Everyone who came to meet his plane wore a fur hat, and the
sight was too much for him to bear. “Man, we got to have
those!” he told his sidemen, and for fear that the hat stores
would be closed before they could get to downtown Helsinki, they fled
from the welcome-to-Finland ceremonies as fast as decency permitted.
And sure enough, when Thelonious Monk shambled out on the stage of the
Kulttuuritalo that night to the spirited applause of 2,500 young
Finns, there on his head was a splendid creation in fake lamb’s-wool. At every turn of his long life in jazz, Monk’s hats have described him
almost as well as the name his parents had the crystal vision to invent
for him 43 years ago — Thelonious Sphere Monk. It sounds like an
alchemist’s formula or a yoga ritual, but during the many years when
its owner merely strayed through life ,
it was the perfect name for the legends dreamed up to account for his
sad silence. “Thelonious Monk? He’s a recluse, man.” In the
mid-’40s, when Monk’s reputation at last took hold in the jazz
underground, his name and his mystic utterances made him seem the ideal Dharma
Bum to an audience of hipsters: anyone who wears a Chinese coolie hat
and has a name like that must be cool. High Philosophy. Now Monk has arrived at the summit of serious recognition he deserved
all along, and his name is spoken with the quiet
reverence that jazz itself has come to demand. His music is discussed
in composition courses at Juilliard, sophisticates find in it
affinities with Webern, and French Critic Andre Hodeir hails him as the
first jazzman to have “a feeling for specifically modern esthetic
values.” The complexity jazz has lately acquired has always been
present in Monk’s music, and there is hardly a jazz musician
playing who is not in some way indebted to him. On his tours last year
he bought a silk skullcap in Tokyo and a proper chapeau at Christian
Dior’s in Paris; when he comes home to New York next month with his
Finnish lid, he will say with inner glee, “Yeah—I got it in
Helsinki.” The spectacle of Monk at large in Europe last week was
cheerful evidence of his new fame—and evidence, too, of how far jazz
has come from its Deep South beginnings. In Amsterdam, Monk and his men
were greeted by a sellout crowd of 2,000 in the Concertgebouw, and
their DÜsseldorf audience was so responsive that Monk gave the Germans
his highest blessing: “These cats are with it!” The
Swedes were even more hip; Monk played to a Stockholm audience that
applauded some of his compositions on the first few bars, as if he were
Frank Sinatra singing Night and Day, and Swedish television broadcast
the whole concert live. Such European enthusiasm for a breed of cat
many Americans still consider weird, if not downright wicked, may seem
something of a puzzle. But to jazzmen touring Europe, it is one
more proof that the limits of the art at home are more sociological
than esthetic.
