Photo copyright 1989 by Jerry Stoll
Just turned midnight and I'm sitting here drinking some cheap wine and thinking about music and how I started out on this journey. My family were not particularly musical but I started buying records at an early age – first one was Jerry Lee Lewis – 'Great Balls of Fire' – you shake my nerves and you rattle my brain... I was a Jerry Lee fan from the start as opposed to Elvis and it must have been one of the last 78's put out because I remember buying the follow up – 'Down the Line' I think - which was a forty five – went in my old man's car out on a sunday somewhere and had it with me and it warped in the sun. One of the minor tragedies of childhood in the days when you saved for weeks to buy a disc. And somehow I got into traditional jazz which I loved – maybe some influence from my father who used to go out with his friends to see Mick Mulligan's band in Nottingham when George Melly was singing with them. (Strange – for years now I've found Melly irritating – some kind of camp burlesque of Bessie Smith). The program about British Jazz last Friday night on BBC2 brought back all the innocent duffle-coated splendour of the Trad Revival...
But the real epiphany was seeing 'Jazz on a Summer's Day' at one of the local cinemas – I haven't watched it in years but can still feel the impact it had. The hazy summer vibes of Newport, the esoteric sound of the cello in Chico Hamilton's group – Jimmy Guiffre playing 'Train and the River' – but most of all – MONK. The impact of whom still goes on down the years. My man. The fountainhead of all ensuing weirdness. Because Monk was – different. A big, imposing figure behind impenetrable shades always sporting a different hat. And the piece he played in the film was 'Blue Monk' which is an archetypal Monk blues – seemingly simple but having little twists that make it quintessentially -Monk. I saw the movie through several times which was a feat of endurance as it was second bill to a not very good flick called 'Paris Holiday' – Bob Hope and Fernandel. Crap... But the sonorities of 'Blue Monk' still ring through...
Round about that time I had inherited an old upright piano and also was living in my own part of the large house we had then, my own space where I could clang away on the piano and teach myself to play jazz as we had no money available for lessons – via Boogie Woogie sheet music and some Monk lead sheets that I somehow managed to get hold of. 'Blue Monk' of course and 'Trinkle Tinkle' which is a bastard to play – show that to anyone who says that Monk had no technique... And in the obsessive way I had – I started to read up on Modern Jazz in the books available at the time, not forsaking the old stuff, rather expanding my ears and my horizons. Discovering Kerouac at about the same time was the literary equivalent of wild bop. I started hitchhiking round the country under the second hand influence of Kerouac and the Beats. Jazz and the Beat Generation -the two big forces of liberation at that time. Sex and drugs and rock and roll came later... But through the music of Monk especially I travelled into bop and beyond – Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and then Cecil Taylor whom I first heard playing 'Unit Structure' on a scratchy radio medium wave broadcast from somewhere in Europe. (Oddly enough, I never encountered Albert Ayler who became one of my all time favourites until I heard some of his records in Paris at a friend's apartment in the early Seventies). In the age of instant Internet access, downloads and streaming and massive CD rerelease programs when you can pick up all your old albums so cheaply - it all seems so long ago...
When I was writing about Allan Ginsberg in a university essay a few years ago, I came across the following anecdote which I used to finish the piece. It ties up the mix of Beat and Jazz neatly...
Allen Ginsberg gave a copy of Howl to Thelonius Monk and a week later ran into him standing outside the Five Spot. He asked him if he had read it.
"Yeah, I'm almost through," said Monk.
"Well?" asked Allen.
"It makes sense," replied Monk.
Monk freed me up - I took up playing guitar which was more portable but the harmonic lessons I learned on the piano from Monk are still with me... It makes sense...
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