I’m just here to make some music and help out with the fucking.
—Yank Lawson
Lawson had been asked to account for his presence in New York in 1954, at Eddie Condon’s on West Third Street, sitting in on trumpet with Ralph Sutton at the piano, Jack Teagarden on slide trombone. A joyful noise in Chicago and well regarded as a recording-studio instrumentalist, Lawson was unknown to a jazz-club reporter looking to compose a program note. Was Lawson come to town to make for himself bigger money and a brighter name? Cut a record with Tommy Dorsey? Climb the stairway to the stars?
Lawson’s answer didn’t see the light of print, but Condon delighted in the tempo and the phrasing, scrawled it on cards sometimes stuck in a lower corner of the mirror above the bar. Where at the age of twenty in 1955 I found it with a sense of thanksgiving and relief. The next day I was returning as a senior to Yale College, where for three years my undergraduate questions about the purpose and meaning of life had most of them come back marked address unknown or return to sender. All but one, and that one off the books, the assurance that when bound up in the embrace of music, I knew and felt as fact—as in other times and places I assuredly did not—that yes, Virginia, and if it please the court, I am a human being. And if to become a being at least in some part human is the object of the lessons taught by poets and philosophers, then why not and better yet the high note hit by Lawson? Why else is mankind here on earth if not to dance to the music of time, make a joyful noise unto Chicago or the Lord, help out with the labors (Promethean and Pythagorean, Apollonian and Dionysian) of creation? (...)
Body and soul in unison is the news breaking from the stage of a Stones or Swift or Springsteen concert, but also, and these days probably as often, in reports from a hospital intensive-care unit or cancer ward. Vibroacoustic therapy alleviates the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease; Alzheimer’s patients recall familiar songs more easily and accurately than spoken words; music increases and improves immune-system function; the Mayo Clinic employs the playing of a harp to relax and lower the blood pressure of patients undergoing chemotherapy.
Cicero relies on Pythagoras for the assurance that the music of the spheres is at all times present in the human ear; he goes on to say it comes and goes unheard because humankind has “become completely deaf to its melody.” Modern authority begs to differ. NASA’s orbiting X-ray telescope in 2003 picked up on a B-flat fifty-seven octaves below middle C, emitted by a black hole in the Perseus cluster of galaxies and reverberating across a distance of 250 million light-years in the key characterized by late eighteenth-century poet and composer Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart as “cheerful love, clear conscience, hope, aspiration for a better world.”
And if a music of the spheres can be dimly heard by a machine, who’s to say the sweet unheard melodies imagined by John Keats cannot be heard by human beings born among us for whom everything is music? W.C. Handy, American composer known as the Father of the Blues, learned his notes by listening to the sounds of nature. No piano or organ in the District School for Negroes in Florence, Alabama, but in the nearby woods and fields there were robins carrying “a warm alto theme,” bobolinks singing counterpoint, mockingbirds trilling cadenzas, distant crows improvising “the jazz motif,” the moo-cow a saxophone, the whippoorwill a clarinet. (...)
In the winter of 1964, I was a contract writer for The Saturday Evening Post, allowed by its editor, Otto Friedrich, to chase rainbows likely to prove rewarding. I’d been listening to Monk live and recorded for ten years, knew he had influenced musicians as dissimilar as Dizzy Gillespie, Dave Brubeck, John Coltrane, and Sonny Rollins, knew also he had suffered a siege of obscurity (time in jail, trouble with money, shunned by nightclub owners who thought him too sinister a shade of black) from which he had begun to reemerge into the limelight. Lulu was back in town, and probably a good story, his use of dissonance being taught in composition courses at the Juilliard School of Music. Friedrich agreed. He was himself a musician of no small means or consequence—“The only way to understand a Mozart concerto thoroughly is to sit down at the piano and play it, which I do with his no. 27, humbly, every six months or so”—and he suggested I take as much time as necessary to come up with something that didn’t read like a program note in DownBeat.
