over to the responsible hands of Pete Um …

One day a long time ago, way back when I lived in Room 5, my man Loukas Morley fetched up at my door bearing gifts. The college he worked at was chucking out some of their music tech. stuff and he had a 16-track mixer and a Teac reel-to-reel machine with my name on it. My heart nearly blew up with gratitude about the mixer because I needed one bad, although sixteen tracks is spoiling me really. With regards to the Teac, I wasn’t so fussed. It looked a bit complicated, what with the fooling with the spooling and so on. Besides, I had a computer to record stuff on and fuck with etc. I almost didn’t even take the damn thing off him, but they’re such massy motherfuckers that I couldn’t exactly tell to put it back in his titchy A30 or whatever that goofy little car he had was called. Shit, I miss Loukas, and wish he hadn’t joined that damn cult. Once I left a reel to reel at a jumble sale too, which still pains me, but then at that selfsame jumbly I got a vocoder (yah!), a homemade keyboard-rhythm machine-amplifier combo (not that I ever got that to work) a decent Denon tape deck and a nice Technics amp that I still use everyday. Total cost was about ten notes, so beat that. Anyway, Loukas´16 track turned out to be a stiff, and the Teac reel to reel just sat sadly in the room untouched for a few months. Then one night, perhaps because I was having some unexplained computer problems, I decided to have a little fuckaround on the reel to reel, which was surprising easy to use. For a laugh I made
some twatty, loop-based recordings. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was the birth of a NEW THING, for me at least. For some reason, probably because I’m a dumbass and I didn’t know anything about reel to reels, it took me a long time to realize that the quality of these experiments, in fidelity terms, was actually quite high. In fact it wasn’t until I recorded some of this tape stuff onto DAT, where it sat next to my PC- birthed music, that I twigged that this woggy analogue jizz had a depth and breadth of sound that I wasn’t even getting close to getting out of my soundcard. This is partly because I had no production values back then, and I was kidding myself that I didn’t want them, but that didn’t seem to matter with the Teac, because I’d recorded my stuff reasonably well almost entirely by accident. Since then I have learned that it is a cliché to talk about the warmth of analogue tape, and it bores the tits off me when people do, but they’re right. Tape is also very forgiving. You can distort something to fuck, whether you want to or not, and tape will just roll with it like a drunk getting punched. Let me tell you an almost completely unrelated story. One night I was getting a lift back from London with some guys in another band. We were listening to some deeply unfashionable rock music and digging the hell out of the stupidity of ting. At some point the guitarist described a certain woman as being ¨the type of girl that starts crying when you’re fucking her¨. I’ll never forget this comment, which seems to me to be the last word in blokeish unfeelingness, but it did kind of strike a chord. Anyway, my point is that you have to know what you’re about when recording to digital, as a certain delicacy is required, whereas tape will never cry when you fuck it.


Pete Um at Kettle's Yard Pt. 1 from pete um on Vimeo.

Anyway, you can do marvelous things with computers, and over the years I’ve tried again and again to turn all that wonderful digital functionality into something that satisfies my restless poetic soul. Most of the time I succeed, and I couldn’t live without my PC for very long before some kind of horrible REAL LIFE SYNDROME started screwing around with my head. However, it is not unknown, as you may know, for computers to give me a bit of a hard time. I have a spiritual aura that conflicts with binary operations, and no PC I use will stay in GWO for very long whatsoever. Computers die on me, and I grieve their loss hard, for without them I cannot do my ART STUFF, as I say, and my mind starts to turn on itself. That’s when I reach for my recorder (Teac A-3340S). I switch off my PC, which is probably
just a blue screen anyway, or parallel lines of various hues, or says DISK BOOT ERROR-INSERT SYSTEM DISK, or is pretending to be a statue like some irritating street performer (why doesn’t one of them paint themselves up like Windows and act crashed? I feel that people would get the joke) or has switched itself off or restarted itself fifteen times in the last hour, and I vengefully stride towards the reel-to-reel.
 
