Travis A. Jackson

ECCENTRIC, GIFTED, AND BLACK: THELONIOUS MONK REVEALED

Do not miss Robin D. G. Kelleys Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original , for it will stand as the definitive biography of the great American composer and pianist for many years to come. What distinguishes Kelleys treatment of Monks complicated and enigmatic life is the sheer depth and breadth of primary research, including, for the first time, the active cooperation and involvement of Thelonious Monks family. In his acknowledgments, Kelley describes a long process of convincing Thelonious Monk, III to grant permission culminating in a six-hour meeting in which his knowledge, credentials, and commitment were thoroughly tested and challenged. Once he had secured “Toots” blessings, as well as that of his wife Gale and brother-in-law Peter Grain, Kelley was introduced to Nellie Monk, Thelonious Monks wife, and a wide range of family and friends who shared their memories and personal archives of photos, recordings, and papers. This is not an authorized biography, however, since Thelonious Monk, Jr. never demanded the right to see drafts or dictate the content. Rather Kelley was admonished to “dig deep and tell the truth.”

“Miles Davis Concerts and Interviews in the Vault,” Wolfgang’s Vault

The 1980s and 1990s were boom years for the recording industry as labels, major and independent, emerged from the economic downturn of the late 1970s and padded their ledgers by reissuing recordings from their vaults on compact disc. In the flood of singlealbum releases (often with “bonus” tracks) and lavishly prepared boxed sets, musicians who had already achieved iconic, if not canonic, status were among the best represented, and few perhaps fared better than Miles Dewey Davis III. Indeed, even early in the present decade, Richard B. Woodward could observe that Kind of Blue (1959), one of the trumpeter’s most celebrated releases, was still selling an average of 5,000 copies per week.1 And as the second decade of this century approaches, this sustained interest in Miles Davis—and particularly his less canonic work from 1969 to 1975—shows few signs of waning. Indeed, a major feature film based on the musician’s life, reportedly directed by and starring Don Cheadle, is in pre-production, and a series of exhaustive reissues and monographs are among the many signs of Davis’s continued popularity.2 Ever-proliferating Internet sites are at least partly responsible for the profile that Davis’s post-Filles de Kilimanjaro (1968) music now enjoys, especially among younger listeners who might not listen to radio. Even the least-enterprising computer users, for example, might locate a seemingly limitless trove of official and bootleg recordings for free by entering Davis’s name in either the search box of one of the sites that aggregate tracks from MP3 blogs or, perhaps, in a search on YouTube. True, the resultant audio would likely be uneven in quality and its provenance indeterminate, but those users who desire better documented (and legally sanctioned) material do have alternatives, particularly via sites like Wolfgang’s Vault. This latter site appeared in 2003, and its initial offerings were “live” recordings from the private archive of the late Bill Graham, the famed rock concert promoter and the proprietor of both the Fillmore West (in San Francisco) and the Fillmore East (in New York) in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In the time since its launch, the site’s original materials have been augmented by recordings