As Kelly's outstanding biography makes clear, Monk as a man and as a composer was his own man -- bold, original, uncompromising, and rooted so deeply in place that when you encountered his oeuvre, you had to go him, because he wasn't going to come to you. Weighing in -- appendixes, notes, and index -- at almost 600 pages, The Life and Times is an appropriately weighty treatment of a musical figure whose center of gravity continues to be affecting the musical orbits of all planetary bodies in motion.
As a public service of the first order, Kelley dispels the persistent myths of Monk as a savant, as a mystic, as hopelessly eccentric, as anything less than a full man who took his art and his independence seriously. Along the way, readers will also get to the bottom of the crooked and discriminatory cabaret card system in New York City and the bizarro world of musicians' unions and music copyrights. Tied up in this, as well, is a brutal picture of how race factored into the criminal justice/mental health system in the US, and how musicians who were underpaid and overworked often kept themselves going with chemicals -- in Monk's case, alcohol, nicotine, "vitamin shots" from Dr. Robert, and the occasional recreational drug. All these impediments -- bad press, insufficient health care, crooked businessmen, and run-of-the-mill substance abuse -- didn't keep Monk from being himself and writing his songs.
Monk was a family man and a neighborhood guy, brought from North Carolina to New York City in 1922 by a mother who preferred the opportunities of the urban north to those of the rural south. In the Monks apartment in San Juan Hill, there was a piano, and Thelonious started playing when he was six, taking lessons across all kinds of musical genres, to the point where, in his late teens, he was skilled enough to tour the nation playing keyboard for a traveling preacher. The picture Kelley paints of Monk is of a young man who is deeply interested in music, provincial in the way that New Yorkers can be, and guided by some inner compass of confidence and strength, no doubt instilled in his by mother, with whom he was close until the day she died.
When Monk made his last public performance in 1975, even as the importance of his music was steadily growing, he had been retired from life as a working musician for a few years already. By the time of his death in 1982 -- folks might forget how long the silence was at he end of his life -- he had retreated to the second floor of his friend and patron Nica de Koenigswarter's home in Weehauken, New Jersey, where his wife Nellie would visit most days and Monk would reside, immaculately dressed, watching TV for the most part, or simply doing nothing. All that music, and then that long echoing coda.
Kelley doesn't miss a note of it -- not the personal microcosm of Monk's day-to-day life, and not the middle ground of music and gigs and records. In fact, few biographies present such a thorough and thoughtful chronicle of any musician's career in making music, particularly in the world of jazz, where a change in personnel means a change in the music. Most impressive is the manner in which Kelley frames Monk's life in the context of the struggle of African-Americans to create a space to make art (and a life) with dignity and integrity. The historical facts of slavery, segregation, discrimination, and the triumph over those factors is sometimes foregrounded in Kelley's narrative, but never in a manner that is forced or preachy. The author is spot-on from beginning to end.
Along with Terry Teachout's Pops: A Life
, Kelley's Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original
is one of the two best jazz books of last year, and I'm sorry on both counts that it took me until this year to get around to reading them. The good news is that Kelley's book will be out in paper next month (as will Teachout's, this week) so you can get the jazz lover in your life an early Christmas present. Actually, do them a favor, and get them two.PN Feedburner | PN iTunes | PN Twitter | PN Facebook | PN Video | PN Goodreads
comes out next week.
and 
director 
, a manifesto, if you will for the highly relevant 
, or the more recent sports documentary 
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. Born and raised in Miami -- with much time on the water and in one of those legendary stilt houses is Biscayne Bay -- Daniel's book is as much about people's relationships to place as to each other. You can listen to the broadcast feature 
(2010 Mythology Records) won't necessarily curl up in your lap and purr the first time you hear it. But, as the title suggests, after some time spent with the songs and excellent playing on this album, you can't fight having an appreciation of what Escreet is going for. Although I suspect he'd be quick to deny attempts at categorization, this album falls squarely in the camp of progressive modern jazz, as might be suggested by the one non-Escreet penned tune, "Charlie in the Parker," from Richard Muhal Abrhams -- he of the 
(2010 D Clef Records), a carefully crafted release from a musician who has written some very strong tunes, assembled a strong group, and made sure that the album's production values are outstanding. With his core band of Bruce Harris on trumpet, Zaccai Curtis on keyboards, Luques Curtis on bass, and Rodney Green on drums, Garrison sounds great on "Try Another Day," "You'll Know When You See Her," and the title track. Much is made of Claudio Roditi sitting in on three of the tracks, and he does great work on trumpet and flugelhorn, but it seems at times that those songs belong on some other album. Garrison has every right to feel confident in his group and in his writing to avoid what appear to be airplay reaches, as he does just fine in those places that are most familiar to him.
, which I have listened to a number of times and liked very much, although it seems more a series of solo piano sketches than a full album of tunes. Of the 17 tracks on this CD, the longest comes in at six minutes, while a couple are slightly over a minute. Aside from John Coltrane's "Moment's Notice" (which came in at 9:10 on Blue Train, but is a paradoxically meditative 3:25 here), and Sergio Mihanovich's "Sometime Ago", all the tunes on Mechanism are from Ross' imagination. The most memorable and distinctive is the title track, which makes more audacious use of digital looping than many of the other performances. Impressive in its range of textures and moods, Mechanism works more as a collection of ambient pieces than as an out-and-out album that commands your full sit-up-and-pay-attention.
, and the set wraps up with a two part audio interview conducted during a Coltrane tour of Japan in 1966. Find the full playlist 
