en-US Fri, 09 May 2025 03:57:55 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg ReadStatus9404592549 Fri, 09 May 2025 03:57:55 -0700 /review/show/7555054527 Aaron is currently reading The Birth Of Bebop: A Social And Musical History by Scott DeVeaux
]]> ReadStatus9404471511 Fri, 09 May 2025 02:34:56 -0700 /review/show/7554968749 Aaron wants to read Bebop: The Music and Its Players by Thomas Owens
]]> Review7547295198 Thu, 08 May 2025 04:19:01 -0700 /review/show/7547295198 Aaron gave 4 stars to Message to Our Folks: The Art Ensemble of Chicago (Hardcover) by Paul Steinbeck
]]> Review7544629797 Mon, 05 May 2025 17:20:09 -0700 /review/show/7544629797 Aaron gave 3 stars to Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth (Hardcover) by John F. Szwed
]]> ReadStatus9391748466 Mon, 05 May 2025 17:14:34 -0700 /review/show/7546207427 Aaron wants to read Lady Sings the Blues by Billie Holiday
]]> ReadStatus9391744642 Mon, 05 May 2025 17:13:26 -0700 /review/show/7546204928 Aaron wants to read If You Can't Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday by Farah Jasmine Griffin
]]> ReadStatus9389506254 Mon, 05 May 2025 05:50:28 -0700 /review/show/7544629797 Aaron is currently reading Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth by John F. Szwed
]]> Review7498098728 Sat, 03 May 2025 17:56:34 -0700 /review/show/7498098728 Aaron gave 3 stars to The Wall (Paperback) by Jean-Paul Sartre
]]> Review6617653116 Fri, 02 May 2025 05:30:30 -0700 /review/show/6617653116 Aaron gave 5 stars to Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails (Kindle Edition) by Yanis Varoufakis
]]> Review5605137135 Thu, 01 May 2025 17:22:10 -0700 /review/show/5605137135 Aaron gave 4 stars to Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (Hardcover) by Robin D.G. Kelley
I had an interesting conversation with my partner the other day that was spurred on by this book. I mentioned that as I was reading Robin D.G. Kelley’s mind-blowingly exhaustive master stroke, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, that I found it bordering on or slipping into hero worship. That it seemed that Kelley seemed to love Monk a little too much and that it might skew his perspective. She responded with a very astute comment: “Well, who else is going to write it?�

It makes sense. He spent 14 years working on this book, and it obviously took herculean efforts to make it come to fruition. Who else but someone who deeply loved Thelonious Monk would spend all that time crafting a book like this? I don’t read a lot of biography–though I’ve been getting more and more interested lately–so I can’t speak to how widespread this phenomenon is. I don’t know how “objective� biographies tend to be. I imagine, like most other things, it’s virtually impossible to take an “objective� view on someone’s life. One’s view is always skewed through myriad lenses through which one perceives someone else’s life and story.

With all that said, I think Kelley was a bit too skewed throughout for my taste. However, I’ll start with the good. This is an incredibly meticulously researched book. If there is any detail about Monk’s life you ever wanted to know, I imagine it is here. Kelley walks through an almost daily account of Monk’s life, including pretty much every recording date, concert, song he wrote–anything you can imagine. Sometimes this detail gets a bit overwhelming. I found this to be a bigger problem early on. Kelley jumped into extraneous details about random guys Monk played with in the 40s that I thought was not necessary. Do I really need to know that a trumpeter Monk played with one time in 1945 had parents born in the West Indies who immigrated to New York to get a job in textiles? Do I need five pages explaining pentecostal revivals in the south in the 30s? Probably not. As the book goes on, I think Kelley homes in a bit more and I found the book flowing better, without as much extra, uninteresting detail.

Kelley tells a compelling story about a compelling person. Thelonious Monk is a legendary pianist who has a certain reputation as an eccentric genius. Kelley tells this story well, but he also does it in contradictory fashion. At the outset of the book, Kelley lays down the gauntlet, insisting that he is going to disprove the notion of Monk as a “childlike,� irascible, unreliable, eccentric man. But through all his attempts, he paints a portrait of Monk as a childlike, irascible, unreliable, eccentric man. He does introduce a lot of warmth through his family interactions and adds some nice complexity to his character. For example, there is a widespread belief that Monk knew nothing about music theory outside of American jazz, but Kelley shows pretty firmly that he was well-versed in classical, pop music, and gospel.

