Page 18-Tuesday, October 16, 1979-The Michigan Daily
The Michigan Daily-Tuesday, C
Onward and upward with A rtworlds
Monk: Coming on the Hui
(Continued from Page 15)
make homespun castanet cords every
bit as good as expensive imported ones.
Artworlds holds special appeal for the
student; workshops are reasonably
priced and two Artworlds terms fit
neatly into one semester on the UM
calendar, with a convenient break for
midterms. For one or two hours a week
it's nice to forget that one-is a pre-law,
liberal arts, or medical student, and en-
joy a modern dance class with live
piano accompaniment. A monumental
bulletin board will ,keep you posted on
upcoming civic and University fine arts
events, and the'gallery houses a new
display of works by local artist each
month.
Gallery art, too, is at the mercy of the
commercial world, and here again Ar-
tworlds is a welcome retreat for Ann
Arborites. "What hangs in the gallery is
not there because someone hoped it
would sell," Taylor says, "but because
the artist likes it."
Taylor never strays far from his cen-_
tral theme. "As an aerospace engineer
I dealt primarily with things. People
were expendable. In the real world it
should be just the reverse. Here we
move people at the expense of things."
About Artworlds' philosophy of
teaching, Taylor confesses, "We cheat
a little. We don't give 'professional' lec-
tures as much as we let people take the
materials in their hands and actually
work with them."
Taylor himself isn't a master of any
of the fine arts, though he's learned "a
little bit about everything." He is still
basically an engineer, now pulling the
switches at a Montessori school for big
kids instead of sitting* behind a light
desk. Though his shift from corporate
peon to Renaissance man meant a
salary cut of almost.80 per cent, Taylor
measures what he earns today in terms
of personal satisfaction, and claims
he's "feeling good." 4
The ultimate goal of Taylor and the
others who are devoted to Artworlds is
to develop it to the point-where it.will be.
entirely self-propelled. This requires a
tough-minded business sense. ''I've
worked just about everywhere," Taylor
says, spouting his resume,"with the
Air Force, AUCO, Burroughs, Bendix,
General Dynamics. You know," he says
without regret, "I'm forgetting half the
companies I've worked for."
i i
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By R. J. SMITH
With hardly any doubt it is the
greatest name anyone ever dreamed
,up. Thelonious Sphere Monk. And
with even less doubt possible, he is one
of the greatest American composers of
our age.
To be fanciful for a moment, let me
put it this way: Monk is the Andy
Kaufman of jazz. One of the funniest.
things I have ever heard is the lub-dub-
lub-dub-lub-dub-shhhh beginning to
"Light Blues'" melody, the way the
whole song gleefully wobbles like a
wagon rolling down a hill on wheels -of
different sizes. Monk's is entirely a
humor of motion. He does not make
musical "jokes;" Monk does not create
anything trite, anything that quickly
wears out, or anything funny for fun-
niness's sake.
Lurking somewhere in the smokiness
beneath his most passionate ballad,
resounding in the joyful little dances he
sometimes performs onstage, is a
humor of truly global proportions, a
sensibility which does not so much poke
fun at "things" as it does take poking
fun as an integral part of one's life.
Surreal and eminently, practical,
Monk's humor bubbles up from his
piano playing, his compositions, and
the music of the sidemen he teaches.
LET ME RAISE the ante on what
Thelonious Monk is all about: Without a
doubt (as Stanley Crouch has
previously noted), Monk is the Picasso
of jazz. Both those guys knew the value
of laughter in modern life, and both of
them knew that what's really funny is
not anything that can be written down,
nothing that can just be relegated to
memory's back shelf after one "gets
it." And that's it, really - no "joke" is
really funny, because if it's really funny
you could never simply "crack it."
What's funny is, well ... everything.
And Kauffman's stuff, like Monk's, is
funny precisely because it is so
ubiquitous and inexplicable.
To Monk, a man unable to find steady
gigs for almost twenty years, humor
was a knife he wielded to ward off the
things - the countless things - in his
life that wanted to take complete con-
trol.
"Play your own way," says Monk.
"Don't play what the public wants -
you play what you want and let the
public pick up on what you are doing -
even if it does take them 15,20years."
From the start, Monk was face to
face with restrictions he refused to give
in to. When his earliest gigs, traveling
through the South and the Midwest
playing piano with a Baptist choir
proved to be overly restrictive, Monk
Although Monk's style of-composing and play-
ing are so utterly his that one rarely hears a convincing,
performance of Monk music by other musicians,
without his influence it is clear that the careers of
people like Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Sonny Rol-
lins, and John Coltrane would have taken different
courses.
tirely different route from the one he
taught his pupils. There were all sorts
of differences. Whereas bebop thrived
on fast tempos, Monk wrote and played
generally in the most laconic tempos
imaginable.
Ever the soloists' medium, bebop
think he w
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took to playing late-night jam sessions
in whatever dive he could find. When in
the late forties, he had played a large
part in educating, and when his license
to perform live was taken away (from
'51 to '56), he scratched out a living
for himself by making a handful of
recordings and living off whatever
morley his wife earned.
BUT THOUGH hidden, his music was
never static. It's impossible to figure
out where much of it came from (in-
deed, it seems only to have sprung from
the mind of Monk), but Monk music
from the start had a few noticeable an-
tecedents. Clearly there is the hand of
Art Tatum in much of his soloing; that
is, Tatumesque fireworks totally inver-
ted to the point where the cathedrals
Tatum built with scads of notes are
built in the average Monk solo as much
by the silences as by what gets played.
And if Monk's wit and smoothness can
be traced back, it is to the often-neglec-
ted piano player Duke Ellington.
After the gospel gigs, Monk homed in
on the New York scene which was soon
to give birth to bebop. Hanging out in
118th Street's Minton's Playhouse with
the likes of Charlie Parker, Dizzy
Gillespie, and Kenny Clarke, Monk was
a prime force in drawing up the master
outlines for the bebop revolution.
The curious thing was, once bebop
exploded onto the jazz world in the mid-
forties, Monk played the role -of an
ascetic teacher who followed an en-
provided lots of open space for im-
provising whatever entered the
musician's head; Monk's music (like
the music of another bebop expatriate,
Charles Mingus) tended by its com-
plexity and the demands of its com-
poser to force the soloist to remain
much closer to the melody, or else the
soloist would be totally lost in it, and
face-to-face with an angry composer.
AND YET along with the pervasive
humor, what makes Monk music Monk
music is his sense of time. He has an
almost Hindu notion of a restful, waitful
circularity of events in his playing; it
goes without saying that every note
counts, because although he has so
many ideas, they are never forced out
in a hurry. Monk will fall back so far
when playing a single note that you
Sight and Sound
Supplement
- EDITORS
Katie Herzfeld, Anne Sharp
Contributors
Terry La Ban, Maureen O'Malley, R.. Smith, Eric Zorn, Keith Richburg,
Owen Gleiberman, Anna Nissen, Roger Pensman, Allison Donahue, Brad
Benjamin, Neil Patten.
ADVERTISING
Sales Manager
Arlene Saryan
-Ei
Sales Reoresentatives
Kathy Culver, Bob Granadier, Sue Guszynski, Leslie Harris,
Nancy Stempel, Bob Thompson, Dan Woods.
VA LUABLE CUPO
Linda Solomon,
Special thanks go to Sun Photo, Big George's and Purchase
Camera for contributing the gift certificates for the Photo Contest.
$1.00 -FF ANY F
Good thru October 31, 19
Cover photo by Maureen O'Malley
L. j
4, *4,. .W, - - . .