Thelonious Monk, Created Wry Jazz Melodies and New Harmonies
Thelonious Monk, the pianist and composer whose wry, angular melodies and unusual harmonic progressions are among the most striking contributions to the jazz repertory, died yesterday in Englewood Hospital in New Jersey at the age of 64. He had suffered a stroke on Feb. 5.
Although Mr. Monk's music was rooted in the stride-piano tradition of Willie (The Lion) Smith, James P. Johnson and Duke Ellington, it stood apart from the main flow of jazz.
”He hasn't invented a new scheme of things,” Paul Bacon wrote in the jazz magazine The Record Changer in 1948, ”but he has, for years, looked with an unjaundiced eye at music and seen a little something else.
”He plays riffs that are older than Bunk Johnson but they don't sound the same. His beat is familiar but he does something strange there, too. He can make a rhythm almost separate, so that what he does is inside or outside it. Monk is really making use of all the unused space around jazz, and he makes you feel that there are plenty of unopened doors.”
'An Original'
Randy Weston, a pianist who studied with Mr. Monk, has called him ”as complete an original as it is possible to be” and he cites the unifying ”simplicity” in his music.
”Not that his music isn't often complex to execute,” Mr. Weston explained, ”but it always comes through so clear and accurate, so uncluttered. His music is simple in the sense that it has totality of personality. It's all him.”
Among his works were ”Round Midnight,” ”Straight No Chaser” and ”Well, You Needn't.” The strange contours of Mr. Monk's tunes led the jazz critic Whitney Balliett to describe them as rippling ”with dissonances and rhythms that often give one the sensation of missing the bottom step in the dark.”
When Mr. Monk was a guest at a jazz class at Columbia University, the lecturer turned to him and asked if he would ”play some of your weird chords for the class.”
Mr. Monk bridled. ”What do you mean, weird?” he asked. ”They're perfectly logical.” ”Jazz,” he said on another occasion, ”is my adventure. I'm after new chords, new ways of syncopating, new figurations, new runs. How to use notes differently. That's it. Just using notes differently.”
