Well You Needn't - Thelonious Monk

So. Let's start in the middle and work outwards. With the last CD I bought. Thelonious Monk Live at the It Club. I got it second hand from Amazon for the price of about a pint and a half of beer.*

At my last piano lesson my teacher decided that I should learn something written by a "jazz" composer. Until now most of the things I'm working on are standards of the show tune/ popular love song breed*. Oh calloo callay when the lead sheet for Well You Needn't was popped onto the music rest in front of me. Do you like Thelonious Monk? my teacher asks. I nod. Oh! Yes!

What do I love about Thelonious Monk? Well firstly it's the force of his musical personality. It doesn't really matter who is playing you can hear that it's a Monk composition. Then there's his playing - the very definition of idiosyncratic. On the surface kind of wrong but at the same time deeply, joyously, stompingly right.

Monk's relationship to music seems to have been a physical one. He would get up and dance while other people were taking a solo. The 'liner notes' for this CD tell me that he used to dance when checking takes in the recording studio - and it wasn't right until he could dance to it. I like this as a litmus test. Does it make me want to boogie?

There's an incredible sense of fun here. When I listen to it (and when I practice it) I feel this great urge to muck about. It makes about six of my inner clowns shout with glee and start running about the place. You want to just randomly chuck in a 'comping chord in an outlying register of the piano - simply because it's there. Or to dance round the living room throwing shapes you'd be embarrassed by in a club. 

It is a thing of clownish joy. Irreverent, out-there, and fun. Which is not to say that it is light or shallow. To say something is clownish, to me, is also to say that it reveals and yet contains and marshalls elements of chaos, nonsense, anti-sense and reistance. It acknowledges our darknesses and struggles and invites us to dance in the face of them.
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Footnotes
* Yes I'm one of those irritating preachy people who believe in actually paying for music and films. Or borrowing them through legitimate channels - like public lending libraries - so that the people involved in creation get their negotiated share. This here blog explains the issues very well.
**Beautiful Love (well Tolerably Adequate Love the way I play it. Sigh), Once Day My Prince Frog Will Come, Manha De Carnaval....