Fuck you world, I think, prepare thyself some fucked-up noise. It should be noted that I am typing this on Sam’s laptop because my desktop is all but deceased, and that while I’ve been doing so all the keys on her keyboard that aren’t letters of the alphabet have conspired to swap functions with one another so that they are opposites, so for instance I have to type the ? key to produce a – and vice versa, although, interestingly, the example I was going to give you now won’t let itself be typed at all.
In addition, some keys have moved their functions along the QWERTY board by one key. Suffice to say I’m struggling to relay this information to you if you feel a bit lost as to what I’m on about. This computer has given Sam no problems in the year and a half that she’s owned it, I should add. Je reste ma valise.



Pete Um Godelmingum & Gyldeforda w/ video FX from pete um on Vimeo.



Anyway, what I love about reel-to-reels is not just the quality of the sound; there’s a couple of other important considerations as well. First off, they look cool as fuck. To a music fetishist such as myself, with an evil jones for sick bollocks, the appearance of the reel-to-reel tape recorder is just about as cool as it gets. Only massive ancient synths that bring Raymond Scott and his work to mind rate higher in
the eye candy stakes. The reels themselves are mainly what its all about. They spin, you see. Round and round. And the spinning makes the music, so that when they start to spin the music starts also, and when they stop the music stops. And when they fast- forward the music goes weebleweebleweeble and when they slow down the music goes roarrrrooow.w..w…w. This is a lot better than the graphic on any CD player. This is virtually better than porn. In fact it is a sort of porn. The people that make the tape know what goes on in the heads of the people that buy the tape, which is why they make the metal reels look like the illest shit they can, with beautifully designed holes of many different types cut in them so you can see where you’re at with your tape use. You have to use the tape that requires the nab hub adaptors to fix them to your machine for maximum aesthetic appeal. I got my machine for nowt so I didn’t mind blowing 20 quid on a pair of nabs. I even videoed my answering machine playing back the message saying “Hello. This is Ian from Roll On Tapes calling to tell you that your nab adaptors have arrived.” Jesus, I get emotional just thinking about that day, and Roll On Tapes, and Ian. Whatever happened to Ian? *
 
So, yeah, and the last cool thing about what a reel-to-reel can do for you is to totally chuck your normal music craft MO out the window. Personally I can’t be arsed to take the time and effort to record proper songs onto my Teac, and in particular those of the verse/chorus/verse variety, with a charming meld of rhythm and melody and so on. I can barely be bothered to attempt that sort of stuff with my professional
digital set-up, so I definitely can’t doing with writing clever lyrics and learning basslines and rewinding everything a hundred times while the pubs are open. Ye Gods! I’m in far too much of a hurry to see the reels spinning and get on with the next song. So, what I do is record any old crap incredibly fast and see if it might just possibly work as art if you were stoned enough. Therefore a “song” might consist of.

1. A track of a looped snatch of audio from and old piece of tape played on another semi-defunct ReVox tape machine I have (at one point I had four reel to reel machines, but these days I have to struggle by with just the two) sampled onto my Line6 DL4 looping pedal, slowed down and reversed.
 
2. A track of me playing bass so badly that it sounds like someone gave a bass to a goat and pointed at a bag of rotten carrots, through echoey FX. I very rarely practice anything for too long because rewinding is a pain in the nuts, and I almost always just play the first thing that has some vague connection to what I’m hearing.
 
3. A track of recordings of Guatemalan bees, sped up, from my vast collection of BBC field recordings on 7” single.
 
4. A track of me producing noises with my mouth through a toy Fisher Price radio (with toy microphone), with the tape being randomly manually manipulated as it is recorded onto by switching the speed button from high (fast) to low (slow).

Let’s face it, it’ll all sound like dogshit, so this is where I rely on what Bobby J and I refer to as THE MICE. Mice music is just music played twice as fast as it ought to be, basically, so the vocals sound like heavy metal mice. Or of course you can slow things down. The basic rule of thumb is to play everything at the wrong speed.