Monk at the time was appearing at the Five Spot Café in the East Village, his presence pictured in the trade press as “the weird and enigmatic genius of modern jazz” surfacing like the Loch Ness monster from the sloughs of despond, “the perfect hipster,” fond of wearing an Ottoman fez or a Chinese coolie hat, “high priest of bop” playing “zombie music” and given to whimsical and cryptic statement. To a disc jockey asking, “Why do you play such strange chords, Mr. Monk?” he had been quoted as saying, “Those easy chords are hard to find nowadays.”
At the Five Spot, I introduced myself as a writer come to write about his music, said I was content to hang around and listen until it occurred to Monk to talk; it was three weeks before he stopped by the table to announce his opinion of critics. “That’s a drag picture they’re paintin’ of me, man. A lot of people still think I’m nuts or somethin’...but I dig it, man; I can feel the draft.”
An imposing figure elegantly dressed in a sharkskin suit, Monk carried himself with the dignity of a man who knows his own mind and doesn’t countenance fools. He wore a goatee, a purple shirt, a dockworker’s cap, and a diamond ring on the little finger of his right hand. I asked him if it was true he never left home without a hundred-dollar bill stuffed into the black silk sock on his left foot. He laughed, easily and good-naturedly. “Right foot,” he said, “you never know when you’re gonna run into a bargain.”
I hung around for the rest of the winter, never knowing if or when Monk might entertain questions. Most nights I arrived around midnight after completing the day’s lesson for Lipsky. Sometimes, when listening to Monk’s complex rhythms and the abrupt, far-fetched chord progressions, I could hear echoes of late Beethoven. Seated at the piano, Monk was utterly possessed by the music, his whole body following the rise and fall of the melodic line, the expression of openmouthed surprise on his kind and trusting face like that of a child watching a magician changing oranges into rabbits. When standing up to conduct his band, snapping his fingers, thrusting an open palm to call for a solo from Charlie Rouse on tenor sax or Butch Warren on bass, Monk never stopped moving. He looked like a man dancing on hot coals.
—Yank Lawson
Lawson had been asked to account for his presence in New York in 1954, at Eddie Condon’s on West Third Street, sitting in on trumpet with Ralph Sutton at the piano, Jack Teagarden on slide trombone. A joyful noise in Chicago and well regarded as a recording-studio instrumentalist, Lawson was unknown to a jazz-club reporter looking to compose a program note. Was Lawson come to town to make for himself bigger money and a brighter name? Cut a record with Tommy Dorsey? Climb the stairway to the stars?
Lawson’s answer didn’t see the light of print, but Condon delighted in the tempo and the phrasing, scrawled it on cards sometimes stuck in a lower corner of the mirror above the bar. Where at the age of twenty in 1955 I found it with a sense of thanksgiving and relief. The next day I was returning as a senior to Yale College, where for three years my undergraduate questions about the purpose and meaning of life had most of them come back marked address unknown or return to sender. All but one, and that one off the books, the assurance that when bound up in the embrace of music, I knew and felt as fact—as in other times and places I assuredly did not—that yes, Virginia, and if it please the court, I am a human being. And if to become a being at least in some part human is the object of the lessons taught by poets and philosophers, then why not and better yet the high note hit by Lawson? Why else is mankind here on earth if not to dance to the music of time, make a joyful noise unto Chicago or the Lord, help out with the labors (Promethean and Pythagorean, Apollonian and Dionysian) of creation? (...)
Body and soul in unison is the news breaking from the stage of a Stones or Swift or Springsteen concert, but also, and these days probably as often, in reports from a hospital intensive-care unit or cancer ward. Vibroacoustic therapy alleviates the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease; Alzheimer’s patients recall familiar songs more easily and accurately than spoken words; music increases and improves immune-system function; the Mayo Clinic employs the playing of a harp to relax and lower the blood pressure of patients undergoing chemotherapy.Cicero relies on Pythagoras for the assurance that the music of the spheres is at all times present in the human ear; he goes on to say it comes and goes unheard because humankind has “become completely deaf to its melody.” Modern authority begs to differ. NASA’s orbiting X-ray telescope in 2003 picked up on a B-flat fifty-seven octaves below middle C, emitted by a black hole in the Perseus cluster of galaxies and reverberating across a distance of 250 million light-years in the key characterized by late eighteenth-century poet and composer Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart as “cheerful love, clear conscience, hope, aspiration for a better world.”
