belatedly, commemorating the centennial of the birth of Thelonious Monk

I had gotten into jazz in high school, mainly usual suspects like Miles Davis and John Coltrane.  My brother brought home Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz, which I kinda liked and liked at the very least for the amazing bass duet of Haden and Lafarro (sic?).

I got into Ellington in my college years.  I didn't get around to listening to Monk until shortly after I'd graduated from college.  This was back when I always had trouble falling asleep and was shuffling from lame temp job to lame temp job back in the 1990s.  So I would try to do something with the time by listening to music as I fell asleep.  That was, among other things, how I managed to listen to the Well-Tempered Clavier or the Haydn Op. 76 string quartets. 

In the later 1990s I finally got to Monk.  Monk and Ellington are my favorite jazz composers if I had to pick just two. 

The two things I find appealing about Monk's language are most easily described as his harmonic approach and his gift for melody.  His melodies are not necessarily always starting at the root of a chord.  One of my favorite Monk piece is "Let's Cool One", which is in E flat major but the melody starts on D natural and descends to C natural in the first measure before reaching E flat, the tonic of the key.

Let's Cool One
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7F5jxJCeRY

You can take that tune, which has an indelible contour and harmonize it in E flat major or you could harmonize it in C minor if you wanted to, or B flat major or ... you could even harmonize that opening head tune in B natural minor if you wanted to accent a Phrygian element in the harmony.  Here's hoping you get the idea that with an opening gesture like the one Monk uses you can harmonize it as if it were in any number of keys depending on whether or not you conceive of the opening note as the root, third, fifth or seventh of a chord.   I'm not sure I'd recommend harmonizing the whole thing as if it were in D natural major but parts of that head tune work even conceived in that key. 

Then there's another famous piece by Monk, Brilliant Corners
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TLEPQZIVOg

You could build a whole fugue or canon out of that glorious first eight measures. 

Ever since Gunther Schuller presented the idea of "third stream" composers and musicians on either side of the jazz and classical divides have expressed some skepticism.  I'm skeptical about skepticism here.  People who venerate J. S. Bach can forget he was a culmination, a proverbial end point.  It took generations of Bachs to get to the J. S. who has been canonized and there's good reason to canonize Bach's music but if there were no Buxtehude or Vivaldi or Sweelinck or Schutz or Monteverdi, if there were not, in sum, the whole arc of the early and middle Baroque idioms Bach wouldn't have happened. 

Let's pretend for a moment that jazz and classical composers aspire to arrive at an organic fusion of jazz with classical.  We don't really have to pretend this is a desired thing because people have been working toward composing such a fusion for generations. The jazz era should be heralded as a great gift to the music of the world and advocates of classical music as it's now called should be grateful for the art.  It's art and not merely entertainment.  Now if someone were to try to say that improvising endlessly on a ground bass or a pre-established and formulaic set of chord changes is entertainment rather than art then whoever says that has to dismiss just about anything and any major composer from the early and middle Baroque periods, which was in many respects the era of variations on a figured bass.  If the Baroque era could be thought of as the era of figured bass realizations the jazz idiom can be thought of as an era of figured treble--we have a melody and prescribed chords but the expectation is that you'll embellish or substitute those chords in some way that makes your performance of the music engaging and special. 

I was reading a book by a Dutch composer who was claiming we'll get a revolution in revived classical music but this author dismisses more or less the idea that jazz is an art form and dismisses the idea that popular musical idioms could be used to revitalize anything about the art music tradition.  But if you're going to cling to the long 19th century as some kind of ars perfecta then don't be surprised if in the wake of the crumbling of that era a new polystylistic era that includes jazz emerges.  For American composers I believe a path forward is to regard the work of the jazz greats like Ellington, Monk, and all of the others that don't even really need to be named for jazz fans to be considered part of the American classical canon.  It's not a big surprise to me that the classical composers most open to drawing inspiration from jazz have also shown an interest in Baroque music and not always just the obvious suspects. 

We don't need to go back and revive the bloated and rambling forms of 19th century continental European romanticism.  All that was any good about that idiom has been preserved in jazz and the American songbook and ragtime.  The great black musicians and composers of popular music preserved everything that was worth preserving about European classical music without displacing that canon.  What we can do now is treat jazz as an art music from which we can draw inspiration in revitalizing forms and idioms that were declared "obsolete" by mid-20th century academic music theory.  As an American composer if I'm going to write a fugue or a sonata I'm more interested in drawing inspiration from Thelonious Monk than from Beethoven and it's not because I don't like Beethoven, it's because Monk's music invites a path forward, a path to explore whereas centuries of musical pedagogical have presented Beethoven as a peak of perfection that can never be surpassed or equaled.   The early Baroque composers saw the perfection of ars perfecta and realized that it had a lot of beauty to commend it but that it could be retained as an older style you had to learn along with newer exploratory styles.

In American music jazz and classical can be thought of as new and old idioms.  It's worth noting that the distance from the end of the ars perfecta and the emrgence of Monteverdi on the one hand and the "culmination" of high Baroque music in the work of Bach and Handel took maybe a century and a half.  The path forward to a new era of musical beauty isn't in Mahler, not for me, it's in Monk.  Mahler has a few lessons to provide about large-scale form but in terms of whose vocabulary of melody and harmony inspires me, Monk.