Additional cheap art can be obtained if you finish recording at different points on the tape, so that at the mixing stage the audio from whatever was on the tape when you bought it cheap at Resale will suddenly leap into one channel like some demented communication from another dimension. If you’re very lucky it’ll be Madonna, backwards, sounding like a man and in rhythmic sync with the nonsense you produced yourself. Lately I’ve been experimenting with adding additional FX at mixdown stage too, and it does sound pretty sweet. OK, so when you’ve finished with your labours do you thoughtfully review the fruit obtained, just to check on what the fuck you’ve actually recorded? No, that would be folly, for it is as plain as the nose on your own face that it will sound like a random clash of harsh noises, so you just get on with the next song. Now, in the fullness of time you’ll have done a whole tape of four tracks of audio recorded at varying speeds. You will also be drunk and stoned as a motherfucker. Play the fucking tape, for this is where the gold comes. OK, chances are that it still sounds a bit like fucked-up noise, but…maybe, just maybe, it will have a mercurial quality to it that appeals to the true seeker of the one true fucked-up noise. I think this magick quantity has a lot to do with the fact that the music has been created almost automatically, so that the artist barely recognizes themself in the work. The alien and strange quality of the tape music appeals to the poet’s sick lust for surprise kicks. This can be very refreshing if you’ve ever sat listening to a loop over and over again in Cubase or whatever. Your girlfriend may not dig it, and you can’t stick it on at work, but it is a pure and unspoiled and wild sound. 

These are the reasons why I love reel-to-reel tape recorders.


So dip your toes into the tape music of a singular chap, who always Looks Sharp.

You can listen to the long-form works from which this album was extracted at http://peteum.podomatic.com/

Coming soon on Chinstrap .....

Exciting releases lined up and imminent ....

Chin17: Pete Um "Look Sharp! and hear the difference"

Chin19: Various Artists "Sounds to Come"


Also in the works is Chin18, a retrospective of the first year of Chinstrap releases, with some special treats thrown in ....

Monk, Martial and Melody

In a recent blog post, Ethan Iverson has a good swipe at anyone (and there are many) who wilfully, or stupidly, misunderstand the work of Thelonious Monk. Ethan said in a post a while ago that should he and I meet we’d probably disagree on most things relating to jazz - an opinion I’ve never really understood quite frankly, because I find myself in agreement on most things that he writes about in jazz, and in particular when he writes about the historical jazz canon. And in this post in particular I think he’s right on the money, both in relation to Monk and his other sidebar criticism of Martial Solal.

I’ve always found Solal to be brilliant, but almost too brilliant. His fluid technique and febrile imagination seem to conspire to refuse to allow him to ever settle on a vibe or an idea for longer than a couple of seconds before he’s off again to demonstrate some other kind of pianistic or improvisational legerdemain. His playing is the musical equivalent of being on a Roller Coaster – full of thrills and adventure, but not something you’d want to do all day.........

Having said that, he IS a true original with a style that incorporates Tatum-esque flourishes but with a very different harmonic approach. His ability to leap from idea to idea is startling and there’s obviously a brilliant improvisational mind at work. He was one of the first really original European jazz musicians and his style was almost fully formed from a very early stage. Here’s an example of his quixotic brilliance in a trio performance of ‘Green Dolphin Street’ recorded in the 60s (couldn’t find any more of this footage on Youtube, which is a pity – looks like a fascinating show) - check out Johnny Griffin’s admiring comment at the end - ‘Ridiculous!’. Yes indeed, it IS ridiculous



But despite the brilliance, or maybe because of it, I often find myself tiring of Solal quite quickly, especially because of his inability, or disinterest perhaps, in sticking with one idea for any length of time, or with letting the music breathe at all.

Which is in stark contrast to Monk’s approach – a man who had an incredible ability to explore and/or repeat small amounts of material for long periods of time. It was Solal’s public dismissal of Monk’s pianism, at a recent talk in New York, that set Ethan off on his angry rebuttal of both Solal’s opinion that Monk couldn’t really play the piano, and of the people who thought Monk’s music lacked seriousness. He also took a swipe at the many people who over the years have believed that Monk’s music could be reduced to a stereotype by just adding a few clusters or sudden displacement of a note or two.

Which is something I’ve felt for years too, and in reading Robin Kelley’s biography (which I previously discussed at length here) it’s clear that this kind of dismissal of Monk as a kind clownish amateur pianist who, as was sometimes grudgingly admitted, wrote interesting tunes, was an opinion that dogged Monk for years when he was alive, (doubtless denying him many work opportunities), and incredibly, seems to be still around in some quarters.