And if a music of the spheres can be dimly heard by a machine, who’s to say the sweet unheard melodies imagined by John Keats cannot be heard by human beings born among us for whom everything is music? W.C. Handy, American composer known as the Father of the Blues, learned his notes by listening to the sounds of nature. No piano or organ in the District School for Negroes in Florence, Alabama, but in the nearby woods and fields there were robins carrying “a warm alto theme,” bobolinks singing counterpoint, mockingbirds trilling cadenzas, distant crows improvising “the jazz motif,” the moo-cow a saxophone, the whippoorwill a clarinet. (...)
In the winter of 1964, I was a contract writer for The Saturday Evening Post, allowed by its editor, Otto Friedrich, to chase rainbows likely to prove rewarding. I’d been listening to Monk live and recorded for ten years, knew he had influenced musicians as dissimilar as Dizzy Gillespie, Dave Brubeck, John Coltrane, and Sonny Rollins, knew also he had suffered a siege of obscurity (time in jail, trouble with money, shunned by nightclub owners who thought him too sinister a shade of black) from which he had begun to reemerge into the limelight. Lulu was back in town, and probably a good story, his use of dissonance being taught in composition courses at the Juilliard School of Music. Friedrich agreed. He was himself a musician of no small means or consequence—“The only way to understand a Mozart concerto thoroughly is to sit down at the piano and play it, which I do with his no. 27, humbly, every six months or so”—and he suggested I take as much time as necessary to come up with something that didn’t read like a program note in DownBeat.
Monk at the time was appearing at the Five Spot Café in the East Village, his presence pictured in the trade press as “the weird and enigmatic genius of modern jazz” surfacing like the Loch Ness monster from the sloughs of despond, “the perfect hipster,” fond of wearing an Ottoman fez or a Chinese coolie hat, “high priest of bop” playing “zombie music” and given to whimsical and cryptic statement. To a disc jockey asking, “Why do you play such strange chords, Mr. Monk?” he had been quoted as saying, “Those easy chords are hard to find nowadays.”
At the Five Spot, I introduced myself as a writer come to write about his music, said I was content to hang around and listen until it occurred to Monk to talk; it was three weeks before he stopped by the table to announce his opinion of critics. “That’s a drag picture they’re paintin’ of me, man. A lot of people still think I’m nuts or somethin’...but I dig it, man; I can feel the draft.”
An imposing figure elegantly dressed in a sharkskin suit, Monk carried himself with the dignity of a man who knows his own mind and doesn’t countenance fools. He wore a goatee, a purple shirt, a dockworker’s cap, and a diamond ring on the little finger of his right hand. I asked him if it was true he never left home without a hundred-dollar bill stuffed into the black silk sock on his left foot. He laughed, easily and good-naturedly. “Right foot,” he said, “you never know when you’re gonna run into a bargain.”
I hung around for the rest of the winter, never knowing if or when Monk might entertain questions. Most nights I arrived around midnight after completing the day’s lesson for Lipsky. Sometimes, when listening to Monk’s complex rhythms and the abrupt, far-fetched chord progressions, I could hear echoes of late Beethoven. Seated at the piano, Monk was utterly possessed by the music, his whole body following the rise and fall of the melodic line, the expression of openmouthed surprise on his kind and trusting face like that of a child watching a magician changing oranges into rabbits. When standing up to conduct his band, snapping his fingers, thrusting an open palm to call for a solo from Charlie Rouse on tenor sax or Butch Warren on bass, Monk never stopped moving. He looked like a man dancing on hot coals.
by Lewis H. Lapham, Lapham's Quarterly | Read more:
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