Playing Hard
A few years back, I was working at a literary foundation where the poet Simone White was teaching an evening poetry workshop. It was called Reading Hard, and the premise of it was that over the course of the 8 weeks, participants would try to read the entire catalog of a writer of their choice. The “hard” wasn’t just the difficulty of the task, but the intensity of it. Like loving hard. Putting the full brunt of one’s intention into the act.
Not really participating in the workshop, but catching glimmers from my desk, I decided I would play along, literally. I would try to learn to play every composition by Thelonious Monk. At the time, I thought Monk had only 55 compositions (in reality, it’s around 70). That is somehow doable, right?
Besides his manageable number of compositions, I thought Monk was a good subject of intense study because I wasn’t in love with him. In college, a professor had told us to pick research topics that we kind of hated. I never fully understood her, but came to believe it had something to do with the way you look at something you deeply love: you don’t see it. Like with rose-colored glasses, or no glasses at all.
I was also in an on-again-off-again relationship with Robin D.G. Kelly’s biography of him, and I wanted to finish the giant book like some people want to catch a giant fish. I thought: I will learn all his songs as I learn about his life.
Monk’s most famous song is “’Round Midnight.” Though the way most musicians play it, so romantically, moodily, literally like a midnight ballad of seduction, it sounds nothing like a Monk tune. Monk tunes are more angular. Like the hats he wore. Like the flatted fifths he was known for, and the flat fingers my piano teacher told me I shouldn’t imitate.
His songs generally aren’t ponderous or melancholy, the way “’Round Midnight” has become. A lot of the times, they seem like texts, meant to be interpreted, projected on to, especially when you hear him play solo, no accompaniment, so simple, it could be each song’s first draft.
I found that some of his songs are perfectly composed; I can play them as transcribed in my little Thelonious Monk fakebook, and they sound like the record (e.g., “Monk’s Mood”). I found that many songs weren’t so songlike–that the colloquial term “tune” might better describe them (like “Little Rootie Tootie”). I nearly hurt my brain trying to play the counterpoint of “Friday the 13th.” I learned “Brilliant Corners” by ear. I still don’t know the bridge to “Monk’s Mood” despite having read this great document in which he says “THE INSIDE OF THE TUNE (THE BRIDGE) IS THE PART THAT MAKES THE OUTSIDE SOUND GOOD.” I already knew “Blue Monk” and “Ruby My Dear” from when I was in high school. I could never get the feel, the inside part of “Crepuscule with Nellie.” And I am in love, madly in love with his only waltz, “Ugly Beauty,” which I heard for the first time in August of 2010, Gretchen Parlato singing, with lyrics, retitled as “Still We Dream.”
You and I I think we know the reason why So far it’s been quite charming … Round and round The carousel is winding down And still we dream of love
I was in love, or on the brink of what I thought was love, with a maybe-ing, sometime-ing guy. So I listened to this song. And after listening to Gretchen, I listened to Carmen McRae sing it. And after that, I went back to my fakebook, all the way to the end, and I taught myself this little ditty, sometimes playing it out of time, as I’d heard Gretchen first sing it, and then in 3, like the waltz it is, all the while holding on to the melancholy something inside, the something I sometimes feel in Monk, sometimes don’t, the melancholy thread that is always there, I think, if you know how to play it.
Below, a vintage clip of me playing “Ugly Beauty” in a very fancy friend’s house with totally different hair!
