High priest of bop

In the Rainbow Grill in New York one evening in 1971, according to Robin D. G. Kelley, Professor of History and American Studies at the University of Southern California, Duke Ellington  halted his band in mid-flow and announced: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the baddest left hand in the history of jazz just walked into the room, Mr Thelonious Monk.’

In the Rainbow Grill in New York one evening in 1971, according to Robin D. G. Kelley, Professor of History and American Studies at the University of Southern California, Duke Ellington  halted his band in mid-flow and announced: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the baddest left hand in the history of jazz just walked into the room, Mr Thelonious Monk.’ In the code of jive talk, ‘baddest’ meant the best. Ellington was paying tribute to the strength that Monk had inherited from James P. Johnson, Willie ‘The Lion’ Smith and Fats Waller, the most renowned stride pianists in Harlem. Now, after 14 years’ research, Kelley has published probably the most thorough jazz biography of all time, perhaps the baddest. Even after a sympathetic editor helped him to cut 70,000 words from the manuscript, this is a long book, richly informative and entertaining.

Kelley has written previously on the cultural and political aspirations of the American black working class and plays the piano himself. From his own Afro-American point of view, he writes with empathetic understanding of the handicap of Monk’s heritage as a descendant of plantation slaves and his contribution to jazz’s part in the desegregation of American society. Monk was a pianist and composer who has been called a genius, and the praise seems gradually to have overcome the dissent. Here is a biography in 3-D, the story of his career in expertly analysed comprehensive detail and the story of his difficult but warm family life from Georgia to Manhattan.