Thelonious Monk
Monk Alone

Dear Thelonious,

it has never been easy to understand you. You have always eluded the stereotypical labels of music critics. You are a genius, an eclectic, a crazy jazz guru. Do you know that? Today you are recognized as the leader of the '40s be-bop revolution, and together with Coltrane and Hawkins you revolutionized the concept of modern jazz. Do you know you gave a hard time to the most virtuosic musicians with your ultra-modern melodic lines? Your sound starts from the piano elements of Harlem in the '20s, then you evolved, alone, with your ideas, your obsessions, and your maniacal tendencies. You had to be forcibly removed from the piano, you were capable of spending entire weeks trying and retrying your pieces, capturing the right rhythm, the right melodic line, trying to discover if anything good could be extracted from your ideas. Day and night. You never talked to anyone, too closed in on yourself, and no one understood for years how you perceived music; yet it spoke for you. It was too easy to call you crazy, no one could imagine that your musical indiscipline was actually highly disciplined, obsessive in the search for perfection and the suitable "groove". Deep down, you were a romantic, a mysterious dowser, a cultured and brilliant fool with unfathomable musical ideas. Your creative process was a result of hard work. Thankfully, your nephew unearthed a tape where you tried a piece for 79 minutes, so we could finally make some sense of it. I'm talking about that time you worked on "I'm Getting Sentimental Over You".  From that home tape, it becomes clear what kind of person you were, in private life and in the creative phase. It shows how every note is set only after long labor, never immediate. It is heard how you improvise without ever losing the melodic track and it is evident how much mastery of the instrument you possess. You maneuver masterfully, seek the funky, double the tempo, and hum the song. You obsessively search for the suitable variant and study melodic alterations, harmonic dissonances, and small tonal and rhythmic variations. How you enjoyed yourself with your wife. Your private life has always remained a taboo. Now everyone will go crazy trying to understand your immense technique. I speak of the "turning the beat around" where with your right hand you trace the main melody and with your left, you proceed transversely by inverting the bass of the offbeat chords. It seems you are playing out of time, but you are just having fun. Today, I was the one having fun listening to an old new great piece of yours, "Ruby, My Dear" and it made me want to write to you. What a classic, Thelonious. We miss you.

Yours

Uxo