THE FAMOUS DOOR FEBRUARY 4, 2010
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Click here to discover what will be inside our newest feature, “The Famous Door.”
Since I've taken the name for this new feature from a storied old jazz club, I thought I should start the series with a video that features a person who not only played in the place but who also named one of his signature pieces "52nd Street Theme"--Thelonious Monk. This clip of a different tune of his, "Blue Monk," is an excerpt from a 1950s TV series called "The Seven Lively Arts," which devoted an episode to jazz. Broadcast on a Sunday afternoon, the show was quasi-educational programming, as we can tell from the presence of the lifeless WASPY host, New York Herald Tribune critic John Crosby. Assuring viewers of his authority on jazz and superiority to its practitioners, he appears on screen positioned above the musicians on prop stairs, and he literally descends to grace the black people with his haughty postwar white benevolence. Monk, who hadn't shown up for the rehearsal, is in wonderful form, costumed with kooky splendor in a riding cap and bamboo shades. He plays with fearless, riveting originality, and the producers of the show enforce the prevailing conception of Monk as a freakish spectacle by positioning Count Basie at the nape of his grand piano, to ogle. Basie accommodates, snickering at Monk's work and darting his eyes around in "get this guy" incredulity. (The other onlookers in the reaction shots include tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins and singer Jimmy Rushing, who performed in other segments of the show.) Monk resented how Basie was used to mock him, and he threatened after the show to appear at Basie’s next concert, sit on the other side of his piano, and make him look like the fool that Monk allowed himself to appear to be only on his own terms.
(www.davidhajdu.com)
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4 comments
Classic Monk. One of my favorite musicians from the finest era in jazz. I didn't see Basie mocking him though - looked to me like he was enjoying it, but I guess to each their own interpretation. All pretty meaningless though - the music is the point and Monk could bring it like nobody else.
- rambooride
February 5, 2010 at 7:28am
Great feature. Keep the classic jazz coming! I agree with rambooride about Basie. It would have been interesting if the camera stayed on Monk longer at the end of the song when it appears he was making eye contact with Basie. I didn't read any disdain in Basie's body language. Persumably David Hadju has a source substantiating his contention of Monk's resentment. My impulse is to blame the producers who staged the thing so awkwardly. One thing is certain: Hawkins was enjoying it. It was right around this time in 1957 they recorded together on the legendary "Monk's Music" album with John Coltrane, among others.
- appleton
February 5, 2010 at 4:54pm
Good stuff: clip and text. I'm with those who think Basie looked disdainful and agree with the observation about Crosby. Even by the later fifties Monk was considered weird and unmusical and threatening to other players and "cognoscenti"—Crosby?—who didn't yet get him.. His piano playing was, my position is, really an extension of Basie's. If there was a spectrum between Basie's compressed conciseness and Tatum's orchestral (florid?) playing, Monk was on the Basie side, but altogether unique in his angularity and stop and start dissonantce, even though he could stride with the best of them. Best thing on Monk I ever read: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100111/yaffe/print
- basman
February 5, 2010 at 5:14pm
This is a great clip which I've seen many times over the years. What is decidedly not great is David Hajdu's tendentious critique. Everything he writes might be true but nothing he writes is supported by the tape itself. I see Basie smiling. I also see Osie Johnson smiling. Perhaps Osie is mocking Monk, too? I do not see Basie rolling his eyes. I see Hawk snapping his fingers with the beat. Jimmy Rushing is watching impassively. I wonder what Hajdu takes from that? And then there's the completely out of left field denunciation of the “racist” host; racist presumably because he's a white and WASPY and announces the clip from a few steps up on a ladder. (Presumably Hajdu knows that the host staged the scene this way and not the director, else his comment would be false on its face.) One would think, given that Crosby does not know the names of the sidemen by heart - and fumbles over Abdul-Malik's name when reading it - that no one is going to confuse him with a great jazz authority. On what basis does Hajdu think the host considers himself an expert? In short, this is a disgraceful and willfully politicized piece of jazz criticism.
- sharpnine@verizon.net
February 5, 2010 at 9:00pm