Thelonious Monk
Thelonious Monk Trio

"Thelonious Monk was strange, and everyone agrees on that" - Arrigo Polillo; Jazz

Unlike John Coltrane, who with never gratuitous virtuosity revolutionized hard bop, Thelonious Monk with an almost naïve simplicity revolutionized the entire jazz of the 1950s.

Monk's personality remains one of the most emblematic of the jazz scene, of 20th-century music, if not of art: Attitudes, behaviors, often enigmatic statements have not only fueled interest in Monk the musician, they have over the years created a real icon, a totem that has nothing to envy, for anecdotes and legends, to personalities of the late 20th century such as Jim Morrison, Frank Zappa, Jimi Hendrix. Just to name a few. In the eyes of the malicious, his was an intelligence that bordered on idiocy, also expressed by his way of playing, keeping his fingers straight and not arched as usual for pianists, which influenced not only composition but also improvisation. Discredited for much of his life, Thelonious Monk today is a must for anyone new to jazz and for any veteran of the genre. 

The album analyzed contains many of the most famous pieces of the Rocky Mount pianist (Blue Monk, Bemsha Swung, Monk's Dream), released for Prestige in 1954. It is evident from the first notes of Blue Monk that it is a different style, a different way of thinking, a logic totally different from the entire bop and hard-bop scene present in those years, there is not the slightest presence of a search for the new and the "colossal," as is part of the jazz of the '50s. As the already mentioned Polillo says, “Monk's music is like a painting by Henry Rousseau,” it does not deign to look into the future because it wants to rediscover the past of African peoples, elevating it to a topos of Western culture: the reclamation and awareness of men of their own primordiality. The criticisms that struck Monk's style are overturned on their own battleground. Technique, composition, and improvisation, although not always infallible from a practical point of view, excel in the theoretical one, finding perfect synthesis in every note, every pause, every mistake. As he would say: “it is all perfectly logical”.

It is music that even after years remains fresh, clear, often naïve like a work by the Douanier indeed, but at the same time rich in symbols, which dig profoundly until they reach the human soul at its roots, making it enigmatic and paradoxical.