Thelonious Monk, desiring-machines, and cultural production

 Thelonious Monk, Desiring-Machines, and Cultural Production

“Alas, I am a mere textual-production machine.”--Quote attributed to Gilles Deleuze--apparently the last words he uttered before throwing his body (and, presumably, his body without organs) out of the window of his flat in Paris.

Thelonious Monk has long been considered an enigma--an outsider in the history of modern jazz--to the point of his supposed mental illness being considered as an explanation for his unique musical style and vocabulary.  More attention has been paid to his eccentricities than to the logic and cohesion that pervades his composition and improvisation.

If we use the theories of the French post-structuralist Gilles Deleuze and his colleague Felix Guattari, we have a lens through which to view Monk’s cultural production and its relation to “mental illness,” capitalist production, desire, and flows.  Thelonious Monk is a great disjunction or rupture in the flow of modern jazz and the “mainstreaming” thereof, and is a disjunction or rupture or glitch in the flows of capitalism.  This rupture is a valuable point to view textual production and jazz criticism from.

Monk’s music is an aural history of desiring-machines and production.  In Anti-Oedipus--Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze defines a [desiring-] machine as “a system of interruptions or breaks (coupures).”  He notes that each machine has an “associative flow” that it cuts into, an “ideal… endless flux”.  This flow and the lines that define the machine and the flows that it cuts into vary according to the individual machine and flow.  “In a word, every machine functions as a break in the flow in relation to the machine to which it is connected, but at the same time is also a flow itself, or the production of a flow, in relation to to the machine connected to it.  This is the law of the production of production.”

The piano is a machine as it is a system of interruptions or breaks, twelve per octave, that divide the pure, ideal flow of tone into pieces.  Monk is a machine that took inputs such as blues phrases, stride piano, and reworked them by making them disjunct, and using those disjunctions as space for new possibilities.  One very literal disruption-of flow technique Monk-Machine uses--uses an input of blues/gospel phrases.  In the blues/gospel flow, a phrase involves grace-note/slurs on the piano that are attempting to emulate the fluidity of the voice.  Monk-Machine takes that flow and fragments it or makes it disjunct---the grace note becomes sounded distinctly apart from the note it is approaching--or, in another instance, they are sounded simultaneously.  Often the notes in this kind of pattern would be a minor to major third. 

You can hear his grappling with the machine order, and the acceptance thereof, in Monk’s music.  There’s a struggle and disjunction--Monk’s aim was not to approach or emulate ideal flows, such as the flow of pure tone that the human voice manages to get close to achieving, but to deal with mechanization through fragmentation and struggle.

Monk’s solos use space and percussive, angular fragments, often based off of relatively simple melodic motifs.  He taught players he worked with, such as Charlie Rouse, to solo based off internalizing the melody, not simply playing up and down the chord progression.  The use of space in Monk’s music is very deliberate, evoking angular, cubist shapes.  Monk often alternates between motifs based off a few notes, and fast scalar runs, often whole tone scales (verify w/ musical examples).  Monk’s solos often evoke an intentional sense of through composition--taking a motif, sometimes a motif from the melody of the song, and varying it--displacing rhythmically, stretching it or abstracting it or inverting it in various ways.  While Monk’s dense harmonic development, angular, full melodies, and fast scalar runs sometimes have him labeled a “maximalist,” many of his solos, especially the one on Bag’s Groove (Modern Jazz Giant Sessions) or Blues at the Five Spot (from the album Monk’s Dream) show a very intentional use of space and development of a solo from very simple motifs.  In the Blues at the Five Spot solo, for the first 8 measures, Monk uses only the “head” from Blues at the Five Spot, but displaces it rhythmically and stretches it out.

Any analysis of Monk’s playing should take into full account his rhythmic feel, and the percussive nature of his music (as Vijay Iyer calls them, “microstructures of feel”).   Monk is not as fluid a player as Charlie Parker or other progenitors of the bebop movement, and has a different vocabulary--less linear.  One of the compositional techniques that pervades his solo is breaking up a motif or arpeggio in different rhythmic ways--he doesn’t have a simple eighth note rhythmic vocabulary like many bop players and “hard bop” players.  (It should be noted that while Charlie Parker’s rhythmic vocabulary and phrasing was incredibly complex, not many of the players who used his harmonic vocabulary were able to emulate his rhythmic approach).  Quarter note triplets, for example, come up in Monk’s solos more than in any other standard bebop players, and the are often played somewhat staccato or accented, for emphasis.  

As an improvisor, Monk used arpeggios, harmonic structures, and motifs as raw material to fragment, and make disjunct.  His production was less linear than other bebop players, more disjunct.  The same genetic material that is built into his melodies is built into his solos--arpeggios and chromatic material, phrases that use upper chord tensions not as passing tones that make a line more fluid, but as places to leap to and from.