I’ve never ever understood the idea that Monk was a ‘bad pianist’. Unless you maintain the narrow view (and some people do), that a virtuosic 19th century classical approach to the piano is the only barometer of pianistic worth, then surely it’s obvious that Monk was one of the most original pianists in the history of the instrument. How can his detractors on the pianistic front, not hear the SOUND he makes on the instrument? It’s totally unique and has never, to my ears, ever been reproduced by anybody. He is a virtuoso of sound and sonority. And he is a virtuoso of rhythm – he swings as much as anybody, but in his own unique way. His use of rhythm is both extraordinary and ceaselessly inventive

Here’s an example of both of those attributes – the unique sound, and the rhythmic virtuosity and of course the amazing swing



Ethan also mentions, and is critical, about the anecdote in the book that tells of Monk flying through some Chopin, and how this was used in the book (along with the proof of his knowledge of the European classical piano repertoire), as some kind of validation of Monk as a ‘real’ pianist. Ethan makes the point that Monk was often erroneously associated by critics with the European avant garde and this is another point I would agree with totally. Monk’s roots are irredeemably, both socially and musically, in the community from which he came. The section of Kelley’s book that deals with Monk’s childhood in the San Juan Hill area of New York was for me one of the most fascinating aspects of the book. It really clarifies where Monk was coming from – black evangelist church music, stride piano, Duke Ellington – and I think all of that is evident in the Caravan performance that I posted above.

There are a couple of related stories to the Chopin story mentioned in the book, that involve anecdotes concerning Monk playing privately like Tatum or like Bud Powell. I’ve heard these stories before and they’ve always irritated me because they are based on the premise that the way Tatum or Powell played the piano was the correct way to play, and that Monk could do it if he wanted to, but he chose not to. So in an effort to defend Monk, the purveyors of these stories are just reinforcing the stereotype that Monk’s way of playing the piano was wrong. I do not personally believe that Monk could, or would have wanted to, play the piano like Art Tatum, any more than I believe that Tatum could or would have wanted to play like Monk. Monk does not need to be validated in this way – his piano playing represents a unique achievement and he did not need to play like Tatum or Powell (or Chopin!) to demonstrate his bona-fides as a pianist


(Monk's Advice)

Another point touched on in Ethan’s piece is the rarity of good interpretations of Monk’s music. Again musicians often seem to believe that just adding the odd cluster to any phrase makes the music into an authentic interpretation of Monk. But this is such a shallow approach and misses the point completely – in fact misses many points. One of Monk’s strongest opinions revolved around how his music should be played and he apparently said ‘Never mind the so-called chord changes, play the melody!’. And as listed in the famous ‘Monk’s Advice’ page, (transcribed by Steve Lacy from various nuggets of info given to him by Monk) this ‘play the melody’ theme was a consistent one as far as Monk was concerned - ‘Pat your foot and sing the melody in your head when you play’, and ‘stop playing those weird notes (that bullshit), play the melody!’

Melody was sacrosanct to Monk, as was rhythm, and yet so many people playing Monk approach the music as if the melody was something to be dispensed with as quickly as possible in order to get to the changes. It’s a very bebop approach and one that just doesn’t work for Monk’s music. All the character and individuality of his music gets flattened by the blunt instrument of changes running. I remember seeing the band ‘Sphere’ in 1983 – a band with great Monk credentials since both Charlie Rouse and Ben Riley had spent extended periods with Monk – and being very disappointed with the music, mainly because of the pianist in the band, Kenny Barron. Now Kenny Barron is a GREAT jazz pianist, but to my ears he played Monk as if the music was just another set of changes to be negotiated. Sphere were a great band, but in my opinion, not a great band for playing Monk.



One of my favourite recordings of Monk’s music comes from what might seem like an unlikely source – Chick Corea. He recorded what was originally a double LP on ECM – ‘Trio Music’ with the ‘Now He Sings Now He Sobs’ group with Miroslav Vitous and Roy Haynes. One of the LPs consisted of free improvisations, which never convinced me at all. But the other LP was comprised completely of Monk’s compositions and this was great. Corea really gets inside Monk’s music in the sense that the melody is referred to constantly during the solos, and his rhythmic sense is so strong – his phrases are carved out of the melodies.

