I think it put the challenge on a higher plan. Monk started to hone out his music, really polishing the edges, if that's an expression to be used in case of Monk, and looking for (and usually finding) new things in the old stuff to work with. So he took his own high standards as a base and tried to improve upon that.

I was involved in a project here in Dallasabout 25 years ago w/Ramsey Ameen, the cat who played violin w/Cecil Taylor back then. He had worked as an aide at Bellevue in the early-mid 1970s, and he mentioned that Monk was a frequent patient/resident there for exactly that reason. Said he wouldn't talk to anybody, just sit in his room and paint pictures of the sky when he did anything at all. Ramsey seemed like a straight-ahead enough kinda guy, and he wasn't trying to outhip anybody by presenting this information. I believed him then, and believe him more now.

If you can believe Gourse's bio even further, this depression/whatever was related to indiscriminate recreational drug use throughout the years. Maybe yes, maybe no. I seriously doubt that this was the sole cause, but if Monk was already leaningthat way for biochemical reasons, it probably didn't help him any.

I can certainly understand why this information hasn't been widely discussed. The stigmas of both mental illness and recreational drug use are still mighty potent, and it would be all too easy for the more sensationalistic elements of society (including "fans") to glom on to this as excuse to denigrate (or celebrate, for that matter) Monk for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with his deep and inate musical brilliance.

Monk was a genius. Period. The rest is secondary.

Image being in the club to see Barry Harris and Monk takes over the piano. I would have loved to have witness that one.

I hope I didn't give the impression that I thought Monk's later work was uninspired. I didn't mean to suggest that, even in a general way. My use of the word "uninspired" was strictly in the context of his motivation/energy/desire to make any music at all. Monk was not a cat who made compromises, and he liked to call his own shots. The notion that he made a (sane) decision to stop playing doesn't seem all that far-fetched to me. But I'm no expert on the subject.

BTW, your use of the phrase "a matter of degree" reminds me... mental illness is a matter of degree (not to mention subjective, controversial, etc etc). Difficult to look at all this with much confidence, let alone certainty...

I think we'll learn a lot more about that 1950s arrest when & if Peter Pullman's Bud Powell bio comes out. Hopefully, too, we'll learn more about Monk's entire life, including his last few years, when Robin Kelley's book is published. Sometimes visionary artists end in a silence that can be interpreted as either profound or bleak (I'm thinking of William Blake--wasn't he relatively quiet for the last few years of his life?), and that probably stem from a variety of factors.

Basically, I think that Monk never did anything that he didn't want to do--and when he didn't feel like playing music anymore, he stopped. Sad if depression/exhaustion of vision were the causes, but I admire his integrity.

If one listens to the Black Lion sessions, there is not a trace of uncertainty. Some of the Giants of Jazz material I have heard sounds more like that.

I recall a mention (either in the biography or the 'Chaser' film) that he stayed for days on end in his room in Nica de Koenigswarter's appartment. If my memory is right, that place was also totally over-run with cats and overlooked the Hudson..

Amen!

btw, where can I find those 70's sessions (especially the ones with the improvised pieces)?

that's why my life is divided in 2: BM & AM

MCO

I zm very reluctant to recommend anything by Leslie Gourse, but her Monk bio goes into a good deal of detail about this, and sources are credited. I'd have a hard time believeing that this much specificity was totally fabricated, even by her.

Again, this is not an atttempt to dwell on the sensationalistic and/or morbid. If it's true, then it belongs to history, and should be treated as such. My personal feeling is that a genius of Monk's calibre would "find a way" for tht genius to come out no matter what the circumstances of their life. Somehow, and with whatever tools were at their disposal. If Monk's fate had been to have been a plumber, I bet you he'd ahve been the damndest plumber in the history of the world.

Just curious, Tony. Are you unequivically equating having an "altered" (ie - observedly different than the norm) "emotional landscape and viewpoint" with mental illness?

Naw, but it's a good point to discuss.

My point with Monk and some other artists who suffered from mental illness is that in their peak years, they did seem able to tap into their (for lack of a better term) visions and even more importantly express them in a way that resonated with others.

I don't think one HAS to have a mental illness to have an iconoclastic viewpoint, definitely not. And of course many people with mental illness aren't able to transform their experience into art - that gets to your plumber comment, Monk was just so creative that he was going to be a genius at whatever he did - probably would have transformed plumbing.