As far as the contradictions, it seems that Kelley sees the moniker “childlike� as a bad thing. It seems that he thinks that degrades Monk’s music. But in his personal life, he is kind of like a child. He needs his devoted wife Nellie to take care of his business, keep him on track with attending shows, deal with his finances, even lay his clothes out for him in the morning. Monk virtually could not function if Nellie had not been there to take care of him. In terms of reliability, Kelley seems upset that Monk has this reputation…but Monk shows up late to shows literally on a constant basis, oftentimes hours late, and he pretty frequently ends shows early for no reason. He’s also a pretty inconsistent performer, deciding on any given night whether he wants to phone it in or not. He is also quite eccentric. He often goes into a state of near catatonia (probably due to some kind of mental illness), he is very reticent, does things for no reason, often speaks in strange ways, etc. All in all, I think Kelley does a better job proving those long held beliefs about Monk rather than disproving them.

Through all that, Monk had a fascinating enough story that I didn’t really care if Kelley’s theses were true or not. I learned a lot I didn’t know about him. He’s such a legend that I figured he was just always famous as soon as he came on the scene. However, he was an underground, underappreciated artist for a long time. He didn’t really get a big break until 1950 or so, when he had already been on the jazz scene for about ten years. He also always struggled with money until the day he died, which is very unfortunate for someone who impacted music in such a hugely positive way. The other thing I found interesting was that I found myself not liking Monk very much throughout. He comes off as selfish, self-centered, arrogant, conservative (musically) and pretty close-minded. He is known as a great teacher, and lots of musicians who played with him characterize him that way, but it seems like he only taught people to play well with him. If they didn’t play the way he wanted them to, they were bad. He hated free jazz and wrote it off completely, a dumb opinion to have. Early on, he was known as a radical, but he went virtually without developing his sound for the duration of his 30 year career, turning him into a deeply conservative musician unwilling to entertain changing or growing. He was also extremely intent on insisting that he invented bebop, while in the same breath saying that everything bebop except his music wasn’t very good or interesting. I also felt very bad for Nellie, who had to stress herself out constantly because Thelonious fucked up their lives so much and could not consistently hold down a gig. I know she chose that life by partnering up with him but it still amazed me how much Monk was willing to take advantage of her kindness.

My biggest pet peeve with the book, though, was Kelley’s portrayal of Monk’s mental illness. Being a psychologist, I am always hyper aware of portrayals of mental illness by non-experts. Kelley puts forward a thesis that Monk had bipolar disorder early on in the book. However, unless I missed it, he never actually backs up the claim with any documentation or diagnosis. He claims that Thelonious was diagnosed with a “chemical imbalance� when he was hospitalized, but that’s not an official medical diagnosis, and nowhere does he back up the bipolar diagnosis. He also spreads misinformation about bipolar disorder. He claims that no one could have known that Monk had bipolar disorder when he was younger because he didn’t have depressive episodes. False. If one has Bipolar I disorder, a depressive component is not required for diagnosis, only a manic episode. Depressive episodes are necessary for Bipolar II disorder, but Kelley never makes that distinction. He also claims that people with bipolar disorder are prone to violence, a claim that is refuted by research on the subject. I think that is a dangerous claim to erroneously make when there is enough stigma against people with mental health problems as it is. When Monk finally gets “diagnosed� (Kelley never makes it clear he was actually diagnosed with bipolar disorder), he is treated by one Carl Pfeiffer, an orthomolecular psychiatrist. Kelley acts like Pfeiffer’s orientation as an Orthomolecular psychiatrist is essential to Monk’s treatment, that he has the unique knowledge to know that Monk should be treated with lithium salts for bipolar disorder. That is not unique knowledge to an orthomolecular psychiatrist; in fact, orthomolecular psychiatry is a fringe movement in the psychiatric community that has never shown any evidence of actually doing anything. Pfeiffer was also one of the psychiatrists in the infamous MK Ultra project who administered LSD to unwitting and unwilling prisoners. Kelley mentions none of this, but makes it out like this is a brilliant psychiatrist and that Monk just needed orthomolecular psychiatry in his life to get treated. All of that made me upset.

On a lesser, but similar note, he gives credence to the idea that Nellie is essentially curing people of cancer by making them juice. That one is sillier, but still in the vein of presenting pseudoscience bunk as legitimate and not questioning it at all, all from the perspective of a decided non-expert.

All of the psychological stuff is probably beyond the level of what a reader who is not a psychologist would actually care about, but it pissed me off throughout the book.

This review is becoming less and less coherent, so I’m going to go ahead and try to give a brief summary of my thoughts. I enjoyed the book far more than my review makes out. It is a fascinating portrait of a genius musician. Kelley sometimes seems to have blinders on or skews things in a direction to make Monk better as a person than he actually was, but it doesn’t detract from the overall story too much. Yes, he gets lost in the weeds of details sometimes, but sometimes those details are incredible. Overall, for someone who is a big Monk fan, this book is extremely worthwhile. ]]>