Corea manages to both reference Monk and yet remain unmistakably himself – the sound he gets from the instrument has that bright sparkling tone that always characterises his acoustic piano work, and here it’s put at the service of the music, using his rhythmic prowess to point up the shapes and angles of Monk’s melodies while generating some of his most swinging playing on record. Having the addition of Haynes, himself of course a former Monk sideman, really helps the music and his bubbling snappy drumming dovetails perfectly with Corea’s clear articulation. Vitous is perhaps not the ideal Monk bassist, with the huge reverb applied to the instrument (by ECM or by Vitous?) making the bass a bit swimmy at times, but as always he’s an impressive soloist and of course this trio has some serious jazz history of it own.

Here they are, more than a decade later, playing Rhythm-a-Ning, and again Corea and Haynes’ affinity with Monk is beautifully on display again. (I have NO idea why Vitous is wearing headphones!)



I recently watched an interview with Corea where he told of working opposite Monk many times in the 60s and described Monk as being ‘one of the greatest musical figures of our culture’. Maybe he needs to have a chat with Martial........

Chin16 : DJ North by Northwest "Dan Bale"

Straight out of Cumbria, DJ North by Northwest brings an instant singalong sampladelic classic in the form of "Dan Bale (I Don't Know)", an ode to a man he transparently doesn't know.
Working the underground scene in North-West England for the past ten years, DJ North by Northwest has constantly pushed the boundaries of the club going public. For him a week without a gig is a week without breathing. Going under various aliases, DJ North by Northwest is his moniker for his sampling and mash-up work. For his other names, you'll have to hunt. The virtual B-side here comes in the form of "The Full Moon Party", a collaboration with the Ambleside based band Hot Barn.

Monk - music and inimitable minimalism

Probably well behind everybody else, I’ve been reading the Thelonious Monk Biography by Robin Kelley And in what amounts to a private Monk festival, I’ve also been listening to the Complete Riverside Monk box set which I picked up in Paris recently.

I’ve been listening to Monk’s music for over thirty years now – I remember my father bringing home a double LP Riverside compilation when I was about 13 or so (pictured above – liner notes by Hall Overton!), and being really struck by the unique sound world of this music, which was unlike anything I’d heard in even my father’s extensive collection of jazz records. I didn’t understand it, but then again, not being a musician until I bought my first instrument at 18, I didn’t really understand anything............

Fast-forward several years and I not only played a lot of Monk’s music in various bands (as any jazz musician does in the course of playing this music), I also put together two different trios – one saxophone, one piano – devoted solely to his music, and also wrote the arrangements for a quartet tour where the entire repertoire was Monk’s. So his music has been part of my musical and everyday life for the majority of my time on the planet.

So, given all that, it’s taken me a while to get to Kelley’s book – I think I tried to order it when it came out first but it hadn’t been printed on this side of the water and then it became one of those ‘to do’ things. But it was worth the wait – I’m not finished it yet (as I write this), and I’ll be sad when I am, because it’s been a great read. As has been remarked previously by others, the amount of research Kelley did was phenomenal – the guy seems to have found out what Monk was doing on a week by week basis for about thirty years! And he not only undertakes amazing research, he also casts some light on on Monk’s (in)famous ‘eccentricity’, by showing that Monk was clearly bipolar and far from his eccentricity being something amusing, his condition caused tremendous difficulties both for him and for his family. The fact that his illness went undiagnosed for so long was caused both by a less developed understanding of the condition in those days, and the fact that the mental state of a black man was a very low priority for 1950s and 60s America.



The person that emerges in this book is a very admirable man – a genuine family man, generous to his friends and with his time to other musicians if they showed a genuine interest in what he was doing. He was also very musically demanding on his sidemen and colleagues, hurt and offended by the lack of recognition he often got, and by the reputation he had for being ‘crazy’. I knew that Monk had a difficult time in his early career, but until I read this book I hadn’t realised just HOW difficult it was. For the first 15 years of his professional life he struggled to get work of almost any kind – his reputation for being ‘weird’ both musically and personally, (not to mention a couple of minor drug busts with the consequent loss of his cabaret card), made it incredibly difficult, for a man with a wife and two young children, to support his family and develop his music.

