Thelonious Monk is the Exception.
Why most Piano Jazz isn’t worth listening to, but Thelonious Monk is the exception.
DISCLAIMER: My knowledge of piano and Piano Jazz stems only from the less than five years of piano lessons I took before the age of eleven when I told my teacher that learning to read sheet music was not important thus not something I was going to do.
I was introduced to Piano Jazz by saying “Alexa, play Piano Jazz.” This was in December of last year (2020). I was playing a video game and needed some music, but nothing with lyrics, which rules out 1) Hip Hop, my go-to genre, 2) alt-rock, my go-to genre when listening to music with my mother, and 3) Frank Ocean, my go-to artist when I can no longer tolerate Alt-Rock but I still have two hours left in the car ride with my mom. This left me with Lo-Fi, my go-to genre when my roommate is making too much noise to possibly get any homework done. But I also didn’t want to listen to Lo-Fi. “Alexa, play Piano Jazz” it was. I didn’t like it. I also didn’t dislike it, at the time it was just there, playing in the background while I did whatever it was I was doing (I think I was playing Rocket League).
Maybe an hour later, the entertainment I got from driving and flying a rocket-propelled car into a ball with the goal of landing said ball in the other team's net dwelled. I turned off my PlayStation 4, said “Alexa, stop the Piano Jazz,” and walked up my basement stairwell.
“Mom, what’s dinner?”
“Tacos,”
“And when’s dinner?”
“Now,” she said, but there was nothing on the table. I sat down and scrolled through Instagram for 15 minutes until tacos appeared. In this time, my mom would ask me, the only person downstairs, random, trivial questions. To which I would respond with half-assed, two-word answers. One of these questions was “So you like Piano Jazz?” to which my response was “I guess.” Which was indeed a half-assed answer, but the truest half-assed answer possible. Like I said before, at this time I neither disliked it nor liked it, it just existed in the background of whatever it was I was doing.
Dinner began with me taking the second seat to the left of my Dad. This seat my sister had designated as hers for the past three years. My act of taking it was a purposeful act to get a rise out of my sister, which worked and somehow segued into a conversation about my brother's grades and his plans for college.
I finished dinner, finished my day with a round of pool against my brother, plopped my body in my twin bed, and turned on House, a show about a genius doctor, who’s also an asshole. I fell asleep at around 11:00.
It was 12:13, I had just finished the first four hours of my all-day lesson, teaching a hysterical child and his two less hysterical cousins how to ski. I was 20 feet in the air riding a double chair to the mountain peak.
“This is a great album. One hour and ten minutes of Thelonious Monk’s solo work on the piano.” The text from my uncle Scott came with an Apple Music link to Solo Monk, Thelonious Monk’s fifth studio album. I told him that I was skiing and I would listen to it on the drive back home. Another text came in from my mom:
“I told Scott about your interest in piano jazz, he wants you to listen to an album.”
“Yeah, he just texted me I’ll listen to it.” I typed in response.
Said drive home began with a self-given foot massage self-prescribed to treat my post-ski-boot foot pain. After my foot massage, I plugged in my phone and attempted to play Solo Monk. “No Service” my phone read in the top left of its screen. I drove 1.3 miles and turned on Thelonious Monk’s Solo Monk. “Okay,” I thought. Not the “Okay” as in “This is impressively and surprisingly good.” No the “Okay” as in “This is okay but I’m bored.” I listened to the first four songs to give it a chance but the boredom was too overwhelming to listen to the full hour and ten minutes. I switched off Thelonious Monk and shuffled “Snowman” my playlist named after the snowman I saw when creating it. I didn’t listen to Thelonious Monk and his genre for 55 days after this.
55 days later…
I was faced with a dilemma. It was 6:00 pm, and my brain was filling with melatonin. I had the option of taking a nap, which would be no shorter than one hour and thirty minutes and would result in an inability to fall back asleep before 2:00 am. My other option was to drink a Bang Energy and crash at 1:00 am. For whatever reason, I chose option C which was to lay in bed and listen to Solo Monk. This resulted in me falling asleep at 6:30 thus disabling me from falling back asleep until 2:30 am. But for the thirty minutes between putting in my fake Airpod Pros, and falling into a nap, I discovered Thelonious Monk.
What makes Solo Monk such a beautiful album are the numerous mistakes derived from the improvisational nature of the album and the flat-fingered style unique to Monk. Lying on my boarding school-issued plastic spring mattress topped with my overly-comfortable memory-foam mattress-pad, I was halfway between dreaming and wide awake. I was seeing every hand movement Monk made as he flat-fingered the white and black of his piano. I could see Monk make these mistakes, then play exactly what was needed to make these mistakes part of the beauty. This is the basis of Monk’s genius. There is a reason Solo Monk includes Dinah (Take 1), Dinah (Take 2), and multiple takes of nearly every song. Every mistake creates an entirely new song and an entirely new form of beauty and they all deserve to be published.
I still don’t like Piano Jazz, I mean the standard Piano Jazz you get when you shuffle Piano Bar on Apple Music. There is nothing special about it and you don’t receive any reward for listening to it so you don’t. The purpose of Piano Bar is to shuffle it in a coffee shop on really low volume to fill the awkward gap of noise that coffee grinders and human voices do not. In direct contrast to Piano Bar is Hip Hop. Hip Hop overwhelms every part of your ear and is beautiful in the way it does this, but it does not allow you to focus on anything but itself. Solo Monk is something special, it doesn’t force you to listen to it the way Hip Hop does, but you can listen to it and when you do, it rewards you every time.
