Word: pianos
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Pretty Butterfly. At the piano, Monk is clearly tending to business, but once he steps away from it, people begin to wonder. Aside from his hat and the incessant shuffle of his feet, he looks like a perfectly normal neurotic. "Solid!" and "All reet!" are about all he will say in the gravelly sigh that serves as his voice, but his friends attribute great spiritual strength to him. Aware of his power over people, Monk is enormously selfish in the use of it. Passive, poutish moods sweep over him as he shuffles about, looking away, a member of the race...
...stays up for days on end, prowling around desperately in his rooms, troubling his friends, playing the piano as if jazz were a wearying curse. In Boston Monk once wandered around the airport until the police picked him up and took him to Grafton State Hospital for a week's observation. He was quickly released without strings, and though the experience persuaded him never to go out on the road alone again, he now tells it as a certification of his sanity. "I can't be crazy," he says with conviction, " 'cause they had me in one of those places...
...wrote last summer under a title that is his own transcription of an Englishman's saying "Ask for T." ("And the T," says Thelonious, "is me.") The concert was the most successful jazz event of the season, and Monk greeted his triumph with grace and style. At the piano he turned to like a blacksmith at a cranky forge? foot flapping madly, a moan of exertion fleeing his lips. The music he made suggested that the better he is received by his audience the better he gets...
...call me 'Monkey,' and you know what a drag that was." His father returned to the South alone to recover from a long illness, leaving Monk's mother, a sternly correct civil servant, to work hard to give her three children a genteel polish. At eleven, Thelonious began weekly piano lessons at 75¢ an hour...
Monk quit high school at 16 to go on tour with a divine healer?"we played and she healed." But within a year he was back in New York, playing the piano at Kelly's Stable on 52nd Street...