Despite the appalling general lack of recognition he received around that time, there were several people who really swam against the tide and supported him professionally and who come out with great credit for it – Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff of Blue Note Records, Max and Lorraine Gordon (the latter going as far as carrying boxes of Monk’s records to record stores in an effort to get them to sell them), and George Wein. And his manager Harry Colomby emerges with a lot of credit for the work he put in trying to get work for someone who must have been both difficult to sell, and a very difficult client at times. In fact he was Colomby’s ONLY client for years – Colomby remained a schoolteacher throughout his association with Monk, and his role as a friend, manager, and agent for one of the world’s greatest composers and jazz musicians is a truly extraordinary story in itself.



As is the story of Nellie...... Without her, Monk wouldn’t have had a hope of surviving the early days in the way that he did, or dealing with the pressures associated with his fame from the late-50s onwards. Her devotion to him is both touching and extraordinary, and he was in turn devoted to, and totally dependant on her. Theirs is a unique story in the New York jazz world of that time – a stable relationship that was put under the most incredible pressure by economics and social class. How she managed to support Monk, raise a family, and deal with her own health issues over a fifteen year period, when almost no money was coming into the house almost beggars belief. But she did, and then when Monk received the recognition due to him at last, she metamorphosed into his road manager, talking care of literally everything for him while they we touring and working.

Of course the legendary Nica is heavily featured in the book too. Hers is a unique story – European nobility, wealthy but disowned by her family because of her bohemian ways, takes up with the NY jazz world and becomes an intimate friend and supporter to some of the most important figures in the music at that time, and to Monk in particular. The extraordinarily comfortable relationship there seems to have been between herself, Monk and Nellie is a story in itself. An unorthodox triumvirate that shouldn’t have worked, but did – for years.

While the book went over some ground I already knew from a previous biography of Monk by Leslie Gourse, I really learned a lot from this book about where Monk came from, the society from which he emerged and the whole jazz scene at that time.

I was again struck by just how much playing these guys did! The scene has changed so much and it’s very easy to forget the huge impact on everybody’s playing that must have been made by the sheer number of gigs they played. In a time when a jazz club gig was a minimum of three sets per night, 6 nights per week, and a possible couple of extra matinees thrown in, jazz musicians put in hours on their instruments in a way that’s almost impossible to do these days. Bands could stay together for long periods and develop their music in a way that to today’s jazz musician is really enviable.



And for those of us (which is nearly everyone by now) who only know that period from the recordings, it’s startling to see how much playing guys like Monk did with bands other than the ones we know from the recordings. For example there’s a mention of a gig at Town Hall with a bass and drum team of Scott LaFaro and Elvin Jones! I know I would pay a LOT of money to hear how that sounded – to hear how Elvin and Scotty sounded together, and how they sounded playing Monk’s music. Monk also hired LaFaro and Paul Motian for a week in a club in Boston! The legendary Evans’ bass and drum team, but playing with Monk – wow..... Apparently Monk was very taken with LaFaro and wanted him to join his band, but he’d already committed to Evans. In the book, Motian spoke very highly of the gig with Monk and tells a great anecdote about Monk asking him to sing his ride cymbal beat to him before the first gig and suggesting adjustments to it.

What also becomes clear by virtue of an accumulation of anecdotes, is just how dysfunctional many of the musicians were in the NY bebop jazz scene in the 40s and 50s in particular, but also into the 60s. The book is littered with stories of guys not showing up for gigs, being late, being drunk, being stoned, starting fights (physically sometimes), disappearing without explanation, dying young from diseases that would normally be rare in their age group, being psychotic, getting shot, knifed etc etc. Of course we all know these stories but when you read them in concentrated form like this, one after another, it really brings it home what the scene was like. It was (with some exceptions) a drug ravaged, alcoholic and dysfunctional community – severely discriminated against by society in general and by the organs of the State in particular. The story of Monk’s treatment at the hands of the police in Baltimore for example is both tragic and, even at this distance, enraging. Yet this underclass, operating in these appalling economic and societal conditions, managed to produce some of the greatest musicians and music of the 20th Century. Extraordinary.

