Word: monke
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Though Monk's career has been painful and often thankless, it has also been a tortoise-and-hare race with flashier, more ingratiating men?many of whom got lost in narcotic fogs, died early in squalor and disgrace or abandoned their promise, to fall silent on their horns. Monk goes on. It is his high philosophy to be different, and having steadily ignored all advice and all the fads and vogues of jazz that made lesser musicians grow rich around him, he now reaps the rewards of his conviction gladly but without surprise. He has a dignified, three-album...
Nellie flies around through the narrow paths left between great piles of possessions, tending to his wants. Clothes are in the sink, boxes and packages are on the chairs; Monk's grand piano stands in the kitchen, the foundation for a tower of forgotten souvenirs, phone books, a typewriter, old magazines and groceries. From his bed Monk announces his wishes ("Nellie! Ice cream!"), and Nellie races to serve; she retaliates gently by calling him "Melodious Thunk" in quiet mutters over the sink...
Nellie and the few other people who have ever known Monk in the slightest all see a great inner logic to his life that dignifies everything he says and does...
...greed. He has no envy. His message, as Nellie interprets it to their children, is noble and strong. "Be yourself," she tells them. "Don't bother about what other people say, because you are you! The thing to be is just yourself." She also tells them that Monk is no one special, but the children have seen him asleep with his Japanese skullcap on his head or with a cabbage leaf drooping from his lapel, and they know better...
...Monk's lifework of 57 compositions is a diabolical and witty self-portrait, a string of stark snapshots of his life in New York. Changing meters, unique harmonies and oddly voiced chords create the effect of a desperate conversation in some other language, a fit of drunken laughter, a shout from a park at night. His melodies make mocking twins of naivete and cynicism, of ridicule and fond memory. Ruby, My Dear and Nutty are likably simple; Off Minor and Trinkle Tinkle are so complex that among pianists only Monk and his early protege, Bud Powell, have been able...