E-mail a friendRobin D. G. Kelley
airdate October 26, 2009
Robin D. G. Kelley is professor of American studies and ethnicity and history at the University of Southern California. Previously on the faculties of Emory, the University of Michigan, Columbia and NYU, where he chaired the history department, he was one of the youngest tenured professors in the U.S. Kelley earned his Ph.D. from UCLA and has published several prize-winning books on African American history and culture. His latest, Thelonious Monk, has been described as the definitive work on modern jazz' most original composer.
Web exclusive - Dr. Kelley explains the relationship between jazz icons Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis. (2:32)
Full Interview (11:22)
Robin D. G. Kelley
Tavis: Robin D. G. Kelley is a professor of American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California. He's also the author of the critically acclaimed new biography "Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original." Professor Kelley, an honor to have you on the program.
Professor Robin D. G. Kelley: Great to be here.
Tavis: It's good to see you, man. When I got wind that this was coming I could not wait to talk to you about it, and you have to be happy at the outset here with all the acclaim - I use that word all the time, book is highly acclaimed, but this, everybody is talking about what you have done here. How does it feel when you spend 14 years of your life doing something and it's met with that kind of response?
Kelley: Well, I'm pleased by it but I have to say when I wrote the book, my audience were two people - Thelonious Monk and Nellie Monk, both of whom are passed. I wanted to write a book that they can read if they were here and recognize it as the truth. That was my goal, and if I did that I'm happy. So hopefully Monk is smiling right now.
Tavis: We're going to talk about who Thelonious Monk was, for those who don't know his genius even today, but let me start by asking why you were so enamored by this man that you would spend 14 years of your life doing this.
Kelley: Right. Well, when I was a teenager I was a budding pianist. In fact, I even considered a career, though I kept my day job, everything's good. I loved his music, just fell in love with the sound, and I've spent basically three decades trying to figure out how to reproduce that sound of his - it's unique.
So in some ways Monk was always living within me, musically. Monk was also a character in the jazz world who was probably the least understood, the most caricatured. Considered mysterious, strange, and I wanted to find out who that man was, get behind the mask, get behind the myth.
Tavis: To your point now about the myth, what people are saying about the book is that you've done a lot of myth-busting in the book. Give me two or three of them before you got into this, "I have got to get to these two or three myths and I've got to debunk them." Tell me about that.
Kelley: Well, one big myth is the fact that Monk himself was well-trained, very knowledgeable about the music, about the piano. He had piano teachers. The myth is that he was sort of kind of an idiot savant, that sort of within him, and even people who loved his music feel like there's something either connected to his mental disorder, bipolar disorder, that somehow that explains his music, or that he's just a natural. But what I found is that he worked very hard to achieve the sound and to write the compositions that he produced.
A second myth is his relationship with the baroness - the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter was in some ways his patron. Not his patron, but the patron saint of many jazz -
Tavis: Many jazz artists.
Kelley: Exactly. So there's all these stories circulating about his relationship, was it a sexual relationship, was it romantic, and what I found was that she was one of his best friends in the world and she was also best friends with Nellie Monk, his wife. The three of them kind of put their heads together and helped Thelonious through his career.
I guess one last one is that Monk was a teacher. This is someone who wasn't disconnected from reality, very much engaged with the world around him. He brought young musicians up; he always focused on what they needed. He taught them so much about the music, both his music and others, that every musician I talk to would describe him as "my teacher."
Tavis: I couldn't wait to get to the part of the book where you delved into the part about Monk for me - you're the writer here, but for me, the part about him that I love next to his musical genius, which is the fall that he took that cost him his license for what, seven years? I'll let you tell the story, but that's - anyway, I'm moved by it, as you can tell, but tell the story.
Kelley: Yeah, in August of 1951 Thelonious Monk was in a car with the pianist Bud Powell and two other people and Bud Powell had some heroin on him. The police arrested everyone in the car and Monk refused to rat out his friend Bud Powell.
As a result of that he served 60 years (sic) in a workhouse at Riker's Island, he lost his cabaret card - now, a cabaret card is something that everyone who works in a venue that serves alcohol must have, whether you're a musician, you're a bartender, and the police control the cabaret cards.
When Monk lost his cabaret card it meant that he cannot work in a venue that served alcohol, meaning a jazz club, for six years. He didn't get the card back until 1957. So it was a huge thing and his wife kept saying, "Look, just tell the truth, say what happened." Monk said, "Look, I can't rat out on a friend. I just can't do that."
He paid a big price for that. The good news in the end is that because of the Black-owned clubs in the outer boroughs, places like the Bronx and Brooklyn and even in Harlem he was able to work and make a living - barely make a living - but without those clubs he would starve.