A recurring theme in the last third of the book is the lack of new compositions created by Monk after about 1958. It’s interesting that he seemed much more prolific in the years when he was struggling to get gigs or be taken seriously as a player or composer. Once he became famous and began to get the recognition he’d always deserved the compositions dried up and his contract with Columbia seemed to be one long conflict between his contract, which demanded three albums a year, and his inability to come up with the material required. It was clear that the demand for new pieces stressed him considerably during this period, and Kelley puts down his inability to compose to exhaustion brought on by constant performing. But I’m not sure this is a strong enough reason for Monk’s compositional river running dry – when you look at Monk’s schedule, even at the height of his fame, he often had three weeks off here and a month there, and contemporaries like Coltrane for example, who was even busier than Monk, were producing new compositions all the time. It seems to me that Monk’s illness must have had something to do with his latter-day struggle and inability to come up with new material.




He was heavily criticised for playing the same repertoire over and over in the 60s, yet if you look at the videos on Youtube from this period, it’s hard to see why the critics are complaining, since his approach to these particular hoary old chestnuts is so fresh every time. Here was a guy who was really improvising every time he played. He never does any mere running through the changes, he’s always improvising off the melody. He does NOT play the same on Blue Monk as he does on Straight No Chaser – Monk doesn’t have a blues template, he really improvises every time he plays a tune – no matter how many times he’s played it in the past.

Another thing that struck me as I was listening to the Riverside Monk collection was how influential Monk was outside of the more obvious players usually discussed when Monk’s influence is mentioned (Jaki Byard, Andrew Hill, Herbie Nichols, Eric Dolphy etc). Listening to his solo piano recordings in particular, I came to realise that Monk was really the first minimalist in modern jazz. Yes, Basie had that aspect to him too, but it’s different. Basie swings tremendously while just using a few notes, and Monk does that too, but in Monk’s solo piano music there’s a stripped down quality and a deliberation about playing sometimes really tiny amounts of musical information that’s uniquely Monk. A kind of stillness and ability to listen to the sound the music is making rather than just listening to the notes being played. Monk will hang a chord or a cluster and just leave them there for a moment, savouring the effect, in a way that you hear in later music by people like Ran Blake (another Monk disciple) for example. And I can even hear it in the sometimes minimalist approach of Paul Bley, or Bill Frisell, or the pared-down drumming of present-day Paul Motian. In an era when jazz musicians moved towards ever greater levels of floridity and virtuosity, Monk sometimes espoused a Spartan approach to his material in a way that not only had never been done before but pointed to a whole aesthetic philosophy that would be adopted by future generations of players. He seemed to have an ability to listen to sound as an end in itself – a concern with timbre that was years ahead of his time. Only Ellington (a clear influence) can really be compared to Monk in this respect, and even then it was different.

Let’s finish by taking advantage of the still miraculous Youtube to watch Monk in Japan in 1963 playing ‘Ba-Lues-Bolivar-Ba-Lues-Are’. Check out the rhythmic vitality of the comping, and the way he takes the last phrase of the melody and uses it to comp for the first two choruses of the tenor solo. And also listen to the way he solos thematically all the time... And when you watch him play, you can see the great truth in what Kenny Werner wrote in Effortless Mastery where he said something like, “I don’t want to play like Monk, I want to feel like Monk felt when he played!’

Then there’s Rouse playing the music with such authority, and John Ore swinging the quarter note into bad health........And then there’s the amazingly musical Frankie Dunlop who as always, carves out a uniquely individual approach to the jazz drum solo. I LOVE Dunlop’s playing (I always preferred this quartet to the later one with Larry Gales and Ben Riley, good and all as it was), it’s such a shame he went off to a showbiz career (including apparently, stints as a female impersonator!) and left so little recorded work behind.

So, this is the Monk quartet of the early 60s – and the critics were complaining about THIS!?