All I'm saying is that when I hear Monk's music, I could be reading in way too much, but I believe I can hear him channelling both the highs and lows of his condition into art.

It's worth emphasizing the highs - to me, one thing that is seldom discussed is the tremendous joy and humor in much of his Monk's music. "Childlike" has been used as an adjective for some of these moments, but I'm not sure I agree. Instead I hear some of his use of repeated simple phrases as expression of the moments of great clarity that people suffering from mental illness sometimes experience - e.g. in manic states, where the world first seems in fast forward and then almost seems to fall away and only a divine feeling remains (often expressed as a feeling of invincibility and even Christ-like state).

Likewise, his use of repeated, micro-varied phrases, often played forcefully on the keyboard, sounds to me like an aural expression of being obsessed with or unable to part with an idea and literally "hammering it out."

Finally, consider his mastery of tempo, and particularly his ability to hold together pieces full of long pauses at incredibly slow pace...best evidenced in some of his solo piano work. This is frankly astonishing, I don't believe I've ever heard anyone else who could do this type of levitation so well. This I hear as an altered sense of time, slowed down perhaps by depression - literally, he seems to be moving and playing slower than time itself, yet it holds together because it must have felt right to him.

Again, I want to emphasize I could be all wet. But I think this is an interesting line of inquiry in considering Monk's music. He could have done all the above things simply because he was a genius, and it may have had nothing to do with his mental illness. But something about what I'm hearing tells me otherwise. Probably the biggest support for this thought is that to my ears his playing had more and more of the above qualities as he got older and his mental condition became more severe.

Excuse the inclusion of quotes from two different posts, but here is the crux of the matter as far as I'm concerned - Monk's mental illness had nothing to do with his music, AFAIC. The "provable" manifestations of his illness came much later in his life, when he became non/borderline functional. Before that, what we got was the genius, pure and simple.

Although it's tempting to read traits of the latent/incipient/whatever illness into his work throughout the years, that sets up the unintentional/unfortunate consequence of looking at his life's work through the lens of "clinical" analysis, and I just don't think that that is a good idea. It's not that far a step from doing that to evaluating all creativity from a mental health angle, and that's a really nasty can of worms to open. I know that that is in no way your intent, Tony, but in these days of psychotropic medications being invented and distributed like so many after-dinner mints, it's nevertheless a valid concern, I think. Once society begins to view those who have "eccentric" perspectives, artistic or otherwise, as people who are acting out their inner mental "irregularities" (can't think of a better word, although one surely exists) in a postive/self-theraputic manner, things could get awfully ugly.

Look, I'm no "genius", not by the longest of shots, but I've always been somebody who had one of those "different" perspectives, and who has not been afraid to explore/act on on them, creatively and otherwise. I can't begin to tell you how many times I've had my "sanity" questioned, and not just by people who are obviously "clueless". And yes, I've had my "ups and downs" emotionally, but no more so than many people for whom unquestioningly following the same routine every day of thier life, the "normal" routine, is not a choice, but a congenital imperitive.

As far as I'm concerned, "mental health" is a pretty subjective field far more often than not. My personal opinion is that it is something that should be evaluated solely in terms of functionality, not "perspective". Dysfunctionality pops up across the "behavioral" spectrum, as does creative insight, but if there's any direct link between the two, I've yet to see it. Frequent intersection, yes, but I also know a lot of blondes who are truly dumb, so what does intersection have to do with anything? Societal conditioning leading to a pre-ordained result sometimes? Well, yeah. And maybe the same thing applies to those with beyond the norm "creative" skills as well - the dysfunctionality is a result, not a root cause. Sometimes.

Monk really showed no signs of not being able to function until later in his life. Before functionality became a problem for him, what were we getting in his music - an attempt to "keep a grip" or sheer genius-level insight into the multi-leveled inter-relationality of reality expressed in tems of harmony, time, timbre, etc.? I myself have to believe that it's the latter. "No harm, no foul", as they say, and if Monk's functionality was not an issue to others or to himself, all "eccentricities" aside, where's the reason to suspect any kind of "illness"? If mortal tragedy, a car accident, a murder, whatever, had ended his life in, say, 1963, would anybody, including family members, had clinical "issues"? Probably not, I'll say. Why would they? They'd just say that he was a genius with eccentric tendencies. And they would be right, because that's all he was until then!

