Hangin' With Monk
Once around a midnight weary, with sleeplessness consequent of too much chocolate, I yet again resolve to abstain from all such too-muchness. Yes, I resolve, I shall adopt an abstemious, monk-like regimen.
Thinking monkish thoughts ‘round midnight, I recall the Thelonious Monk signature tune of that name. And lying in the dark, I begin writing in my head, riffing on an encounter many long years ago…
* * *
I run into Monk at The Five Spot, a small, New York City nightclub on a street corner about four seamy blocks from my seamy East Village apartment, where I emote, read, scribble and suffer, unknowingly in search of transcendence.
I have no knowledge of Monk as I make my way through the dark, sparsely populated club to a table by the illuminated bandstand. Monk, his broad back to me, is playing piano with bassist and drummer.
A big man, he is also a big presence. He plays totally engrossed in a style unfamiliar to me—jangled, jagged, dissonant, bluesy, classical and lyrical, all at once.
I am a cool jazz fan—Horace Silver, Gerry Mulligan, Miles—natural for any young jazz aficionado of the era. This Monk music is not that. It seems richer, bolder, with one foot planted deep in a modern classical tradition, the other breaking new ground.
The band takes a midnight break, and I exit into the warm humid evening for a smoke break of my own. There, standing off to the side, is Monk. I take two shy steps and face his right profile.
He is taller than my six feet one inch. I am as slim as he is broad, and in contrast to my callowness, his maturity and physicality render him mammoth.
He stands rock still, locked in an intense distant gaze. I stammer some words of appreciation. He nods slightly, not averting his eyes—a minimal acknowledgement, yet neither rude nor dismissive.
We leave it there, not quite comfortably for me. We stand four feet apart, draped in the heavy humid night—he, wherever he is, me straining to join him there; oh, so young me, soaking in night and squalor and art and tawdry beauty and black jazzman and tinge of drugs and danger and unsettlement of bearings not yet gained, the immense darkness untamed by mist-shawled city lights, the jangly mind-echoes of Monk’s music now the soundtrack of standing near this benign, definitively removed giant, so grandly, unaffectedly cool, me feeling dwarfed, dislocated, but sensing something nascent growing within.
Without knowing this man I’m hangin’ with, I sense him—though "hangin’ with" implies interactive familiarity. But it does feel very much a hanging out—old ape, young ape hanging out in the cloaking external night and interior benightedness of our short span here, our flickering moment on a small corner of a whirling speck in a cosmos of whirling speck worlds, our nano squiggles, squeaks and bangs drifting up and out, expanding waves arching gently outward to resonate among the silent spheres ... little me and giant Monk, remote, yet inextricably joined in art and life, my stunted scribblings and his sublime soundings flying blind through the darkness, deconstructing, diffusing, ever wispier whimpers surrendering unto ultimate evanescence.
* * *
Round Midnight.