To me, that's part of the story, the way - the story of the Black community and the Black-owned clubs really speak to a part of the jazz world that's just not been written about in a lot of the history.
Tavis: What's your suggestion about how we should interpret the fact that he would not rat out his friend. Was that loyalty, was that stupidity, what's your read on that?
Kelley: I think it's a combination of things. Loyalty is part of it. He was loyal to his friends. He'd also had a very vexed relationship with the police. He'd been arrested before, in 1948, three years earlier, for possession of marijuana and served 30 days in jail.
He also felt like being part of a community of musicians that on the street he did not want the reputation of being someone who would rat out his friends, and that's part of it. I think that Bud Powell, for him, was almost like a younger brother. It was Monk who introduced Bud Powell to the jazz scene, Monk who took him around to all the clubs in Harlem and made sure that he played piano when other people didn't want him to play.
So that kind of loyalty and that love of his friend I think was really fundamental to Monk's personality, who he is.
Tavis: How was Monk regarded on the one hand, or not understood on the other hand in his time by others in the jazz world?
Kelley: That's a very good question. The musicians who were close to him loved his music. There were always those who felt they couldn't understand it but for the most part you think about the times when he was a young pianist at Mitten's Playhouse in Harlem. Musicians would come out and they couldn't wait to play with him because he was doing something different, something new.
On the other hand, the jazz critics, many of those people whose reviews determined whether or not you're going to make some money and sell a record, they didn't always understand what he was doing. There were a few who did - Nat Hentoff was one who did understand.
But the critics at first dismissed him in the '40s and it wasn't really until about 1957, when he got a gig at The Five-Spot, a small club in the Village, after he got his cabaret card back, that he began to make a little bit of money. He was 40 years old, the first time. That's when the critics began to say, "Well, hey, he's doing something different, something unique. His sound is unparalleled."
That coincided with a change in the music where a lot of musicians would become more experimental and Monk ceased to sound so experimental against artists like (unintelligible) Coleman and John Coltrane.
Tavis: What was up with the various hats that he would wear and with getting up and dancing in circles in the middle of a performance? Tell me about his style.
Kelley: (Laughs) Well, the dancing, he begins doing that in the late '50s - middle '50s, actually - and I argue a couple things. One, that he saw dancing like that when he was on the road with an evangelist in the 1930s as a teenagers, and you can see - there's a great scholar named Sterling (unintelligible) talks about the ring shout as a practice of dancing from Africa, which is a kind of sacred dance which became a Christian dance. So in some ways you can see elements of the ring shout when he gets up and dances.
The other thing is that it's ecstatic performance. When he danced he was in some ways conducting the band. Sometimes musicians couldn't quite get the rhythm right so he'd get up and dance the rhythm. He'd dance what the accent should be, and that was important for the other artists. Of course for the audience it was eccentricity, it was performance, it was part of the show.
As far as the hats go, he was a little bit vain. By the late '50s, early '60s he began losing his hair and so he began wearing hats all the time. Because of that, people from all over the globe would send him hats. Everywhere he'd go, he'd get a hat.
Tavis: How did this brother, of all the Black men who were doing good works in a variety of genres and fields and disciplines back in the day, how did he end up in '64 on the cover of "Time" magazine?
Kelley: That's a great story. He was supposed to be on the cover in November of '63 but then Kennedy was assassinated and bumped him off.
Tavis: If you're going to get bumped, that would be the story, yeah.
Kelley: Right. (Laughs) So when he was in, in February '64, part of it had to do with one writer in particular - a man named Barry Farrell who lobbied to write the cover story on a jazz musician, and it wasn't clear who that musician would be.
It could have been - Ray Charles was someone that was considered; Miles was considered. But he made a case for Monk and they bought it, and Monk in '64 was only the second African American jazz musician to be on the cover of "Time," the third musician, and that was a huge deal for Thelonious - huge.
Tavis: My time with Robin D. G. Kelley is up and it seems so unfair, because I got so many more questions. I'm going to ask Robin to stick around for a few more minutes and we're going to do some stuff for the website so there'll be a web exclusive of a few more things I want to ask him about, speaking of Miles, including the rift - the rift that developed between Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis. So much more to talk about.
It's a dense text but it's a good one. I couldn't wait to get my hands on it; I think you'll enjoy it as well. It's called "Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original." Indeed he was. He's dedicated a good chunk of his life to this, Professor Robin D. G. Kelley, an honor to have you on the program.
Kelley: Thank you so much. Appreciate it.
Tavis: It's good to see you.
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