In Mahayana Buddhism, there is a general tendency to dismiss the self-made enlightened ones, the pratyekabuddhas. The reason is that though they have developed practices that have brought an end to outflows, they rarely have developed a language to teach those practices to others.
In fact, I would say the general tendency is toward denigration, to describe them as hot house flower buddhas fearful of the ordinary world.
I bring this up just to say that often having a language can be helpful. Musicians hate to be boxed in by genre, but that’s about commerce. Having a word to describe a musician can be so helpful.
Few musicians need a word like Thelonious Sphere Monk. Monk had no mentor, other than being vaguely friendly with James P Johnson. Monk never attended a formal music school. Unusually for a New York resident, his early development was unrecorded. Miles Davis’s first recordings were made in 1944 when he was 18. They depict a young trumpeter struggling to escape the influence of Dizzy Gillespie. Monk’s first recordings in 19471 depict a mature independent musician: he was more than 30 years old.
Fortunately, the kind of flat mystery Monk had for years is finally being filled in with facts. For this we have to thank Robin DG Kelley’s magisterial biography.
We actually know the word Monk used to describe himself: “Modern”. But perhaps in retrospect we can add a few more words of clarification.
In particular I would like to distinguish three kinds of modern writing: Fantasy, Surrealism and Absurdism.
By “fantasy” I mean the deliberate creation of other worlds, meant to be compared to the empirical world. Sometimes this involves the creation of literal other worlds as in Lord Dunsany’s Gods Of Pegāna. Sometimes this involves the analytical depiction of a historical situation, such as Bolesław Prus’s masterpiece Pharaoh.
In Jazz, the great fantasist was certainly the divine Sun Ra. Sun Ra may be a cult artist, but it shouldn’t be mistaken that he had little influence. George Clinton’s funkentelechy would be silent without Ra. Malcolm X held up Sun Ra as an example of the possibilities of self-reliance. Amiri Baraka talked to Sun Ra daily and popularized many of Ra’s concepts.
But Sun Ra and Monk contrast sharply in exactly this genre respect: Monk was not a fantasy auteur. Looking just at his song titles, what do you see? Green Chimneys (his daughter’s grade school), In Walked Bud, Blue Bolivar Blues, Round Midnight, etc.. These daily things, empirical life.
Monk’s music is the music of the ordinary world, mystified.
The next stop would be surrealism. The original surrealists, the Breton circle defined surrealism as techniques to express the real mechanisms of thought in art. There was a great deal of discussion of Freud and especially William James.
Because everyone fell out with Breton eventually I would include other attempts to go beyond 19th century realism in the pursuit of artistic accuracy. I take “surreal” at it’s name: on top of real. For instance, for me, Braque is a surrealist painter because he is trying to display the actual perspectivless reality revealed by modern science, rather than a 19th century perspective realist.
From this point of view, the master of musical surrealism is certainly Charles Mingus.
Mingus’s surrealism is revealed most strongly by his late work, such as Let My Children Hear Music and Cumbia And Jazz Fusion. These show Mingus’s reaction to Miles Davis’s concept of fusion, namely that Mingus infused musique concrete elements into his post-Ellington orchestras.
Don’t Be Afraid The Clown’s Afraid Too, for instance, is a rearrangement of The Clown with the spoken word replaced by animal noises.
But I don’t think Monk is a surrealist. Mingus’s work has to be large, because he is interested in the psychological process by which the PTSD patient goes from lyrical reminiscing to screaming in pain and - if they’re lucky - back.
Exactly what is jarring in Monk is the lack of obvious process. His music is always that way.
What is philosophy without process? No, not without process but without the specialness of process. In traditional western philosophy (revived and emphasized by Hegel), process does not simply explain, but also justifies.
Spinoza’s Ethics says there unboundedly many vocabularies with which one can describe the one world. Two of these have the special property of being always valid: physical vocabulary and logical2 vocabulary. Though these two vocabularies explain everything, they justify nothing. This is the core of absurdism.
The art of absurdism, like the etching of MC Escher above, is frequently put down by critics who care terribly about process. Monk himself was terribly put down by critics who didn’t agree with his keyboard technique.
Well, it’s getting long, so I will just let Monk lead us out with a song that captures the absurdity of our times. This song was written in memory of one of those long hospital nights.
I hope you are having a happy thanksgiving and not one of those.
There are technically some earlier recordings as a sideman, but Monk is inaudible on them.
Spinoza says psychological, but this is a more contemporary phrasing