it, rippling through the keys like they were a deck of cards, fingers jabbing at them like they were hot to the touch or tottering around them like a woman in heels – playing it all wrong as far as classical piano went. Everything came out crooked, at an angle, not as you expected. If he’d played Beethoven, sticking exactly to the score, just the way he hit the keys, the angle at which his fingers touched the ivory, would have unsteadied it, made it swing and turn around inside itself, made it a Monk tune. Played with his fingers splayed, flattened out over the keys, fingertips almost looking like they were pointed upward when they should have been arched.
A journalist asked him about that, about the way he hit the keys.
—Hit ’em any way I feel like.
Technically he was a limited player in that there were all sorts of things he couldn’t do – but he could do everything he wanted to, it wasn’t that he was held back by his technique. Certainly no one else could play his music like he could (if you played the piano properly, there were all sorts of little things you couldn’t get at) and to that extent he had more technique than anyone. Equilibrium: he could think of nothing he wanted to do and couldn’t.
He played each note as though astonished by the previous one, as though every touch of his fingers on the keyboard was correcting an error and this touch in turn became an error to be corrected and so the tune never quite ended up the way it was meant to. Sometimes the song seemed to have turned inside out or to have been constructed entirely from mistakes. His hands were like two racquetball players trying to wrong-foot each other; he was always wrong-fingering himself. But a logic was operating, a logic unique to Monk: if you always played the least expected note a form would emerge, a negative imprint of what was initially anticipated. You always felt that at the heart of the tune was a beautiful melody that had come out back to front, the wrong way around. Listening to him was like watching someone fidget, you felt uncomfortable until you started doing it too.
Sometimes his hands paused and changed direction in midair. Like he was playing chess, picking up a piece, moving it over the board, hesitating and then executing a different move from the one intended – an audacious move, one that seemed to leave his whole defence in ruins while contributing nothing to his attacking strategy. Until you realized that he’d redefined the game: the idea was to force the other person to win – if you won you lost, if you lost you won. This wasn’t whimsical – if you could play like this then the ordinary game became simpler. He’d got bored with playing straight-ahead bebop chess.
Or you can look at it another way. If Monk had built a bridge he’d have taken away the bits that are considered essential until all that was left were the decorative parts – but somehow he would have made the ornamentation absorb the strength of the supporting spars so it was like everything was built around what wasn’t there. It shouldn’t have held together but it did and the excitement came from the way that it looked like it might collapse at any moment just as Monk’s music always sounded like it might get wrapped up in itself.
That’s what stopped it from being whimsical: nothing makes any difference with whimsy, whimsy is for low stakes. Monk was always playing for high stakes. He took risks and there are no risks in whimsy. People think of whimsy as doing whatever you feel like – but there’s less to whimsy than that. Monk did whatever he wanted, raised that to the level of an ordering principle with its own demands and its own logic.
—See, jazz always had this thing, having your own sound so all sorts of people who maybe couldn’t have made it in other arts – they’d’ve had their idiosyncrasies ironed out – like if they were writers they’d not ’ve made it ’cause they couldn’t spell or punctuate or painting ’cause they couldn’t draw a straight line. Spelling and straight-line stuff don’t matter necessarily in jazz, so there’s a whole bunch of guys whose stories and thoughts are not like anyone else’s who wouldn’t’ve had a chance to express all the ideas and shit they had inside them without jazz. Cats who in any other walk of life wouldn’t’ve made it as bankers or plumbers even: in jazz they could be geniuses, without it they’d’ve been nothing. Jazz can see things, draw things out of people that painting or writing don’t see.
He insisted his sidemen play his music the way he wanted but he wasn’t dependent on them the way Mingus was. Always it was Monk and the piano, that was really what the music was about. How well they knew his music mattered more to Monk than whether they were great soloists. His music came so natural to him that it baffled him, the idea that anyone could have trouble playing it. Unless he was demanding something beyond the physical possibilities of the instrument he assumed his sidemen should be able to play whatever he asked.
—Once I complained that the runs he had asked for were impossible.
—You mean they don’t give you a chance to breathe?
—No, but . . .
—Then you can play ’em.
People were always telling him they couldn’t play things, but once he gave them a choice – You got an instrument? Well, you wanna play it or throw it away? – they found they could play. He made it seem stupid to be a musician and not be able to do things. Onstage he’d get up in the middle of playing something, walk over to one of the musicians, say something in his ear, sit down again and resume playing, never hurrying, wandering around the stage as his hands wandered around the tune. Everything he did was like that.
—Stop playing all that bullshit, man. Swing, if you can’t play anything else play the melody. Keep the beat all the time. Just ’cause you’re not a drummer doesn’t mean you don’t gotta swing.
One time Hawk and Trane were having trouble reading some of the parts and asked Monk for an explanation.
—You’re Coleman Hawkins, right, the man who invented the tenor? And you’re John Coltrane, right? The music’s in the horn, between you you should be able to work it out.
Most of the time he said little to us about how he wanted us to play. We’d ask him questions two or three times and get no response, he’d be staring straight ahead as if the question were addressed to someone else, to someone else in another language. Made you realize you were asking him questions and you knew the answers all the time.
—Which of these notes should I hit?
—Hit any of ’em, he said at last, his voice a gargle-murmur.
—And here, is that C sharp or C natural?
—Yeah, one a them
He kept all his music very close to him, didn’t like other people seeing it, he kept everything close to him. When he went out he liked to be wrapped up in a coat – winter was his time – and he preferred not to stray too far. At the studio he’d have his music in a little book, reluctant to let other people see it, always plunging it back into his coat pocket when he was through, locking it away.
During the day he walked around, wrapped up in himself, figuring out his music, watching TV or composing when he felt like it. Sometimes he paced for four or five days in a row, walking the streets at first, going south as far as Sixtieth, north as far as Seventieth, west as far as the river and three blocks east, then gradually restricting his orbit until he was walking around the block and then sticking to the rooms of the apartment, pacing nonstop, hugging the walls, never touching the piano, never sitting – then sleeping for two days straight through.
There were also days when he was stranded between things, when the grammar of moving through the day, the syntax holding events together fell apart. Lost between words, between actions, not knowing something as simple as getting through a door, the rooms of the apartment becoming a maze. The use of things eluded