Critics and speculators, discussing Monk’s performances, have long noted certain eccentricities--his dancing, the way he held his fingers flat, pounding at the piano.  These eccentricities were ascribed to mental illness for much of his life.  They are actual a logical continuation of certain flows Monk was engaged with--the flow of music as something that animates the social and physical body--the flow of gospel and blues music, and of black music as dance music.  (I’ve heard an apocryphal story of an older jazz musician going up to a bebop musician and saying, “This isn’t music--you can’t dance to this.  The bebop musician replied, “No, YOU can’t dance to this.”)  The first reviews that Monk received were negative because he played in an “ancient” style--his left hand heavily influenced by stride.  “He also has several passages where he plays straight striding Waller piano.  As a modernist, this can hardly be excused.”  --Downbeat Review quoted in Kelley’s Monk Bio.   How could Monk be both a maker of “high art” and a maker of “dance music”?  That would negate the binary/duality of the categories encoded in all of Western culture, which follows what Deleuze calls an “arborescent” model--a tree with roots.

Very few critics grasped Monk’s musical and rhythmic conception at the time he came onto the scene, and probably only a few more musicians.  “Many Roost regulars were still unaccustomed to Monk’s style.  Even some of the musicians didn’t know what to do with him.  Bassist John Simmons couldn’t follow Monk when they first started working together.  ‘He played between the keys, he played against the meter, and he would just play all over the piano, you know.  It wasn’t anything you could follow.  If you didn’t know the tune, you couldn’t play with him.  Now, if you’re playing by ear, you had to listen to the melodic line.  So I trained my ears to listening to .. Milt Jackson.  I’d just throw Monk out of my ear…’ When that didn’t work, Simmons turned to cocaine, reefer, and Seagram’s VO: ‘I was resorting to this to try to get way spaced out to keep up with Monk, and I couldn’t catch him.’” (Kelley, p. 139).  

In “Anti-Oedipus,” Deleuze and Guattari write of three categories of mental illness, understood through modern “territorialities”: Neurosis, psychosis, and perversion.  According to Deleuze and Guattari, the neurotic is “trapped within the residual or artificial territorialities of our society, and reduces all of them (les rabat toutes) to Oedipus as the ultimate territoriality--as reconstructed in the analyst’s office and projected upon the full body of the psychoanalyst (yes, my boss is my father, and so is the Chief of State, and so are you, Doctor).”  The schizo, or psychotic, has rejected authority, rejected the ego and “papa-mummy,” and wanders further and deeper into the deterritorialization that is the main force of capitalism/the “line of flight” of capital.  

For these reasons the schizophrenic has been considered dangerous and disturbing by modern society and the institutions that enforce those “artificial territorialities”.  One such institution is Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital in New York City, where Monk was involuntarily committed after a minor, routine car accident in January 1957.  Eventually he was released without a diagnosis.  “The absence of a diagnosis is a little surprising.  One might have expected the staff psychiatrist to declare Monk a ‘paranoid schizophrenic,’ a catch-all phrase frequently applied to black patients and nonconformist artists.  The list of alleged paranoid schizophrenics who passed through Bellevue in the 1950s is long and distinguished, including Bud Powell, Charles Mingus, not to mention Gregory Corso, Norman Mailer, and Allen Ginsberg.”  (Kelley, P. 214).  Monk’s mental illness or lack thereof is a matter of much controversy, and it is unlikely he was schizophrenic in the modern, DSM IV sense of the word, but at some points in his life and artistic and social production, he resembles Deleuze’s schizo, who wanders with the deterritorialized flows of capitalism rather than the artificial territorialities of institutions and society.  

   

    While much music and arts criticism presents itself as attempting to illuminate the art-object, textual production actually has the tendency to obscure the art object, or neuter it. Most jazz criticism from the 1940s on can be seen in conjunction with the recording industry’s attempt at “mainstreaming” jazz, or assimilating what were originally disruptive innovations into the deterritorialized flows of capitalism, and the artificial territorialities of society.  This can be seen in the persistence of the recording industry in getting Monk to record American Songbook standards, as well as the critical reception to Monk’s music.  While mainstream jazz criticism managed to eventually accept much of bebop, due to it’s virtuosity and linearity, Monk was too disjunct, too much of a disruption.  He was written off for playing music with stride elements, though his music was undeniably modern.  Where did this critical “deafness” come from?  Monk’s innovations simply did not fit neatly within the European, linear notion of harmonic innovation and increasing chromaticism as the vanguard of musical development.  This is not to say that Monk was not harmonically innovative or (sometimes) highly chromatic.  But Monk’s innovations came out of a flow unrelated to the linearity of the European avant-garde.  Monk’s music is about the body-brain as desiring-machine, dancing “wrong side out,” its broken pieces finding themselves resegmenting, dancing through the stuffed, productive void that is late capitalist society.  Monk-machine is overstuffed, synesthetically produced, playfully rid of the tendentiousness of Authority, of the Father, of the Ego.  The Father as critic, Oedipus as Authority--both of them stand to lose when Monk-Machine goes wandering where he isn’t allowed.

(Post script : here is my transcription of a Thelonious monk solo on Bags Groove, that I think fits with the aforementioned theory/schizoanalysis: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0sJBA-51tVCaXB6b0VJOExKa2s/view?usp=drivesdk&resourcekey=0-PSoAZyU3VX7u4hoaDhJcKg ).