"Latency" must be classified as nothing but speculation (idle or otherwise) when it comes to stuff like this, I believe. We all are latently mentally ill. This I truly believe, from the most off-the-wall eccentric to the most staid model of behavioral consistently. It's not until we reach the point where we cross the line and become dysfunctional that that illness must be considered and examined as an illness, because that's the time, the only time, that it truly is an illness. Looking for "signs" before it does can turn up anything in anybody. It all depends on who's looking for what, and who gets to define where the boundaries are. You're not sick until you get sick, and anybody can get sick under the right combination of circumstances.

If we want to say that Monk had a uniquely precious tonal/spatial perspective all of his life that became "cloudy" due to various factors, including mental issues, which may or may not have forced him to "work a little harder" to keep in touch with it in his later years, I'm more than fine with that. But if the "argument" is that the way he acted out on that perspective at every point in his career was formed by a mental illness of some sort, then I will have to respectfully but resolutely disagree.

Very good points, Jim.

I tend to say that what we call mental illness could be viewed as one type of behaviour "accepted" by society in case you are too frustrated by life and want to step out of your way and still stay inside your social context - at least as long as you are not treated in an institution. I can't help but think about Lucky Thompson as another highly talented musician so dedicated to his art he had to be frustrated by the business.
I totally agree that it is a very individual thing - this is confirmed by every diagnosis of mental illness I witnessed.

While I can follow your thoughts as seen from the psychiatrist's point of view, the features you described can tell us something entirely different if seen from an ethnomusicologist's point of view.

All these musical features are common practice in African music - the African influence on Jazz as an important aspect of Afro-American culture is still heavily underestimated, IMHO. While these features might sound "childlike", this is only if seen from a European musical cultural viewpoint. We project our musical expectations to African cultural elements, where they have different importance and functions. This lead generations of social scientists to categorize African culture as childlike or close to states of madness (if you think of trance phenomenons in ritual contexts) - and it still does!
This also applies to Monk's mastery of rhythm, which is the most important feature in African musical practice, and here African music has developped far beyond European music.

I think your points are totally valid on their own, but should be enhanced by an intra-cultural African-American point of view - I think this applies to any discussion of jazz, BTW.

Absolutely!
Monk made sense.
We're the insane ones!

you maybe, but not me!

certainly not!

Gotcha!



Crazy or not? Should we have a poll?

ubu

Thank you, Senator.

And I will respectfully disagree with this overly simplistic notion.

I imagine that the distinction between being "freer of mental illness" and having enough "reserves" to "keep at bay the demons" is one that only a professional could understand. The rest of us always run the risk of falling victim to overly simplistic notions.

I know you were kind of funnin' me here (and a well deserved swat on the nose it was, sorry for the tone of my first message, was more than a little, shall we say, HAUGHTY) , but I also have to say that the notion I've posed is not simplistic at all.

I simply meant that with aging the brain and body lose all kinds of reserve...in the most tangible example, that's why when you were 20 and you went out and drank all night, you could jump out of bed without much of a hangover the next day, while now you feel like you want to die. Ditto for heavy exercise, you could be totally out of shape at 20 and go out and play soccer all day and have nary a sore muscle, but most people at 40 can't, and at 60 you'd need a body cast.

Pneumonia in an 80 year old is a WAY big deal; sure it can be too in a younger person but if they are otherwise healthy, it seldom is.

Same thing happens with mental reserve...all kinds of studies show that normal older people do have more trouble with "mental stress" types of tests like repeating long strings of digits from memory than younger people. This is associated with all kinds of tangible, real problems, like the tendency of otherwise normal older people to become disoriented or even frankly psychotic (it's called "sundowning" and is extremely common) when admitted to the hospital with an illness (even a relatively minor one) - they lose their normal cues and all their defenses/reserves are fighting off the illness, and they go ga ga temporatily. Same thing can happen in younger people who have medical problems that make them physiologically "older."

So we lose reserve and when we do, medical problems that were present in youth but more or less compensated for can become more of an issue. Now I ask you, why should mental illness - a misnomer in the era of molecular biology and genetics, since these disorders are every bit as "medical" as heart failure - be any different?

It's an important point, not really a very technical one. I think it explains why a lot of artists who contended with mental illnesses were able to be quite productive and keep it together early in their lives, while later on their productivity went to hell and they became withdrawn or reclusive.